Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel Hamnet has had rave reviews, so I could not wait to see it. And it is a very beautiful film. The Forest of Arden shimmers and soughs, the unspoilt rural England in which Shakespeare grew up.
You probably know the story of O’Farrell’s fantasy. William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, had three children: Susanna, the eldest, and twins: Hamnet, a boy, and Judith, a girl, named after their godparents, Stratford-upon-Avon’s Mr and Mrs Bun the Bakers.
The only actor I liked in the film was Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who plays Susanna. She reads to her younger sister from the sonnets and for once we hear Shakespeare’s poetic voice — really the only voice we care about. “And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence…” For the first, and only time, in the film, I turned to gooseflesh.
The premise of the novel is that Shakespeare, feeling grief for his son Hamnet, who has died from the plague at the age of 11, is so traumatised that he can never bring himself to mention plague or Black Death in all his copious oeuvre. His wife — in the film called Agnes, as she was named in her father’s will — is furious with him for being in London all the time. She has never been to the capital and neverseen a play. Somehow, out of all this grief and pain, he constructs his most famous play, Hamlet. Agnes relents, comes to the Globe and is slowly won round to the magic of theatre.
There were several Hamlet plays before the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet — possibly one of them written in part by Shakespeare himself. So in real life, if one is allowed to mention it, Shakespeare was not inspired to write Hamlet because of his loss of Hamnet. As for his being so traumatised by the plague that he never brought himself to mention it in his writing … there are innumerable mentions of plague and pestilence in his works, both dramatic and non-dramatic.
The real Anne Hathaway was eight years older than Shakespeare, but Jessie Buckley, who plays her in the film, is everlastingly young, brimming with sexuality and so in love with herself that you can’t quite bear to watch. She is the perfect mother, of course, and the childbirths are all natural — the first one being in the woods, the twins coming along indoors. Unlike all her stuffy relatives, she is at ease in her beautiful body, and too in love with all the fungi, flowers, roots and herbs in the forest to want to go up to London and find out what it is which makes her apparently dim-witted hunk of a husband so interested in all this theatre malarkey.
Their Shakespeare is just an absurd dunce, who, in the last 10 minutes of the film, is revealed to have written a masterpiece
Shakespeare himself, Paul Mescal, is not really drawn at all. He is a complete non-entity. Ruth — my wife — told me that we had seen him in other things, that he was a celebrated handsome devil, and that such actors and such plays were not meant for old men like me. I could just about believe that Mrs Shakespeare was a sex goddess in real life, but I cannot believe that Shakespeare looked rather dim, as Mescal does.
Shakespeare is absent from his plays, but in the sonnets, he teases us by disclosing a complicated inner emotional life.
The obsession with the young man, who has “a woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted”; the love for the dark lady; the overwhelming remorse and self-hatred in “th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame”… You cannot help wondering how Anne Hathaway felt as she read these poems, especially since she is the one named person in the sequence. She unmistakably comes into it with the one poem in the batch which is not written in iambic pentameter — “‘I hate’ from hate away she threw, /And saved my life, saying ‘not you’.” The phrase “hate away” is clearly a pun on her name: “Hathaway.”
Zhao and O’Farrell show no interest whatsoever in the sonnets, except when Susanna recites from one of them. Nor do either of them ask what could have prompted Shakespeare to write poems of passion to a beautiful boy and a dark lady. The doltish version of Shakespeare portrayed in this film appears, when in London, to spend all his time in a dusty bedsit, just writing. No Mermaid Tavern, no rowdy friends like Ben Jonson, no relationship with the other players. The scenes where he is supposedly rehearsing the actors to play Hamlet are the most wooden thing you ever saw. Their Shakespeare is just an absurd dunce, who, in the last 10 minutes of the film, is revealed to have written a masterpiece.
Why was I annoyed? There is a sort of philistinism behind the shimmering green leaves and the over-confident Mum Knows Best of this version. And, as I say, it wilfully misses out the known facts — particularly that Anne Hathaway, whatever the turmoil of Shakespeare’s mysterious emotional life, was with him in London, and she makes a star appearance in his only personal work of art — the sonnets.
