Hamnet
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Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet starts, as all tenuous slightly tenuous historical films do, with typescript on the screen. It claims that in sixteenth century England, the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable, and were in fact, two versions of the same name. From that starting point, we are launched into an unconventional depiction of Shakespeare’s family life. Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) is a background figure and not immediately identifiable; instead, the film focuses on Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), Shakespeare’s wife.
The film follows Agnes, who has a vision that at her deathbed there are two children, not three, introducing a note of foreboding grief; the film depicts the birth of her eldest daughter, Susanna, and her twins Judith and Hamnet. The film is certainly well shot and runs through the full cycle of grief and immense emotion: Shakespeare’s abusive father, birthing children in the forest, and, climactically, Hamnet’s death at eleven years old (supposedly of the plague). The New Yorker wasn’t particularly sold on the somewhat ceaseless cycle of emotion, branding Hamnet to be ‘highly effective grief porn’. Although Buckley won the Golden Globe for her performance and has been seeded to win Best Actress at the Academy Awards; The Times review simply read ‘well done, she’s acting’.
‘Grief porn’ is an odd way of putting it, but the emotional whiplash of the film does tend towards increasingly meaningless displays of feeling, bordering on the unconvincing. To mitigate the slightly elemental storyline, there is an interesting literary biographical link made to Hamlet by Maggie O’Farrell (author of the novel, Hamnet). In the film, Agnes’ son, Hamnet, dies of the plague, something based entirely on O’Farrell’s speculation. Indeed, in the author’s note to the novel Hamnet, O’Farrell states that there is no mention of the plague in any of Shakespeare’s work, and this strange omission is possibly a result of the trauma that Shakespeare connected with Hamnet’s death.
Herein lies the problem: emotions in Hamnet are rendered tepid for those who are slightly more sceptical of O’Farrell’s historical leaps. In the first place, it is simply incorrect to say that the plague was not mentioned anywhere in Shakespeare’s works; indeed, the pivot of Romeo and Juliet is that the friar cannot deliver the message to Romeo that Juliet is not really dead, as he is quarantined in a house struck by the ‘infectious pestilence’. Further, if we buy into the idea that Hamnet was killed by the plague, which, as there were no recorded deaths in the Stratford-upon-Avon parish records for ‘pestilence’ that year; is highly unlikely, seeing as the rest of the Shakespeare family miraculously survived.
We might be getting nitpicky. Plenty of literary biographical leaps are plastered onto Shakespeare’s life, as historians know little for certain about him. O’Farrell is allowed to speculate. However, the particular link that a lot of the second half of the film rests on is that Hamlet was written in response to Hamnet’s death; after all, the ‘l’ and ‘m’ in Hamnet/let are interchangeable. This link leads to probably the best-shot sequence in the film, where Agnes goes to the Globe to see Hamlet, and publicly processes her emotions whilst Shakespeare plays The Ghost (this is one of Shakespeare’s only known performances in his own plays). Hamlet is made into a tool for processing Agnes and Shakespeare’s grief for their dead son Hamnet, thus implying that Hamlet was written for Hamnet. Those who know a little about Hamlet are immediately sceptical at this point. After all, Hamlet was mourning his dead father, not his dead son, as Shakespeare was doing. Crucially, the whole premise of this link is collapsed after a brief look at the chronology of Hamlet. A version of Hamlet, perhaps performed by Thomas Kyd and then performed by Shakespeare himself, was being performed long before Hamnet died in 1596.
It is a snide historian’s fun to rain on a literary parade, particularly when related to historical media. But as the viewer (even without in-depth historical knowledge) starts to question the premise of Hamnet, and what, consequently, a lot of Buckley’s emotional heavy lifting was done off; the recurring melodrama starts to fall a bit flat. So, not exactly ‘grief porn’, but more a series of increasingly unconvincing moments. Doesn’t really sound as good. Even Buckley’s poignant scenes start to feel like a bit of a gloss.
I will end with an equally tenuous literary link to pile onto tradition. Maybe not to process his grief so much as to cheer up Judith, whose twin just passed, Twelfth Night follows the separation, then grief, then eventual reunion of two twins at the end of the play. It’s probably fair someone rains on my parade now.