Before his execution for treason by the British government in 1916, the Irish revolutionary Pádraig Pearse composed a poem for his mother written in her voice, something she had specifically requested. Lines from this poem, “The Mother,” came to mind as I watched “Hamnet,” the current Oscar contender from director Chloé Zhao:
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in [our children’s] coming and their going;
And tho’ I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow—
If there is one thing “Hamnet” is determined to sear into our minds, it is “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks” a mother is heir to. With raw scenes of natural birth and untimely death, the movie paints the home life of William Shakespeare through the perspective of his wife in vivid and overlaid terms.
Maggie O’Farrell wrote the book on which the film is based and co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao. O’Farrell has said that her research into the life and death of Hamnet Shakespeare, the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, left her dismayed by the negative view many historians and biographers have of Hathaway, who married Shakespeare, eight years her junior, after conceiving their eldest child, Susanna, in 1582. To help us imagine Mrs. Shakespeare afresh, O’Farrell calls her Agnes (the name Hathaway’s father used for her in his will). In the film, she is said to be the daughter of a forest witch, a falconer and herbalist possessed of second sight and healing powers who sleeps curled upon tree roots.
Agnes captures the attention of young Shakespeare, who has been tutoring her half-brothers in Latin. The actor Jessie Buckley has the presence to persuade us that Agnes is a person of substance; in fact, she makes Paul Mescal’s Will look like a goofy kid. But her uncanny insight perceives something in her admirer—“spaces, caves, tunnels and oceans. Undiscovered countries”—and she falls for him.
Motherhood and the precariousness of life are two recurring themes in O’Farrell’s work. Her 2017 collection of essays, I Am, I Am, I Am, reflected on 17 occasions when she had close encounters with death, including a case of encephalitis in her own childhood and many terrifying instances of anaphylaxis suffered by her daughter, who has an immune disorder. These experiences give her something in common with the average Elizabethan: more intimate familiarity with the valley of the shadow of death than most moderns ever develop.
That knowledge suffuses the action of “Hamnet,” as Agnes transforms from maid to mother, moving from deep woods toward a hearth and garden. Her children become her locus. She is haunted by a premonition that only two of her three offspring will outlive her, and it is worry over the health of the most fragile one, Judith, that makes her unwilling to move the family to London, though her husband, Will, is increasingly tied to his theatrical work there.
She’s in a fix, since she must suffer not only the “coming and going” of her babies, but of her genius playwright husband. She intuited his unique depths when they first met and, as the film tells it, was the one to insist that he pursue his ambitions. She understood that whatever he contained would drive him mad if Stratford continued to confine him. Ever the falconer, she sends him on his journeys and keeps the gauntlet on her arm, though she sees how his absence pains her son.
When tragedy strikes, Agnes’s calculations around this sacrifice change. She cannot pardon Will for being away when their children fell ill, nor comprehend that he would return to work in the midst of her grief. Using her second sight to penetrate his soul, she tells him she sees “Nothing. Nothing at all.” When she learns that he has been working on a tragedy called “Hamlet,” however, a door cracks open. Perhaps the drama will give her insight into a reaction to loss that has thus far angered and bewildered her. She travels to London to see for herself.
A Sea of Troubles
What is “Hamlet” about? It is considered the magnum opus of our most elevated literary figure because there is no single answer. It has many glinting facets, and the perspective of the viewer helps determine the meaning.
From any angle, we can see that it describes a tortured state of mind. By far its most famous lines come from Hamlet’s suicide-pondering soliloquy, wherein he expresses the suffering entailed in being alive, decrying “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” “a sea of troubles” and “the whips and scorns of time.” It’s reasonable to imagine that Shakespeare, writing these words in the months after his 11-year-old’s death, was giving voice to his own anguish. In “Hamnet,” we see Will intoning “To be, or not to be” while he hovers over the Thames at night, contemplating whether to fling himself in.
But both the soliloquy and the play, taken in their entirety, grapple with aspects of existence that have little relevance to the loss of a child. Prince Hamlet is defined primarily by his indecision. He is an overthinker, in whom “the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”; as the soliloquy concludes, it causes the forward motion of his big plans to “turn awry/ And lose the name of action.” A vision of his father’s ghost has put it in Hamlet’s head that he must kill his guilty uncle, but nothing can quell the uncertainty the prince feels over every course available to him. In the end, disaster unfolds precisely because of Hamlet’s inability to choose a path; not choosing, as the existential saying goes, is still a choice.
How much of this was inspired by the death of Shakespeare’s son? It’s impossible to say, but whatever influence real events had, they seem to have been subterranean rather than overt. The Bard may have channeled his grief to articulate Hamlet’s excruciating doubt, or his despair on seeing Yorick’s skull. He may have named the work in his son’s honor because he thought so often of him during the writing.
But construing Hamlet as any kind of stand-in for Hamnet Shakespeare, or for Will himself, does not work. Hamnet was a child, not a man beset with existential angst. Shakespeare, who wrote dozens of lengthy plays in his 52 years, was hardly afflicted by paralysis.
Life into art
“Hamnet” overplays “Hamlet” as a catharsis for the grieving parents, and it makes for a muddle. A title card notes that “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” were considered interchangeable in Shakespeare’s time, priming us to see the play’s protagonist as fundamentally connected to the boy. This link is underscored by the casting of two brothers, Jacobi and Noah Jupe, in the roles of Hamnet and the actor playing Hamlet at The Globe, respectively.
When Agnes watches the drama on stage, she is moved by Old Hamlet’s ghost, played by Will, embracing the prince. This is presented as a moment of restored faith. Here is her husband enacting an embrace of their dead son, whom she feared he hardly missed. But this scene, to any half-careful reader of “Hamlet,” is the antithesis of healing: The father’s ghost appears to demand retribution, initiating the son’s crisis. Likewise, when the character Hamlet finally dies, Agnes has a vision of her deceased boy on the stage and is able to bid him goodbye with a new sense of acceptance. The conclusion of “Hamlet,” however, is an unmitigated calamity of needless destruction, making Agnes’s beatific reaction almost unintentionally comical in its incongruity.
Perhaps Agnes is realizing that the collective catharsis taking place among the Globe audience, who weep openly at Hamlet’s death, means her family’s private grief has been alchemized into great art that will make her son’s name immortal. It will, of course. But if that represents a revelation to Agnes, it undermines the film’s attempts to present her as clairvoyant. She seems surprised by the small size of her husband’s London digs. Did she understand his gift so little that she thought he was in theater for the money?
Erased lives
“The Mother” came to my mind because Agnes suffers as a mother, but it’s also striking to consider what prompted Pearse to write the poem. Margaret Pearse asked her son to ventriloquize her experience, rather than penning verse herself. Even more fascinating in this context is his allusion in the poem to “The Magnificat”: “The generations shall remember them/ And call them blessed.” Apart from the presumption of drawing a parallel between himself and the Blessed Virgin, note the irony of his echoing that rare passage in Scripture where a woman is recorded describing her experience firsthand.
Few women have been remembered by history independent of their relationship to a man, because few women’s words were ever recorded. This has led to a whole genre of books and movies offering fictionalized conceptions of figures like Anne Boleyn, Beatrice Portinari or Vermeer’s young model with her distinctive earring. The poet Carol Ann Duffy published a full volume, The World’s Wife, playing with the ways in which famous men might be remembered by the women in their lives; Anne Hathaway is one of those to whom this clever collection gives voice.
It’s a popular approach, but is it always the best we can do for the nameless sisterhood of the past? I came away from “Hamnet” wondering whether a simpler, stronger, more affecting film might have been made from a whole-cloth invention. I imagine a tale about an anonymous 16th-century woman attuned to the cry of wild birds but tender toward humans, at odds with the expectations of the patriarchal society she inhabits but bound by love to negotiate that tension. Without the need to map her arc onto the known life of Shakespeare, clearer lines might emerge.
Almost a century after Virginia Woolf championed the possibilities of fiction by and about women in “A Room of One’s Own,” it could be that there remains a hesitancy “to light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been”—that is, the interiority of the female denizens of centuries past. To overcome it, we must dare to imagine the many who were compelling on their own merits.
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