Leaving the cinema last week after watching Hamnet, my mum turned to me, both of us looking through foggy tears, and said, ‘Now you must teach me what Hamlet is all about.’
For context, whilst studying for my A-Levels, I fell in love with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and would constantly try to get my mother (who is both Greek and dyslexic) to watch recordings of it with me, and read her soliloquies. Inevitably, to no avail.When, upon leaving our local Everyman, she said those sun-parting words, I knew Connell’s chain wasn’t the only thing I had to thank Paul Mescal for.
As a Literature student, Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet brought to life the exact romanticisation of Shakespeare’s creative process in writing Hamlet that I envisioned. Mescal’s Shakespeare stands on a cliffside, in a state of raw grief, proclaiming ‘To be or not to be’—implying that this was the moment of inspiration for arguably the most quoted line in theatre.
It must be the simultaneous history nerd and fangirl in me who felt right at home watching such a vivid interpretation of the famous figure, who, in reality, we know very little about.
Films about literature arguably attract a whole new audience. But also draws attention to the human behind the writer. Shakespeare, especially, being someone who has so often been spun into an almost larger-than-life name.
Maggie O’Farrell (the author of the novel Hamnet) herself expressed the weight of fictionalising such a literary great, grappling with this by subtly anonymising Shakespeare’s character, almost deeming his historical prominence insignificant to this intense story of family grief and loss.
Even in much of the movie adaptation, Shakespeare’s artistry merely acts as context for his absence from Agnes and the family. Thus, whilst many may flinch at Shakespeare’s name, after memories of being force-fed confusing lines of iambic pentameter in secondary school, movies like Zhao’s remove the stigma of Shakespeare as the puppeteer of a nightmare literature exam, instead, reshaping him, and other older playwrights, into real people, writing from a very real place.
Regardless of whether this is exactly how Shakespeare’s life played out, is irrelevant, as the raw emotion of what became Hamlet is the sentiment etched into the bones of this adaptation.
Illustration via Izzy McBroom @IzzyMcBart for The Student