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Hamnet : Some Thoughts

 


I recently watched the film Hamnet and I had some thoughts. First, we should recognize that this is a work of fiction. The film was based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Though the big life events are correctly placed (births, deaths, marriage) everything in between those events is speculative. There is very little we know about Shakespeare’s personal life. For example, it has been theorized that Shakespeare did some private tutoring to make ends meet. This is depicted in the film. But we have no direct evidence that he did so. So little is known about his life that people have speculated that the man from Stratford (Shakespeare) did not write the plays and sonnets at all. A variety of other authors have been proposed.

Personally, I believe that the man from Stratford was the playwright. None of his contemporaries ever doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays. There was no theory running around at the time that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else. Those theories came much later, more than 200 years after his death. Well, it is easy to come up with theories that fit some of the facts hundreds of years after everyone involved is dead. It seems more likely to me that what everyone believed in the early 1600’s was in fact the case.

(The Holocaust denial is a similar situation. No one denied the Holocaust in the years just after the war. There were too many witnesses. Too many survivors. Too many Russian or American or British troops that had liberated the camps. There were even guards from the concentration camps who talked. But eighty years after the fact when all the witnesses are dead, it becomes easy to create false narratives and conspiracy theories and pretend the Holocaust never happened.)

But I digress. Hamnet is a work of historical fiction. That means the big picture life events fit what is historically known and everything else (like all the dialogue) is made up. This in itself is no small feat. Coming up with a plot that fits the framework and is still compelling to the reader/viewer is an achievement.

I have not read the novel, so I can only comment on the movie. The first ¾ of the film was a good movie, not a great movie, not a bad movie, just a good movie. The acting is well done. They do a nice job of transporting the viewers to that time and place. The pace of the film is maybe a bit slow, but not annoyingly so.  But the final scene of the movie redeems all. Jessie Buckley playing Shakespeare’s wife Agnes is confused at first watching the play Hamlet, but soon finds what Shakespeare is trying to say. She pulls us into her world and we understand what she is feeling.  The final scene is so beautiful and entrancing that it makes the whole film worth seeing. And I can only say that Jessie Buckley is well deserving of her Academy Award.

Star Liner

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