There are now three exceptional pieces of dramatic and literary art centring on the father-son relationships in the life and work of English dramatist William Shakepeare.
Historians of England anchor epochs in the country’s history to the names of monarchs. Shakespeare worked as an actor and dramatist in London, entertaining the court of Elizabeth 1. His most widely known tragedy, and perhaps the most famous play in English, is Hamlet (1602), a revenge drama notable for the high body count in the final scene, comparable to the ultra-kill last scene of L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997).
The play’s the thing that excites a novel and a film into existence.
A novel focusses on the earth-mother character of Agnes, who marries Shakespeare and with whom she has children, including a son called Hamnet (novel, Maggie O’ Farrell, Tinder Press, 2020). This boy is the character that O’Farrell uses to drive the plot towards a final sequence where the ‘play within the novel’ device is used to tantalise the reader with an earnest of opposition to death.
A film Hamnet (Chloe Zhao, 2025) takes the novel and creates a visual and aural wonder, on a semi-dark palette of autumn and forest colours, with intimate speech sounds, whisperings and murmurings, birthing roars and screeches, in forest and bedroom, and the whistling calls of falcons, as they hunt.
The boy walks into darkness at the end. The mother laughs.
Tragedy is defeated, in the only way it can be. By laughing, full-throated, in its heartless face.
Shakespeare worked in a time of torrid upheaval, in a country where adventurers and war-makers plundered great wealth and brought it to the Court and the city in London. Much like America today. Hollywood now, London then: that’s where money accumulated and circulated.
Shakespeare yearned to be among it.
Frustrated by his brutal father and his fruitful marriage, he did what many men have done since, right up to today: he protested the importance of his work and abandoned home for London, with the line, present in both the novel and the film,
my company needs me.
These were occluded times. Agnes will not take her children to London, for fear of pestilence. But it finds her and the young ones. She says of Shakespeare that he has more in his head than any man she knows. Agnes is a sorcerer of herbs from garden and forest for conjuring medicines, with much in her head and in her heart.
Riches flow from the contents of Shakespeare’s head, conjured into dramas that delight the Court and the public so much that he can buy a big house and land in Stratford, but cannot move back there.
There is tragedy enough in this, but death, the ultimate tragedy, stalks them. It kills the boy at home and forces a formidable play from his father. Shakespeare writes and produces Hamlet, wherein the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, he told Agnes earlier, is overturned, when the boy does looks back to his mother, who smiles and lets him go.
In Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Chloe Zhao directs two physically strong and charismatic young Irish actors in exhilarating roles. They are present and convincing. Buckley has received both the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globes awards. Oscar nominations are likely. Supporting actors are strong, especially Emily Watson, re-united with Mescal after their stirring work together in God’s Creatures.
A play within a play; a play within a novel; a play and a novel within a film.
A child within a womb; a child within a grave.
We may not cheat death, but we may salve life and its pains. By art.
Hamlet, play: recommended
Hamnet, novel: recommended.
Hamnet, film: recommended.
See also READING HAMNET (2022)
https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2022/10/reading-hamnet-thats-n-not-l.html
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