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. 

Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet is out in paperback...

  

“World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural,”

reads the epigraph to Maggie O’Farrell’s seventh novel — a quote from Louis MacNeice’s poem “Snow”

 

In “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Eudora Welty writes that “it is our inward journey that leads us through time — forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.” 

 

If you are going to read one book in the coming months I strongly recommend Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, Hamnet.   It spins around the death, at the age of eleven, of William and Agnes Shakespeare’s son (yes, we know her as Anne, but O’Farrell has done her homework, and just as Hamnet

and Hamlet were used interchangeably in the 16^th century, so Mrs Shakespeare is recorded under both forenames in parish records.  

This beautiful and original story explores the relationship between Hamnet’s death and Shakespeare’s famous play, and how the boy’s death may have resonated through the whole family.  

 

His mother Agnes is at the heart of the novel and she is a wonderful invention, powerful and tender – a wise woman skilled in herbs and healing, with deep intuitions that seems strange and unworldly to us and to her neighbours.   She has a lot to teach us about old wisdom and lore.  Hamnet’s father (never actually named) spends most of his life in the wings, in London creating his plays, his company of players and his Playhouse.   We stay in Stratford (again unnamed but described in convincing detail) with his family; his wife and their children, the firstborn Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet,  all of them living with Agnes’s in-laws.   

 

I was caught at the first by O’Farrell’s writing.  It grabbed me by the sleeve and said ‘Come with me, now!’ and I had to follow.  I fell in love with Agnes, and I grieved with her for Hamnet. The whole book is about grief, but that means it is also, inevitably, about love.  We only grieve for those we love.   Being about love means that it is about hope.    

 

The ending is unexpected, makes perfect sense, and lifted my fallen heart.   It also offers a possible and persuasive answer to the question ‘why did Shakespeare name the character at the heart of his most famous play,‘Hamlet?’ 

 

A couple of years ago I first watched the film Arrival, a science fiction ‘first contact’ movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.   That film was also original, intellectually rigorous, convincing, revelatory,  and – unlike the majority of science fiction films – ended with a deeply moving punch to the heart.   Arrival’s medium, genre, narrative and denouement could not be more different to those of Hamnet – but both introduced me to clever, sage, loving and courageous women, and the emotional poignancy their stories delivered. 

 

If you read one more book this year…. 

The Plays the thing. Benedict Cumberbatch's Hamlet

I  recently drove to Galway to see the NT live broadcast of Hamlet from the Barbican Theatre.   It is an hour and half trip, each way.    Do I think it was worth it?    Wait and see.

Directed by Lyndsey Turner this was,  of course, the much anticipated Benedict Cumberbatch debut in the role – and I will come to him later.   Later, because any performance of this role is shaped by choices made by the Producer, Director, Designer and many others.  They create the context in which we see Hamlet’s tragedy enacted.

I do not know what influence of the Producer, Sonia Friedman, was, apart from recruiting the Director and other main players.      But I do know that the Designer, Es Devlin has a long and worthy track record setting plays, operas, ballet and and music concerts.  This is her second consecutive production with Lyndsey Turner.    Previously she has been employed by The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal Court, The National Theatre and the Theatre de Complicite, and many of the world’s leading theatres, opera houses and musicians.   She has designed eight previous Shakespeare productions, including another Hamlet, and worked with U2, Kanye West, PetShopBoys, Lenny Kravitz, Lady Gaga, Goldfrapp, Jamie Cullum and Nitin Sawney among others.     I mention this CV to illustrate her versatility and reputation, and because I think her set is one of the stars of the show.    The Barbican has a huge stage and her design is  reminiscent of that used for Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film, but this set is turned slightly slant wise and she shows both Elsinor’s initial grandeur and then the gradual decay of the State of Denmark, and maybe of Hamlet’s state of mind.      I give top marks to Es Devlin and to the Lighting Director, Jane Cox, who exploits the set’s depth and shadows.   Controversially, Hamlet’s soliloquies are spot lit in front of a freeze frame of slow-mo background action.     I liked this.   Soliliques are difficult to stage, and moving them out of time is an interesting solution.   I thought the music was usually appropriate too, even if at times it almost drowned the words.

Talking of words, the script was cut to 3 hours instead of the full 4 hour text.  So was the recent Sarah Frankcom/Maxime Peake production for the Manchester International Festival,  and I had no problem with that.   It is good to have the full text at times (all praise to Branagh for his full four hour filmed version) but I did not miss anything here.    Some of the words were transposed, particularly in the opening scene, where Hamlet greets Horatio with ‘Who goes there?’ and much of the rest of Marcello and Bernardo’s conversation is cut or transposed. We were told that in the previews the play started with Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’,   but now we start with the grieving son sorting through his father’s possessions and listening to Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy.   This production had been criticized in The Times as "Hamlet for kids raised on Moulin Rouge".   Apart from this song being used in the Baz Luhrmann movie of Moulin Rouge (sung by David Bowie) I cannot see the point.   Did this tune subconsciously make the connection?  Anyway, I think it is good to start with Hamlet.  

The Direction delivers the text clearly,  coordinating the creative ideas of the crew, moving us along apace,  using the space, hits many of the emotional high and low notes, missing a few, works within the capacity of the actors,  gives the lead players room to explore and does not ignore the supporting roles.   All of these are important for a Director to manage.      I think Lyndsey Turner had done well enough.  

So what about the acting?

The play is set in the mid 20^th century,  judging from the weapons used, but Horatio, played by Leo Bill,  is presented as a late 20^th century  student, complete with self-inked tattoos and a back-pack.   Horatio being an academic fits the text, and Bill  plays his part well.   I could not quite see why he would be Hamlet’s bosom pal, but at least he is loyal and bright, unlike the deadly duo of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are treacherous dullards.    I love Tom Stoppard’s play centering on them, and seeing it on the page, stage and screen has obviously engendered an affection for them in my heart, but here – quite rightly -  their off-stage death is no tragedy.   

Nor, sadly was Ophelia’s.   Sian Brooke  has worked with the RSC,  and certainly knows how to speak Shakespeare, but neither I nor my companion could see why or how she might have captured Hamlet’s heart.   Pretty, but rather round shouldered (in the way Princess Diana was)   she had little sparkle, and therefor when her spark was extinguished we did not miss a lot.   Her final exit was given the works by the Director,  using timing, lighting and swelling music to move us,  but we not moved.   Her early business with a camera was designed to provide an emotional pay-off later,  but again we felt short changed.    I once saw Robert Laplace’s one-man Hamlet.     (Yes, One Man Hamlet).     I expected it to be interesting.   I did not expect to be profoundly moved by his portrayal of the multiple roles, but the death of his Ophelia moved me to tears.    There were early murmurs that Jessica Chastain would play the part.  Be still my beating heart. 

Her brother Laertes is played by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith with vigour and clarity, and their father, old Polonius, by Jim Norton who is a well known actor in Ireland,  but most English eyes are more likely to recognize him as Bishop Brennan in Father Ted.    He certainly does a workmanlike job here, but nothing distinguishes his performance, nor that of Anastasia Halle as Gertrude.   I confess that seeing the magnificent Janet Suzmann play this part opposite Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet (yes, it was that long ago)  set a high bar.   

Ruairi Conaghan, another Irish actor, is the Player King, always a difficult part to play, as he is such a bad actor.   (Hamlet’s coaching him for his performance at the Court is very funny).   The Player Queen role goes to (yet) another Irish actor, Diveen Henry, who impressed us with her brief moment in the limelight.  

Karl Johnson is the Ghost and Gravedigger.  I loved his work in Mike Leigh’s Mister Turner, playing another father.   Here I thought his vocal delivery as Hamlet Snr. was rather strange, but he did provide the necessary comic relief as the gravedigger. 

Ciaran Hinds, however, really impressed.   He filled out the role of Claudius well,  his flashing eyes, resonant tones and physical presence made him a worthy adversary for Hamlet.    

And what of Hamlet?    Of course I loved Cumberbatch’s  Sherlock, and admire the whiplash mind that he had to have in order to play that part convincingly.   I was very impressed by his physicality and grace as Frankenstein’s creature in the 2011 NT/Danny Boyle production.    The Imitation Game showed another aspect of his talents; vulnerability.     So I know he is smart and fast, funny and physical.   (Early on, in the banquet scene, he lightly leaps onto the table without a break in his stride.  In fact it is not a leap; he simply steps up with no discernable effort.)     Here I saw a burning intelligent intensity, an absolute understanding of who Hamlet is, even when Hamlet himself does not know who – or what – he is.   Every word seems to have been thought through,  ‘read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested’.     He carried me with him through all his character’s changes, moods, confusions, fears,  jokes and rages.    It has been lamented by some that Cumberbatch does not have a more stellar supporting cast.    I can see the point, but on the plus side I heard every word, which is rather important,  nobody walked into the set or into another actor (and there was a slot of rapid hustle-bustle for time to time),  and apart from Ophelia I didn’t feel that anyone was miscast - or mis-directed. 

There is no one perfect reading of the role,  or of the play.   There is no agreed ‘best text.’     It is like a diamond held up to the light, revealing new facets with every slight change in perspective.    That is why it is so fascinating.   Perhaps the most we can expect from any one production is clarity, to hear every word, and to let the  play itself shine.     That said,  I have not seen a better performance of Hamlet on stage or screen.