Written in the Stars
By David Hering
Hamnet
Dir. Chloe Zhao, U.S., Focus Features
In 1596, William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet died. Somewhere between three and five years later, Hamlet premiered on the London stage. The idea that the death of Shakespeare’s son might have influenced his work isn’t a new one. It’s been around since the Romantic era, and by the early 20th century was a relatively common reading—James Joyce devotes much of a chapter of Ulysses to a debate, in which Hamnet is cited, over whether Shakespeare’s life should be read into the work. Such was the ubiquity of this approach that in 1934 the critic C.J. Sisson argued that “the dramatizing of Shakespeare the man has gone too far”. Undaunted, in 2020 Maggie O’Farrell published Hamnet, a novel-length meditation on the connection between the child and the play, which has now been adapted for the screen by Chloé Zhao.
In the UK, Shakespeare has the same kind of public status afforded to Paddington, a vessel for both nebulous projections of British identity and tourist revenue. As a result, biographical screen depictions of Shakespeare himself tend to be somewhat unadventurous. The lack of verifiable historical information, coupled with the cultural prominence of the plays, often lead to accounts where the life is built backwards from the work. In Shakespeare in Love, the bard is depicted as a handsome, rakish humanist whose tragic love affair informs the composition of both Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True, which depicts the period after the one covered in Hamnet, is more preoccupied with domesticating Shakespeare, making him an ordinary bloke who says “cheerio” and wanders round gardenscapes and stately homes, complete with the obligatory shot of a hand brushing through wheat stalks. Shakespeare in Love plays primarily as a tragicomedy, a knowingly constructed, ill-starred romance laced with dramatic irony. We know Christopher Marlowe will not end up England’s most famous playwright, just as we know Shakespeare won’t end up with his beloved Viola. Hamnet approaches the same structure minus the laughs: here, tragedy plus time simply equals more tragedy.
Hamnet begins with Shakespeare’s first meeting with his wife to be, Agnes—the name by which Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway was also known—and ends with the first public performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre. Most of the film takes place in the Shakespeare home in rural Stratford-upon-Avon, with occasional excursions to London as the play is rehearsed and eventually performed. Zhao’s previous dramatic films—Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland—adopted a light, docudrama-like directorial touch. They deal primarily with the footloose, the disenfranchised and the frustrated, people pursuing or accepting the failure of a dream, and tend to be framed against wide heartland vistas and in natural light. Zhao’s decision to shoot Hamnet as a stately melodrama hastens a change in this visual style. Much of the film is shot against flat or foreshortened backgrounds, most commonly forests and doorways, from which the characters emerge. The camera is often held square, framing the actors and the action centrally in various indoor and outdoor tableaux. This mise-en-scène has an obvious analogue in the stage set, suggesting visually—as Shakespeare in Love did verbally—an elision of the work and the life. This is most clearly deployed when the set for the premiere of Hamlet is a painted forest, a simulacrum of the real forest in the opening shots of the film. It’s an engaging visual style, not least because it appears to offer a formal alternative to the heritage-industry filmmaking that so often attends films of both Shakespeare’s life and work.
Unfortunately, this flatness extends increasingly to the narrative itself. Hamnet is impeccably tasteful, the interiors exquisitely and naturally lit and the exteriors strikingly framed, but this tastefulness grows wearying, even stultifying. The tragic future bearing inescapably down on the Shakespeare family, rather than encroaching steadily, obtains formally from the first frame, leading to a perpetual seriousness, with even the most throwaway lines spoken with a hushed and breathy gravity. There’s an anxiety evident here about matching the seriousness of the historical moment—an important writer creating arguably his most important play—and as a result, the film struggles to move or to breathe. The performances, accordingly, grow straitened and over-serious, with Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley often reduced to tiptoeing around the frame. Mescal, who gave an extraordinary performance of barely concealed torment in Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, is here given little to do other than stand around look pensive or sad. Buckley is afforded more looseness, particularly in the latter half of the film, but both feel muted by the film’s oppressive sense of occasion.
This apprehensive approach tends to overwhelm the film’s more compelling ideas. When Hamnet begins Agnes is depicted as a creature of the woods, at home in nature as Shakespeare is at home in the city, and it’s implied by the locals that she might be a witch. A portentous, repeating image of a dark passage in the wood’s interior suggests that something ineffable or terrible exists there, something with which Agnes can communicate but that—crucially—operates unspoken and unwritten, and is therefore difficult for her husband to assimilate into his work. This is a concept rich with iconoclastic potential—what if Hamnet is as much about what Shakespeare can’t do as what he can?—but the film relegates this almost immediately into a foreshadowing of the grief to come. Agnes’s wildness is abruptly abandoned, and the promise of a spousal clash of philosophies, one invested in the world itself and another in its verbal or written representation, is reduced to the well-worn movie argument between annoyed wife and emotionally distant husband.
When events turn tragic, though, the film’s problems really start. We’re introduced to Hamnet, a perfect, cherubic child whom we know will die—as the film’s opening epigraph reminds us—and so once he appears, the clock’s ticking. The film doesn’t allow us a sense of Hamnet as a real child; instead, he’s a cipher for what’s about to come, his sweetness and selflessness cranked up remorselessly to maximize the impending tragedy. Unlike the actors who play the other two Shakespeare children, who are allowed touching moments of what appears to be improvisatory interaction with Mescal and Buckley, Jacob Jupe—who certainly does his best with the material—must carry the burden of being a narrative conceit, and his every line is framed and filled with overwhelming portent. This speaks in turn to a larger problem with both book and film—the narrative of Hamnet has effectively no function other than to kill off the child in order for the play to exist. And so we wait.
In the film’s most frustrating moment, one which acts as a microcosm of its flaws, Hamnet’s sister falls deathly ill with plague. Will she be the one to die? She won’t, of course, as we already know. Instead, Hamnet requests, in saintly fashion, that he takes on her suffering. The fates accord, and in the next scene she is fully recovered, and he is dead. This is also a problem with the source material—it’s taken straight from O’Farrell’s novel—but it’s disappointing how this sequence, which might ambiguously blend love, sacrifice and childish naivety, is played flatly for sentiment and to sanctify Hamnet. It’s the least interesting and most emotionally manipulative way to play this moment: there’s no time to explore the troubling complexity of the child’s decision because he needs to die and we need to hurry up and get to the play. If there’s a fundamental flaw with Hamnet, it’s this. As with Shakespeare in Love and All Is True, the film can’t escape the gravity of the cultural importance of Shakespeare and his texts; ultimately, it seems to suggest, to question the function of his art—is any work compensation for the death that inspires it?—is outside the film’s ability, because after all he’s the reason that we’re watching this. This has the effect of making the film feel overdetermined, the viewer always several steps ahead of the action and waiting for it to catch up, watching it play out rather than being surprised by it. It should be upsetting; instead, it’s deadening.
This dramatic inertia extends to the film’s final third, when Shakespeare goes back to London and writes his play, and when, in the climactic scene, Agnes attends the Globe Theatre to witness its premiere, pushing her way to the front past outraged extras in Hollywood fashion. It’s at this point it finally becomes clear that Hamlet itself, a text with so much to say about grief, madness, isolation and the fallacy of art as a reaction to tragedy and as a representation of the world, is really of no serious interest to the film at all. What we get instead is a checklist of the most famous lines—Shakespeare incongruously drops “the rest is silence” into his retelling of Orpheus to Agnes, for example—apparently for no reason other than for the audience to identify them, like Easter eggs in a Marvel movie. At times, this line-dropping approaches risibility. In a late scene, Mescal stands on a precarious ledge over the river Thames, looks sadly into the distance and says, quizzically, ‘To be…or not to be…’. At this point, we’re entering the realm of camp.
As for the performance of Hamlet itself, we see only the opening and closing scenes. In the opening, Shakespeare appears playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the climax, Hamlet dies and Agnes weeps because she understands now that Shakespeare was in fact channeling his grief into the play. The problem here, and it’s a significant one, is that neither of these scenes in the play have any real dramatic bearing on what’s gone before in the film. If you’re looking for an emotionally resonant analogy, you’d be better off with The Tempest, which features an anxious father giving up his child and then breaking the staff that he uses to write the world, or even Macbeth, in which the death of children is a sudden, horrifying and mind-breaking event. And herein lies the problem of reducing such a rich and complex text to a 1:1 allegory for trauma and grief. It cheapens the life, and it cheapens the play.
So much of Hamlet is about self-questioning—am I doing the right thing, am I losing my mind, and in staging my life am I cheapening or reducing an endlessly complex thing to something simple? One of the boldest things about the play, in which the tragic protagonist metatextually stages his own tragedy, is that it questions the very necessity, the very value of drama itself as a reaction to tragedy. In dramatizing Hamlet as response to a real-life death, Hamnet has such rich potential—to question the limits of drama, of whether the stage can ever obtain the urgency of life, whether creating art in response to tragedy is an adequate substitution for mourning. But it jettisons all of this in favor of the least interesting reading: that Shakespeare was important, that he was sad, and that he wrote a sad play, and then everyone understood why he was sad, and they—and we—must all be sad too. Exeunt.