My girlfriend took me on a cruise to celebrate a milestone birthday last year, and as someone who loves to read, I took some novels along with me. Only one of them went unread during that trip: Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. Now, I am a Shakespeare guy, so I knew I would get to it eventually, and that did happen over the summer. The novel is, despite the title, arguably more about Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, or Agnes as she is referred to in the book. Interestingly, Shakespeare himself is never mentioned by name during the entire course of the novel as the book seems to assume the reader knows who the man referred to as “the Latin tutor,” “the husband,” and “the father” is. Instead, the book tracks what happens when tragedy strikes the family and the effect this dark turn had on both of the parents and their marriage. Not much is known about Shakespeare himself, and the Bard of Avon’s wife and children are even bigger question marks with only a handful of facts in the form of legal documents had for each of them.
It’s actually a damn good book, but now there’s a movie directed by Chloe Zhao with a screenplay co-written by O’Farrell.
Agnes (Jessie Buckley) is the, let’s say, unorthodox daughter of a local farmer, her parents both dead and her stepmother hardly the sort that approves of pretty much anything Agnes does as she is essentially a “wise woman” type of person, someone with some mild psychic abilities and a knack for mixing plants and herbs to make medicines. One day, Agnes’s half-brothers’ Latin tutor (Paul Mescal, whose character is referred to by name exactly once and listed in the closing credits as “Will) spots her and falls for this mysterious woman whom he knows nothing about. Considering Agnes’s reputation around Stratford-upon-Avon, that is a good thing as he finds himself in love with the woman based on who she is and not what everyone thinks she should be. The feelings are reciprocated, and the two marry and have three children: older daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). Small Town life with his abusive father is no good for an aspiring writer, so Agnes arranged for him to go off to London while she stays in Stratford, Judith’s poor health being something that she feels would never work out in London.
However, tragedy strikes the young family, one where Agnes’s medicinal skills come up wanting while the father is away with his acting troupe. The father arrives home too late even if there was nothing he could have done, and Agnes withdraws herself in misery, both parents wondering where things went wrong. Despite the passion and love the two shared before the tragedy, there is a sense that what happened may shatter their marriage beyond repair. Essentially, Hamnet is the story of a marriage, one built by a shared love for each other, and what happens when one of life’s ugliest possible moments creeps in and perhaps sends that marriage to a point of no return.
I’m being very circumspect here. I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare’s work and a lot about the man himself, so I don’t know how much of the fate of the family is common knowledge. But let me say this: this movie was beautiful. It moves at much the same pace as O’Farrell’s novel, and both Buckley and Mescal knock it out of the park with their respective performances. Shakespeare enthusiasts will pick out more than a few of the Bard’s lines in the course of the narrative, and if the screenplay does remove some elements from the book’s narrative, such as giving Agnes’s full-brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) a smaller role, it comes with the benefit of showing more of Will’s reaction to events when Agnes is not around. The novel really is more Agnes’s story than anything else.
What follows is a meditation on the role that the arts and nature might play on healing, and the movie ends with the opening performance of Hamlet, a play that shares a name with Shakespeare’s son as explained by text at the beginning of the movie. Heck, the casting is rather smart where the actor in the play portraying Hamlet is Jacobi Jupe’s older brother Noah. Agnes is a woman of nature and the wild places while Will is a man of the city and the written word. These are two people who shouldn’t possibly be anything of a couple, and yet, as presented here, they are. It’s a story where William Shakespeare is just a man whose life takes a hard turn and Agnes is more than a footnote in history. It’s a story about marriage and how marriages survive. It’s something that gave me a bit of a good cry. It may be the best of the year. We’ll have to see what comes out in the next few weeks.
Grade: A
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