‘The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears …” This is Francis Bacon’s essay Of Parents and Children; maybe they were more secret in his day than ours. This kind of secrecy and revelation is part of Chloé Zhao’s deeply felt romantic fantasy about the origin of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. It locates the play’s beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the play’s first performance.
The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that the two could be used interchangeably. The movie is inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name – Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell – as well as the 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same time.
On one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading, based on treating Shakespeare like you would a contemporary novelist with contemporary ideas about the speakability of this kind of bereavement; it relies heavily on a name coincidence which could be simply that, a coincidence. Moreover, the Hamnetisation of tragic themes could as easily be applied to any of the plays. (Shakespeare’s horror at the death of Hamnet could have remained dormant for more years than this, and then surfaced in Macbeth at the murder of Macduff’s wife and young son.) You can remain unconvinced. And yet there is such terrific daring in Zhao and O’Farrell’s stretch: a thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human beings.
Zhao takes her movie at walking pace at first, following Agnes as she wanders endlessly through a forest, a habit that has earned her a witch-like reputation like her late mother, dreamily registering the sky through the branches and a hawk that has swooped down to her hand. Agnes is in a trance of rapture in the folk-horror woodland outside Stratford-upon-Avon, a premonition of creative inspiration from the depths of despair. It is an unselfconsciously beguiling performance from Jessie Buckley, who gives every look and smile a piercing significance. Her beauty captivates young William Shakespeare, a would-be poet seething at having to follow his abusive father into the gloving business, and played with intelligent force by Paul Mescal.
They marry, to the deep unease of William’s mother Mary (Emily Watson), and the film imagines Agnes having her first baby (Susanna) actually in the forest. But when she reaches the end of her second pregnancy, she is forced to give birth indoors, a bad augury; these are the twins Judith and Hamnet. And while William is away in London following his dream of becoming a star of the London playhouse, illness and calamity strike.
The death of Hamnet could be compared to that of Thomas Cromwell’s wife and daughters from sickness early in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; it is an inciting event, a terrible event which in some sense explains everything that happens next. Cromwell had to cauterise his inner agony by throwing himself into his career, pursuing it ruthlessly and making it of overwhelming importance – but he did not dwell on those that he has lost as Shakespeare is supposed to be doing here. Zhao and O’Farrell suggest that Shakespeare transformed and displaced his grief into every line of his play: the agony, the futility of carrying on, the dazed inability to decide on the point of anything. In a way, he, Shakespeare, is the ghost, the undead phantom condemned to wander miserably through the world while Hamnet is left alive. The boy’s soul has not been murdered as the father’s has.
It could all be true – although it comes down to the name, and there is a line in Romeo and Juliet about what there is in a name. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal is beautiful and pellucid and Max Richter’s score swarms all around the action. It is a film that moves because of the performances which are so absorbing.
Decades ago, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead provided a whole new way into Hamlet. Perhaps Zhao and O’Farrell will do the same thing with this tender and moving new creation myth.
• Hamnet is out now in the US, on 9 January in the UK, and on 15 January in Australia.
