When Hamlet the Dane talked about “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, it was typical of the way that Shakespeare generalised. The writer didn’t let you infer too much about himself. So when he specified one or two of the thousand shocks in the same speech (“To be, or not to be”), they involved rather impersonal, evasive things like “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office”. In this, his most famous soliloquy, Shakespeare remained all things to everyone – his “universal” quality that made his literary name while eternally frustrating biographers.
This new Shakespeare biopic, however, wants us to draw a direct line between the death of the author’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet, and the play Hamlet written about four years later. After all, the two names, like Bob and Rob, are basically the same. And Hamlet is, indeed, a man sent off the rails by family grief – by the sudden and grisly death of his dad, which triggers his worst angels and mass killing maybe even less cathartic than that of King Lear.
The movie could have made the Bard a wild and self-consuming Hamlet type – like the contemporaneous Caravaggio, say. But instead, as played by Paul Mescal, he’s grounded and grown-up, as close to an ideal husband as you might think Tudor times could produce. Where Edward Bond, in his play Bingo, made him a property-mad recluse, Shakespeare in Love (1998) saw him as a South Bank hustler, and Kenneth Branagh’s rather underrated All Is True (2018) gave us a befuddled pansexual, here we have a fairly stolid, gentle, deliberate fellow who struggles with his words sometimes and probably shops at Waitrose. He claims to have a volcanic temperament but keeps it mostly under wraps.
Yet Chloé Zhao’s bucolic, sombre, cradling film is not really about Shakespeare, or even about whether Hamnet, as it were, wrote Hamlet. It’s about the playwright’s deep-welled Warwickshire wife, played off the screen and back into the projector by Jessie Buckley, representing Agnes (Anne) Hathaway as an earth mother for all seasons. It’s a role made for an actor, like Buckley, at dazzling peak form, offering multiple child-births and Hecuban grief at the death of her son.
We meet her in a forest, training a hawk, pestling medicaments and curled up like a pod on the woodland floor in an arterial-red dress, which she wears throughout. A seer and plant expert, she says she’s from a line of women who “came out of the woods” and “see things that others don’t”, though locals claim she’s “the child of a forest witch”. All this Stevie Nicks stuff presents an obstacle for a time to her hooking up with Will Shakespeare, who works as a Latin tutor at her comfortable home near Stratford while his father’s glove business struggles. Will’s mother (an excellent Emily Watson) objects to the match, before becoming a reluctant support.
Little of this set-up material, including Agnes’s mysticism, plays into the rest of the film once Agnes has her three children (the birth of the twins Hamnet and Judith is especially gruelling). Will has started sharpening quills while scratching out bits of Romeo and Juliet, and the movie must figure out how to get him away from his close-knit family and off to London to become a legend. Shakespeare-botherers have long wondered: did he carelessly abandon them for two decades, or was he shuttling back and forth to Stratford the whole time? Scholars today have a clear and unambiguous answer to this: we have no idea.
The movie prefers Option (2) above, so Agnes insists that he spend a bit of time down the Dick Whittington route to get away from his bullying dad (David Wilmot, a rather shadowy presence) and to ease signs of a breakdown brought on by drink and writer’s block. She hasn’t really been established as a self-sacrificing type, so it’s not entirely convincing – equally so when she says they can’t all join him in London because of pestilence there, rather than yanking him back.
Still, it keeps him out of the way for an extended sequence in the middle that’s so shattering it almost amounts to the whole movie and makes us forget any sense of muddle elsewhere – the slow and painful death of Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) in his mother’s arms (thought to have been from bubonic plague). Buckley’s controlled loss-of-control here is devastating.
Zhao even briefly shows us the boy in a chilly afterlife, lonely and terrified. That might have been an interesting idea to pursue further at this point, though probably too punishing even for the more hardened of us, and certainly for the film’s Hollywood backers. Will turns up from London too late to see his son alive, for which Agnes berates him. (He’s too much of a mensch to say: Well, you were the one who sent me down there.)
Zhao deployed an inventive neo-realism for her Oscar-winning Nomadland of 2020, but her style here is on the plainer side, as is her dialogue (she wrote the script with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the source novel). Cinematographer Lukasz Zal crafts soft cottony light to go with the overall mood of springtime blighted.
The back half of the film is engrossed in Agnes and Will’s obliterative grief, an emotion that’s usually easier to show than dramatise. She stops talking to him and he loses his temper with his actors in Southwark. As we see him rehearsing the “Get thee to a nunnery” speech in Hamlet, the film implies that its stream of self-laceration (“We are arrant knaves, all”) must reflect Will’s guilt and upset over Hamnet. Soon after, he’s teetering over the edge of a dock and reciting “To be, or not to be” – an eggy moment that Mescal only just pulls off.
Agnes comes unannounced to London, lingers without comment near the double bed in his empty room, and attends the finished Hamlet amid the surprisingly well-behaved groundlings at his theatre. Buckley’s face in the crowd goes from bewilderment to anxiety, anger, racking sorrow, hypnotised immersion and her own cathartic calm. As with most Shakespeare biopics, Hamnet is less a window onto the Bard and more a mirror for us. In a film that’s over-fussed on the scholarly axis and surprisingly straightforward on the dramatic one, we’re left with the idea that, of the members of this famous couple, the wife was the more interesting of the two, if only for her luminous reactions to her husband’s churned-out plays.
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