Hamnet. The Movie.

  

 

“Grief fills the room of my absent child.”

 

Adapted by Maggie O’Farrell’s from her 2020 novel with the Director Chloe Zhao, starring Jesse Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare.  Cinematography by Lukasz Zal, Music by Max Richter, Production Design by Fiona Crombie. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes.  

 

I am writing this article assuming that most people who read it will by now know that the film deals with the death of Hamnet, the Shakespeare couples young son, and suggests how this may have affected William’s work on the playHamlet.   

 

 In it I look at how the film affected me and those I have seen it with, especially those closely acquainted with grief;  how truthfully it seemed to speak about the nature of grief; how the media of print and film can speak to us in different ways; with a brief exploration of possible actual links between Hamnet’s death and his father’s writing; and lastly a consideration of the film’s score, and the slight critical dispute about it.       

 

It is generally understood that our response of any film depends on what we bring to it.

Some audiences of Hamnet will not have read the book.    They will, I think, enjoy a beautifully filmed love story, set in the late 16^th century English countryside, with two very good actors playing Agnes and Will Shakespeare alongside a fine supporting cast,  sensitively directed and lusciously filmed with a wonderfully persuasive score and soundscape.    It may well move them to tears, but not, I expect, leave them bereft.   I hope that many of them will then read the book. 

 

Some will have read the book, and come wondering how it has been have adapted for the screen.    I do not think they will be disappointed.    I am sure that many will, like me, appreciate the way the filming of the final scene offers rather more than the written word could.   

 

There are also some who come to see it knowing that both book and film centre on grief, in this case parental grief;  but grief is grief is grief, and all grief is about love.   So they will not expect this movie to be altogether easy to watch – or listen to.   They too may be moved to tears as, we are told, many previous audiences have been.   But the ending comes to a kind of resolution and a reconciliation that I found comforting and profound.    Having watched it twice, with friendsI am now sure that this beautiful and demanding gift from the novelist, film maker and crew offers catharsis and consolation to those who need it and are willing and able to accept it.   Our response of any work of art depends on what we bring to it – and are able to take from it.  

 

I also want to encourage those who have not seen this movie to do so in a cinema.   Sharing laughter and/or tears in the company of an audience is so much more powerful than home viewing.  

 

Good Art, in its visual, literary, musical or kinetic forms, can sometimes reach into our heart-strings and strike chords there that evoke deep responses of joy, pity, compassion, love, agitation, calm  – and sorrow.        

 

I have read Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet twice, once to myself and once out-loud to someone I love, so I knew that grief was at its core.   As young and brilliant actor Jacobi Jupe, who played Hamnet, said at the Golden Globe Awards, “This film is about grief and love.  And grief is love.”    We do no grieve for someone we do not love.  More than that; love is the sea on which we sail our little lives and grief but one of the storms that disturb it.    We hold on, praying that the storm will abate with time, and the sea will abide.          

 

Hamnet is a work of fiction and Ms O’Farrell does not claim that its story is true.  But fiction can be truthful rather than true.  I have now seen it twice, with four friends, and out of the five of us three have been bereaved, two by losing a boy-child, one their wife;  two are trained therapists and one of us a Vicar who has worked with hundreds of families before, during and after funerals.   This film reached deeply into all our hearts and the chords it struck there rang true.            

 

For the first part of the film I was, in a way, ‘watching the book’,  seeing how O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao had between them transferred the words to the screen, and how the cast, especially Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Will, had interpreted their characters.  From the start I loved this watching this ‘translation’.  And then the film itself took over.    The production design and costumes seemed very authentic,  properly grubby and lived in.   The composition of every image was gorgeous.     The editing, which obviously  could not replicate that of the book, was coherent.        The soundscape and music carried us forward without ever being intrusive.   

 

And all of that was scene-setting for the central and essential tragedy, and its aftermath.   And now it became very personal.   Jessie Buckley’s anguished howl as she held her dead son instantly took me back nearly twenty years to when I held my own dead wife in my arms.    Then Paul Mescal’s acting out of Will’s response reminded me of how I had also struggled for years to find a way to live out my own grief.   

 

Agnes and Will may share a common grief, but like so many of us they responded to it in differing ways, and that is not always easy for grieving couples or families.  But then came the film’s masterstroke, expanding the book’s final chapter not with words but with profound direction and the acting of the two lead players as we watched their healing in front us.  Here the medium’s advantages became most important.    I love written fiction, but sometimes words can be brought even more to life by film.   It is a little like the way a type printed page differs from an illuminated manuscript, but much more so.   The uses of pauses, silences, gestures, looks and facial expressions cannot be written on the page as well as they can be shown on the screen.   

 

It is only when Will has transmuted his grief into words, into the play that bears his son’s name, transferring  it as he needed to from those of the father for his son, Hamnet, to that of the son, Hamlet, for his Father, and then physically acting them out on stage, that he 

can break down and privately weep.  Then we see Agnes’ dawning understanding of her husband for the first time, of how his art was vital and essential to his emotional processes.    She is then no longer enraged that he had run away to avoid his grief, now seeing that he had run away to find a way to express – and ultimately perform - his grief.   

 

We also see the child Hamnet freed at last from the dim grey space he entered when he died.  This seemed to me to resemble the Jewish Sheol or classical Greek realm of after-life in which the dead are not punished but live a half-life in a shadowy realm where there is no hope, no volition, no direction.   Very early in the story Will tells Agnes the story of Eurydice and Orpheus and how she was condemned to remain in Hades.   Both Ursula le Guin and Phillip Pullman wrote about their versions of this place in their Earthsea: The Other Wind and His Dark Materials volume Three; The Amber Spyglass, each of them finding way for these dead souls to be released.   And we see Hamnet released as both his parents allow him to move on -  as they have at last moved on.   The film ends with the glorious smiles of the child and mother.   

 

Most of the audience who watched Hamnet with us sat in silence for some time after the credits had finished, and I remember how glad I was that by accident or design the houselights were not turned up for a while.   And yes, there were tears, as reported from many previous showings, but I think and hope that for many of us, maybe even most of us, they were tears of relief.     Agnes and Will’s grief had not become lessened, but this play, Hamlet, had helped them to become more reconciled to it and to each other.   Now at last they could walk forward together, hands and hearts joined together again.    And it seems to me that by the magic of this high art so could some of us, as we also move forward a little, having revisited our own personal losses and taken an another small but significant step along our own healing journey.    

 

With regard to the quote that heads this piece, Will Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596.  He was eleven or twelve years old.  Shakespeare’s play King John  appeared in the same year.  In it Constance is the widow of King Richard I’s younger brother Geoffrey, and the mother of Prince Arthur.  Arthur had the most legitimate claim to the throne so John had him assassinated.  In Act 3, scene 4 we hear Constance pouring out her rage and grief.  Having lost her husband and her son she is drawn to suicide.    When Cardinal Pandulph, the Papal Legate, tells her she is talking madness, not grief, she says;

 

 “Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!

I am not mad: I would to heaven I were! 

For then ‘tis like I should forget myself:

O! If I could, what grief would I forget.

Preach me some philosophy to make me mad, 

And thou shalt be canoniz’d, Cardinal,

For being not mad but sensible of grief,

My reasonable part produces reason 

How I may be delivered from these woes, 

And teaches me to kill or hang myself”.

 

 Is this a pre-echo of ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet?  Some critics have objected to this speech being used in the film as Will contemplates suicide, but King John shows that close to Hamnet’s death Shakespeare had deeply looked at the link between grief and suicidal thoughts.   Hamlet is surely a better play for Maggie O’Farrell to use as a conduit of Shakespeare’s grief than the much slighter King John.   I would also suggest that by this time in his writing his internal word-thoughts could take metrical form.    I know it can be quite easy – easy enough to become natural -  to think in iambic pentameters, not to turn thoughts into poetry but to think in so natural a poetic form, so why would not Will do so at this crucial juncture?  

 

And when scolded for holding ‘ too heinous a respect for grief,’  Constance turns on the celibate priest saying  ‘He talks to me, that never had a son.’  King Philip of Spain then says to her ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child,’ and she replies, 

 

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then I have reason to be fond of grief.”

   

Constance is actually given 73 lines in this short scene, and they are the most memorable in the play, speaking to us about the emotional and fearless power of her maternal love and grief.    It seems likely that Shakespeare made his Arthur younger than the historical account, maybe almost as young as  Hamnet, in order to express something of his own grief; and he did not mind putting his words into the mouth of a grieving mother.     It was almost five years before  Hamlet appeared on stage, and grief is much more central there,  even if it is for a son grieving his father, rather than a father grieving his son.   Tom Stoppard once said, rather ruefully I thought, that in the links between an artist’s life and work ‘Nothing is wasted.’    

 

 

After seeing the King John connection I sought out the Steven Greenblatt article  The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet  referenced at the beginning of the film telling us that in the 16^th century the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.  In this article the earlier play is explored more deeply.  He suggests that by the time Shakespeare was writing Hamlet his own father may well have been approaching death, and that writing Hamlet was a turning point for Shakespeare.     Hamlet considerably expanded his vocabulary – and ours –  and moved his characters away from actions motives based on reason to actions that grew out of powerful but confused feelings  (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus?)    (The article can be downloaded at scribd.com.). 

 

I also confirmed that my supposition that Agnes, the name used for the woman we know as Ann Hathaway,  comes from the Greek and Roman for Holy and lamb.    In both the novel and film Agnes is shown to be a deeply spiritual, though not religious woman,  and shows the willingness to sacrifice her own happiness to help her husband fulfil his destiny, almost like a sacrificial lamb.   In her father’s Will she is indeed named Agnes.     

 

As a postscript for those who pay attention to film scores, I see that Jesse Buckley’s suggestion that Max Richter’s previous composition, On The Nature of Daylight, be used for the final scene was taken up.   Some critics have found fault in this.   

 

I remember reading this reproach in the New York Times review in November 2025, and it was recently repeated by one of my favourite film critics, Mark Kermode.     And yes, this music has been used a number of times, perhaps most effectively in Arrival where it was added to Johann Johannsson’s score.   Mark Kermode celebrated Arrival as showing ‘the way that joy and love and grief and mourning and celebration can be refracted’ by the combination of film and music.   He did not object to On The Nature of Daylight being used again in podcast review, or in his movie music book Surround Sound.   I love Arrival, and its inclusion of Max Richter’s piece.    Surely what matters is how appropriate a piece of music is, not how often I has been used?  

  

Allegri’s Miserere Mei has been used at least ten times in films ranging from  Chariots of Fire to Two Popes.    Faure’s Requiem in a similar number, and Bach’s Cello Suites  in well over 20.     If On The Nature of Daylight was as obvious as ‘manipulative’ strings playing swooping minor cords,  the Faure piece or Samuel Barber’s Adagio (in fact especially Samuel Barber’s Adagio) I may well have abreacted to it.   But its use in Hamnet was, for me, seamless with the rest of Richter’s score, and utterly at one with the complex emotions the final scene evoked.  

 

I have seen some fine films in the last twelve months, Conclave, Flow, 28 Years Later, Sinners and One Battle After Another,  but I am sure Hamnet is the one that will live with me the longest. 

Conclave, for those who have seen it!

 In the film Conclave the name and nationality of the Dean pf the College of Cardinals, who was responsible for running the election of a new Pope, was changed from Jacobo Lemoli, an Italian in the Robert Harris novel, to Thomas Lawrence when Ralf  Fiennes was cast in the role.   The Dean’s post is one of the four senior Cardinals in the Vatican along with the secretary of State,  the Chamberlain of The Holy See, and the Confessor in Chief.

Robert Harris is clear in his introduction to the novel that for the sake of authenticity he used these real titles throughout the novel, but the characters he created to fill these offices were not intended to bear any resemblance to their present day incumbents.

     

According to ‘Political Europe’ several Cardinals watched the film to understand the process of a Papal election. 

 

For those who have seen the film it is worth saying that according to canon law Cardinal Benitez would not have been allowed to attend the Conclave, as appointments made ‘in pectore’ end with the current Pope’s death.  The novel says that the late Pope changed this law, (p 74) though that is not mentioned in the film.     With regard to other matters Harris ‘consulted Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as part of his research for the book. He later gave Murphy-O'Connor a copy of the novel, and to his surprise, Murphy-O'Connor sent a letter praising its accuracy.’   Wiki. 

 

The Dean’s homily before the conclave starts is pretty much straight form the novel. 

‘My brothers and sisters, in the course of along life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty.  Certainty is the deadly enemy of unity.   Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.Even Christ was not certain at the end. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? He cried out in his agony at his ninth hour on the cross.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Our faith is a living faith precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.  If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.' 

 

'Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a Pope who doubts and by his doubts continues to make the Catholic faith a living thing that may inspire the whole world,  Let Him grant us a Pope who sins, and asks for forgiveness, and carries on.’  (p123f)

But the words of Cardinal Benitez, in his response to those of Cardinal Tedesco after the seventh ballot, were revised for the script, clearly by Robert Harris and Peter Straughan, and the last of his words  ‘The Church is what we do next’ added.     

 

For me as theologian these words carry deep meaning.   What I hear there is that although we may acknowledge that a Church is not made of stone or bricks,  but of the people of faith, it may be less commonly understood that the Church is not an organisation or institution.   ‘The Body of Christ’ is not a bureaucracy, or even a hierarchy, so it is not defined by its physical presence or characteristics, but by its actions.   The Church is what the Church does,  and that activity keeps changing.   The Church is not what it was in the past, or did in the past, but what it is and does  now – and therefore by ‘what it does next’ in any given situation.  

 

Cardinal Tedesco, in his fear and anger looked backwards for guidance and authenticity.   Cardinal Benitez, in his faith (not hope, which is different), looked forward trusting in his Lord;   the Lord whose body ended up nailed to a cross.   So the Church should not fear even its own death.  The survival of the institution of the Church should not be its major concern.   

        

Peter Straughan, the scriptwriter, had previously adapted John le Carre’s novel ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ for the screen, working with his wife, the late Bridget O’Connor, and later adapted Hilary Mantel’s three ‘Wolf Hall’ novels for the BBC.   I do not think that would have been possible without a clear understanding of the theological background to those historical novels set at the time of the 16^th century English Reformation. He was, by the way, brought up in a Catholic family.    

 

His script for ‘Conclave’  won many awards including the Oscar.     

 

Steve, part 2.

The staff at Steve’s school, called ‘Last Chance’ in the book, are like islands in the stream, standing in a tumultuous torrent of pain and anger trying stop it tearing the young men in their care away downstream,  towards disaster.  Steve and his colleagues know they have to do all they can to hold them, emotionally, heartfully, courageously (heartfulness and courage are really the same thing) to offer them a place of physical and emotional safety in what may be the only place where they are accepted as they are, for whom they are,  despite their behaviour.    

In youth work and schools we kept saying that ‘if there is something wrong with a child or young person’s behaviour there is almost certainty something wrong with their situation.’       Their behaviour is symptomatic, not causal.   We needed to look beyond the behaviour and explore what was behind it.   Why, for instance, is the bully bullying? The liar lying?  And we learnt that those who have been abused, in whatever way, are not likely to present themselves in ways that arouse our sympathy.  

That is why we needed to set aside our expectations of ‘good behaviour’, of politeness, even decency, and to reach out across the void and offer a hand,  even when we expected it to be bitten.   Even when it had been bitten.  Being bitten hurts and these young people knew exactly how to hurt.   Their emotional (and too often physical) scars told their own story.      

But even this is not enough.   Such children and youths also need firm boundaries  consistently maintained by those who care for them.   This is the same discipline all children need of course, but for them it is in spades.   The young boys in Steve need to know that this really is their last chance, that outside the boundaries is a void.  Both Steve the character and Steve the movie are clear about this.   

But how can the Staff  doing work like this be so strong, so consistent, so alert and responsive  when  they are also standing on rocky ground, also in danger of being swept away  by the torrent?   The film is set in 1996, after 18 years of Tory Government,  but now Britain has emerged from another 15 years of their rule, another 15 years of underinvestment in education and youth work. 

I remember attending a national conference  called by the Tories in the mid 1990’s, when they wanted youth work to be ‘contracted out’ from Local Government to charities such as the uniformed organisations, the denominational Churches and the YMCA and YWCA.    But they needed us to tell them what measurable ‘outcomes’ we would produce to justify the work – and the expense.    These needed it to be quantifiable, so we could be accountable.   

Many of us did not know whether to laugh or cry, or both.    For most of us the only justification for our work was the potential benefit it might bring to those we worked with, and these benefits could not be measured, predicted, tracked or tested.  Many of them  might not emerge for years, long after they had left our clubs or organisations.     Some young people might not benefit at all from our efforts.   Some would certainly have been damaged, but none-the-less we were there to ‘cast our bread on the waters’ in hope.     We did the work simply for the sake of the young people. 

The situation we see in Steve shows what happens when work with children and young people is shaped by a governmental ethic of profit and loss.    Not by ‘what can we give?’ but by ‘what shall we gain?’    In our case the Minister suggested that our efforts might mean more young staying on in education, or going into work.   These things, they were sure, would improve the Nation’s economy.    Now, of course, most English schools are run by Academies, by businesses.   The work done in places like Steve’s school is not really economically viable.       

If this does not read like a movie review forgive me.   It is a review of the truths that this movie tells.     If you read The Guardian article linked to it you will see that Steve  was made by people who know what they are talking about, and who care about it passionately.  That is why it is a passionate movie - and yes, I say again that movies can be made to move us, and as the great critic Roger Ebert said, “to generate empathy”.    I was going to write about the Direction, the Music, Cinematography and of course the Actors, but you can find out all about these elsewhere.     This article is simply about what their combined efforts meant to me as someone who spent most of their working life in Youth Work and Child Protection.   That is why this film means a lot to me.   

 

Steve. A film about heroism.

  

Steve is Ciaran Murphy’s new film.   He stars in it and produced it, working with Max Porter as they adapted Porter’s novel Shy into this screenplay.  Murphy had already worked with Porter in the stage version of the novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers,  and the short film All Of This Unreal Time.    Adapting the two novels  required considerable work, as they both used interior monologue, chaotic nonlinear time scales and in the case of Grief, poetry.  Shy also mixed in the jumbled memories of previous conversations and confrontations.    Shy is played by Jay Lycurgo, who previously worked with Ciaren Murphy on Peaky Blinders,  and consecutively follows the events of just 24 hours.

Steve moves the focus away from the initial narrator, Shy, a 16 year old boy living in a corrective school trying to cope with behaviour that other schools could not manage.   It is 1996.  Shy is a central character, but most of the time we follow Steve, the Head teacher.    

Why is Shy there? We are told that “He’s sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger.”  Already expelled from two schools, his first caution came when he was thirteen, and this may be his last chance, as it is for other boy there.   Shy is depressed and confused.  His mother also suffers from depression and, it seems, can no longer cope with Shy in her life.  This is a desperate time for Shy. 

But Steve and his exhausted under-resourced staff are having a hard time coping too.    An intrusive film crew arrives, totally insensitive to the febrile atmosphere, the knife edge that too many relationships negotiate, or fail to negotiate.   Verbal and physical violence can break out at any time, with fearful possible consequences.     An MP arrives trying to engage in conversation with the boys, and win their support in the upcoming General Election – and have it filmed for propaganda.  Needless to say this does not go well. In the midst of this Steve seems to be suffering from PTSD after a car crash and resorts to pain killers and alcohol.    

This is not an easy film to watch, and it should not be easy.  There is so much pain, anger, sadness, despair, fear and confusion, but there are also moments of joy, hope and emotional intelligence, shown by both members of staff and the boys.    I remember Hemingway’s definition of courage as ‘grace under pressure’.    That rings true to me, and so did this film.    

In 1996, when this film is set,  I was doing group work in an establishment one rung lower down, in the place young men ended up when all other systems failed; a prison for ‘Serious Young Offenders’, seventeen and eighteen years old, many of them there because their uncontrolled violence had led them to commit GBH, manslaughter or murder.   I worked with some of them, with some Warders, and the Prison Chaplian.    And I was over whelmed by admiration for so many of them.     Not all Warders are brutes, many of them will do whatever they can to help their charges to be rehabilitated, to find hope and purpose in their lives.  And many of those young men were determined to do so themselves.   

I also came to see that the difference between many of those boys and myself came down to sheer luck.  In so many of their lives there came a time, maybe just 10 minutes,  when they could no longer cope with the pressures life had brought down on their shoulders.   The weight of their pain, anger, confusion and despair leading them to acts of hate and violence.   Acts they would regret for the rest of their lives.     I am sure that many other people are put under  such pressures, I know I one was, but we got through those 10 minutes – or however long they last – not by virtue or moral strength but by luck and  having previously been given the support we needed to survive.   Given, not deserved.  We all deserve it, but not everyone is given it.     

The boys and staff  portrayed in Steve are heroic.    I will write more, later, about the performances,  direction, music, camera work and script, but for now it is enough to say that this is a fine film, a grown up film, a Good Thing, a ray of light in the darkness and a beacon of hope in hard times.    It is not fun.  At times it is properly frightening.    It does not have a happy ending, in fact it does not really have an ending at all.  The 24 hours are simply over.  Another 24 hours will follow.   Things will not necessarily get better; in fact they will almost certainly get worse,  but for now we have come through and there is hope.

Why hope?  Because this is a film about love.   Not sentimental love, which is cheap, but about love-in-action, the love we call compassion, and that is always costly.     I urge you to see it.   We need more films like this.  We need more works of art like this.  We need more real life examples of the loving endurance portrayed in this movie.    My thanks to all involved.