At some point in your high school or college life, Shakespeare’s plays most likely have washed over your consciousness. You may be familiar with Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you’re lucky enough to purposely go down the route of further exploration, you will at some point encounter Hamlet. In one of Shakespeare’s most famously quoted plays, you might be familiar with the line “to be or not to be”, and the infamous skull of Yorick, which have become majorly popularized symbols of his work.Â
The novel Hamnet, however, is not about Shakespeare. While it is about the creation of one of his most infamous stories, it is not his story being told. Many people are familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but very few know the true story of how this play came to fruition. Maggie O’Farell’s novel Hamnet tells the true story of Shakespeare’s life, beginning with the budding romance between him and his soon-to-be wife, Agnes. The central landscape of this novel revolves around Agnes and Shakespeare’s 3 children, but primarily their son Hamnet. Through the lens of Agnes, you feel the fierce and undeniable instinct of a mother’s will to protect her children. Even more so, her ceaseless search to answer an impossible question: why is death so unfair to us?
What I both love and resent about this novel is how utterly heartbreaking it is. While a reader will already know the outcome of this story before reading it (the book jacket gives it away), this doesn’t change how devastating it is to feel the agony of a mother losing a child. O’Farell’s works of literature allow you to truly understand feelings of love and loss that you may have no reference point for in your own life. What makes a beautiful story is one that can capture a universal truth, grief, and shape it into an emotion so unique you feel as if you’re feeling it for the first time.Â
So often — as readers — we brace for the adjustment between the book and the subsequent movie adaptation, expecting more discrepancies in how we imagined the characters to be and how a director chooses to portray them. In many ways, Shakespeare is an ever-changing concept, where no 2 performances are alike. ChloĂ© Zhao’s direction of this film felt as if it were pulled directly from my mind’s eye. The day before I went to see the film, I had finished the novel, so I was freshly familiar with the plot. This is the type of film that you must see in theatres; it is a non-negotiable. From the hauntingly dissonant Elizabethan melodies by composer Max Richter, and the chilling chemistry between Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, the presentness demonstrated by these 2 actors in their roles supports the weight of a relentlessly tragic storyline.Â
From the very beginning, you quite literally fall in love with Jessie Buckley’s curiosity and inquisitive smile. So much of what you feel from this film is expressed through her micro-expressions and moments of devastation. I was unprepared for the copious amounts of empathy I felt for her as an audience member, and even more so as a woman. Agnes is representative of a narrative so common, yet so underrepresented in film and media; women are the beckoners of life into the world. While the film dances around a few major themes of life, death, and Christianity, each ultimately circles back to the mother. A woman was there in the first seconds of your life, and that notion is powerfully portrayed in Hamnet. To be a human is to have once been a child, suspended between the thin veil of breath and being. Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes fighting through the traumatic birth of her twins shows us that life is held in a delicate balance, supported by mothers whose will for us to exist in this world transcends the burden of mortality. Forceful is an understatement for how this theme struck me.Â
While it is not mandatory that you read the novel before you see the film, I felt that by knowing the original text, I felt personally involved in the decisions made by the director to include or exclude specific moments from the novel. Each intentional callback to the novel furthers your understanding of what Hamlet is really about. Before this experience, I hadn’t known that the play was a product of Shakespeare’s personal grief, nor did I realize just how ahead of his time Shakespeare really was. If you have ever felt frustrated by the complex metaphors of his language, you might find this film to be the perfect passage into a playwright who wrote for the true integrity of the human experience. Multiple times in the movie, I was brought to tears, and by the end of the film, there was not a dry eye in the house. In the world of art, there is nothing more valuable to a society than a piece that allows us to collectively speak the language of humanity.