Hamnet – A universal tragedy

#fiction #movie

Warning: Contains spoilers

Hamnet is a Shakespeare movie, except it is not actually about Shakespeare. Sure, William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) features, but a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another, he is neither its central character nor commands the majority of screentime. According to my local cinema’s blurb, Hamnet concerns ‘the healing power of art and creativity’. That is not untrue insofar as the movie culminates in a performance of Hamlet, which the movie portrays as Shakespeare’s means of processing his son’s death. Yet to interpret the movie by its finale alone seems to me to deny the centrality of Anne ‘Agnes’ Hathaway (played by Jessie Buckley), and her embodiment of the universal grief over the loss of those who die before their time.

Hamnet’s unflinching portrayal of visceral sorrow has ignited a debate among critics on whether the movie emotionally manipulates its audience to the extent that it could be considered ‘grief porn’. This is a surprising argument to me. Objecting that a movie about the death of a child centres grief feels like objecting that a Marvel movie contains superheroes and mediocre CGI. Rather than fault a movie for our discomfort, it is worth considering if it is not our cultural inhibitions around emotions that is to blame.

None of this matters yet at the beginning of Hamnet, when Agnes and William are just falling in love. Each in their own way, they are both outsiders. Like her hawk, Agnes is a forest creature, representative of a fading medieval tradition of herbalism and (witch)craft. Will is an aspiring poet by night, impoverished Latin teacher by day, who, as the audience knows, will become one of the foremost incarnations of the early modern period that is set to eclipse medieval norms and customers. We are witness to a transition where the rooted magic of plants and place will give way to the illusory magic of show and spectacle. And a transition that, it should be noted, was often carried out by violence against people like Agnes who stood accused of witchcraft.

Agnes’ second pregnancy symbolises this traumatic rupture with the Old Ways when she is forcefully denied giving birth in the forest and instead made to deliver at home – though a birthing stool is still more sensible than the methods 'modern’ science would inflict on future generations of women. Compounding Agnes’ distress is the sudden realisation that she is giving birth to twins, despite premonitions that she will be survived by only two children. From that moment, she is quietly convinced that her unexpected second daughter will pass before her time.

For a time though, things are go well for the Shakespeares, although Will is mostly absent from both his family and the screen, building his career as a playwright in faraway London, leaving it to Agnes and William’s extended family to care for their children. Their domestic life is beautifully captured by director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal, conveying a moderate yet not impoverished existence that feels plausible, which reminded me of similar scenes in 2023’s Znachor – despite the latter being set four centuries later.

Yet in the end, misfortune strikes as plague sweeps the land, afflicting first Judith but ultimately killing Hamnet instead. Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes’ grief over Hamnet’s death is raw and visceral, as is her depiction of Agnes’ subsequent bitterness at the absence of her husband, whose sorrow is more restrained and distant. This is where the debate over Hamnet’s emotional interaction with its audience, and its reliance on tropes of feminine and masculine ways of expressing grief comes most to the fore.

It is undeniably true that Hamnet seeks an emotional response from its audience, and that the death of a child is not exactly a subtle way to extract this. Some critics contend that this in and of itself invalidates any appeal the movie might make to our emotions. Viz. the BBC:

But as most of us already know that the death of a child is devastating, they seem more exploitative than insightful.

This is an odd line of argument. Most of us also already know that guns kill people, yet there is no shortage of movies containing copious amounts of gun violence. An entire franchise has been built on the premise that a man going on an intercontinental murderous rampage is a reasonable response to him losing his dog.

Rather than attributing our discomfort to Hamnet’s portrayal of tragedy, I wonder if it does not instead originate with our societal and cultural inhibitions on grief and mourning. The welcome triumphs of modern medicine over a host of lethal ailments are undeniable, but also seem to have engendered a collective need to disavow infirmity, illness and death altogether. Our desire to believe that science now holds the cure for any ailment, possibly driven by capitalist imperatives to forever be productive, means we must banish from sight any signs to the contrary. Hamnet is a timely reminder of our not-so-distant past when death was a more familiar companion.

For while Hamnet’s lure is that we are witnessing a grief that is special, its power lies in showing that it is universal. In the end, I’m not particularly invested in whether Hamlet really was Shakespeare’s way of processing his grief over Hamnet’s death. The movie posits rather than demonstrates the connection, and it makes for a satisfying and moving finale, but the story leading up to that point does not require it. Instead, the most poignant scene for me is a rather understated exchange between Susanna and Shakespeare’s mother Mary (played by Emily Watson), where we learn that she, too, has lost some of her children.

Here is universal, intergenerational sorrow. The silent pain, both individual and collective, over the loss of children taken before their time. Of generations of women dying in childbirth. Of brothers and sisters succumbing to mysterious plagues and diseases, chance infections or simple misfortune. Of family and friends taken by and natural calamity.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin persuasively argues there is an alternative mode of telling our stories and histories: the story of life, of the bag that carries home the food or medicine, the shelter that is home or community. Despite the centrality of death, Hamnet is what Le Guin would call a ‘life story’. A story about grief, and how we heal from it through community (as we saw in Small Acts of Love).

And it is a story about rage. Le Guin’s carrier bag is also a medicine bundle, representing human efforts throughout the ages to heal, to prevent suffering, or to ease pain where no cure was available. Grieving loss can transform into fury against uncaring gods or the vast universe for whom the death of our loved ones pales beyond insignificance, fueling resolve to spare future generations the same fate. Where these efforts are frustrated not by the impersonal obstacles of nature, but by human forces who seek to prevent or even negate our collective capabilities to prevent suffering, rage is surely the justified response.

At its best, Hamnet reminds us that while grief over the passing of those we love is an inseparable part of what it means to be alive, so is the ability to overcome it through connection, community and love. Rather than denying our mortality and its attendant sorrows by hiding its manifold expressions from our view, we must learn how collectively give them space and process them. Yet where our pain results not from blind, impersonal chance, but the choices of those who hold power over us, we must also resolve to do what we can to spare others from the same fate. To adapt the famous last words of Joe Hill: first mourn, but then organise.

Notes & Suggestions

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