Hamlet and Hamnet

A Clash Of World Views

The latest tour de force from the world of film is Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’ which stars two, much feted Irish actors as everyone must know at this stage. It is of course a work of fiction like the novel of the same name by Maggie O Farrell on which it is based. It recounts the death of Shakespeare’s eleven year old son, Hamnet, and the way it might have impacted his parents and inspired, at least in part, the writing of Shakespeare’s most intriguing work for many, Hamlet.

I went to see this film out of curiosity rather than expecting to be entertained very much or emotionally moved even though the the film is said to be accompanied by sniffles and suppressed sobs and, according to one account. ‘people clinging to each other’ in their seats. It had never occurred to me that there was anything particularly biographical about any of Shakespeare’s plays though the internal musings of Hamlet may well be the author’s own.

I wondered if the film might reveal more explicit connections between Shakespeare’s life and work. It did not. While one can accept the claim that Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable names in the England of the time, it is well known that Shakespeare drew his plots and their titles from older sources. A play called ‘Vita Amlethi’ set in Denmark and a lost play by Thomas Kyd called Ur-Hamlet have long been understood as Shakespeare’s sources for Hamlet which means there are no grounds at all for claiming the name was deliberately chosen for its personal resonance.

Fanciful as this re-contextualising of the play is, the real re-contextualising takes place behind the scenes, so to speak. This work is presented as a feminist tour de force (with its female protagonist, female director and female scriptwriter) against unnamed odds by its makers and promoters. The self-congratulatory hype and gushing accolades were rolling long before the cinema reels. Anything less than hyperbolic praise could leave commentators open to charges of churlish sexism. It’s significant that a play centered around the world’s greatest poet and dramatist manages to push the great man firmly into the shadows. It’s Hamlet without the Prince in a way but the void is filled by the reverberating pain and grief suffered by the putatively gifted wife whom history has consigned to the margins.

The project of this film is the retro-fitting of the past with a plausible, though invented, story, based on the mostly undocumented lives of the Bard’s family circle. Imaginative reconstruction can be defended when it comes to filling the blanks of history but distorting what is already there is more questionable.

However, this work of feminist revisionism and has little concern for incidental accuracy in what it sees as a biased recording of events in the first place. It is strange though that nobody in production bothered much when the text of Shakespeare was mis-matched with what was depicted on set. The contradiction of an actor dressed in powder blue talking about his “ . . inky cloak . . and customary suits of solemn black” managed to make the cut.

However, there is a more fundamental distortion and it goes right to the heart of the film’s artistic and moral vision. The countryside of 16th century Warwickshire as depicted by Shakespeare is evoked very differently by Zhao and O Farrell. It is the difference between a Christian and pagan engagement with nature and its forces.

In Zhao’s film, nature is a force to be coaxed into giving up its secrets, whether medicinal or magical. Agnes wanders the woods crushing herbs and roots into lotions and tinctures. She uses soft invocations which carry the same cadence as the witches’ incantations in Macbeth. What is celebrated in the natural world is the gift of women like Agnes to draw nature’s power to themselves and use it, in her case at least, to heal. Yes, Shakespeare does celebrate the power of plants, for good and ill, in Friar Laurence’s early morning ruminations in the garden in Romeo and Juliet, but the tone is one of awe and reverence. He also draws insights about human nature and behaviour from his observations as he fills his basket.

Throughout Shakespeare, the beauty of creation evokes a kind of mystic wonder that intuits a creator. We encounter it time and time again even in contexts where the mind is very preoccupied with other things. In Scene 1 of Hamlet, just as the Ghost departs, Horatio gives us a memorable personification of dawn, ‘ . . . but look, the morn in russet mantle clad walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.. . . ‘ When Shakespeare’s characters speak of nature it is with awe and joy and a sense of our littleness and fragility, not our power. The abundance and glory of nature has a power to startle, delight and humble and that is missing from this film. It is significant too that it is only from his virtuous characters, as critics have observed, that we hear such tributes to the beauty of the natural world.

Shakespeare’s resonant phrases and passages about familiar plants and flowers can linger in memory even after the play’s plot is forgotten. Perdita’s evocation of Spring in A Winter’s Tale where she speaks of ‘ . . . daffodils that come before the swallow dares and take the winds of March with beauty’ comes to mind. So does Oberon’s evocation of the the mildly intoxicating languor of summer, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grow, quite o’er canopied with luscious woodbine with sweet musk roses and with eglantine’. Yes, it paints a scene for a woodland encounter at a time with props and visual effects hadto be conjured out of words but it does more; it stirs reverence and wonder at the simplest and purest things in creation. It’s as if the breath of God’s creative love stirs in the fragrance of flowers. A Midsummer Night’s Dream goes on to describe the poet’s art as ‘(giving) to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. What the poet does with words, God does in his creation. Shakespeare’s memorable personifications of nature are of a tone with what we find in the Psalms and in the way mystics from Daniel to St Patrick to Francis of Assisi write of nature. In one respect they are different from Shakespeare in that they make the connection between creator and creation explicit. However, they all share a tone of awe and reverence, often through the literary device of personification, which is markedly absent from Hamnet.

Shakespeare’s treatment of nature is of a piece with his moral vision. His work can be mined for many things but faith in all its varied expressions, direct and implied, taken for granted or wrestled with, is embedded in both the script of his work and the society in which he lived. It is nowhere to be found in Hamnet. Its artistic horizons like its moral vision are shaped by contemporary, secular feminism. Only in Shakespeare’s witches, described in Macbeth as ‘instruments of darkness’, does this film find an echo in Shakespeare. Like Agnes, Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ seek to draw power from plants and animals and use that power to control nature’s own forces but with markedly limited success in both instances. Most importantly, the relationship of the witches to nature is not presented as positive but as dark and destructive.

Not surprisingly, Jessie Buckley who played Agnes spoke of Shakespeare’s ‘strong women’. She mentioned Lady Macbeth as one example. Shakespeare would have been surprised. Lady Macbeth is strong for a while in pushing against moral restraints unlike her husband whose conscience revolts from the start. Later when her deeds and his show themselves in their true hue she collapses mentally. Her husband does not but faces the consequences of his crime with resolution though without honour.

By Jessie Buckley’s measure, the evil sisters in King Lear could also be said to be ‘strong women’. Driven by ambition and lust, they betray their father and dominate their husbands. They get their way until their deeds recoil on them. By contrast, their seemingly meek sister, Cordelia, who chooses truth before flattery, even though it costs her her father’s love for a time, represents Shakespeare’s idea of feminine strength. To further enforce the point, Lear tells his now reconciled daughter, Cordelia, that her mother’s voice was gentle and low, “an excellent thing in women”. Shakespeare’s depiction of Katherine in ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ shows he does not equate strength of character with assertive and forceful personality. Moral firmness and integrity are what make character for Shakespeare, irrespective of gender.

In one respect at least Hamnet may be said to conform to Shakespeare’s own artistic vision, if Hamlet’s speech to a troupe of actors can be presumed to convey the author’s own thoughts. In the advice Hamlet gives ‘the players’, he tells them their task is ‘. . . to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. The form and pressure of our culture is very evident in ‘Hamnet’. In its treatment of the natural world in particular we have a pointed comparison with the Bard’s own work. It shows how starkly the spirit of our age differs from his.