Tea and Dragons

In which I take my bathysphere into th’abysm of Hamnet.

Warning: here be spoilers.

I was of seven or eight minds about seeing this flick. The reviews have been ecstatic, not to say hysterical. “Tore my heart out and stomped on it in spike-heeled boots” does not appeal. I don’t like being bullied into pity and terror. Having plunged, I can report that Hamnet goes well beyond tear-jerking all the way to snot-fracking. Even the falcon dies. As the lights went up, a woman kept repeating piteously, “But I just came to see Jessie Buckley.” And indeed, her acting is spectacular, full-on Euripides. If you like it raw, this is one for the statues.

And the movie? A real curate’s egg, well acted, well shot, and ill founded. I have serious problems with the whole conceit, the authenticity, the script—which, given that the novelist Maggie O’Farrell shares writing credit with the director Chloé Zhao, is somewhat troubling. It’s badly worldbuilt.

To begin with, there’s that damned red dress.

Agnes (pronounced “Ann-yes” here) wears it everywhere: to hawk in, to hoe muck, to bloody well give birth in, in an earthy cavern in the woods. In its designer’s stated vision, it’s the color of a scab, the color of menstrual blood. (Can you say, period piece?) My take is, oh my goddesses, right there is a fortune in imported cochineal, a crime against the sumptuary laws, a color for a countess or a cardinal. And she’s wearing this unwashable illegal finery without a smock to keep it clean. Which in Elizabethan mores is unspeakable. She does own a smock, because she wears it when she’s forced to bear her twins indoors, with unwanted women’s aid, instead of in communion with the greenwood-sidey-O.* (In the weirdest error in this movie, the boy pops out without a cord to cut.) Otherwise, she goes about like Mad Maudlin in prigged petticoats, barefoot and bareheaded, with her hair tumbling down her back in elflocks.

That is because she is a “forest witch,” conceived as a sort of noble savage or a woo woo Mary Sue, the only splash of vivid color in a world of dour browns and faded blues.

And yes, I get it, I get the strong desire to let the radical woman be powerful, the (oddly Copernican) center of this world. I would applaud it in another story. But this is also Hamlet's story, a creation myth. Couldn’t they have allowed poor Will a bit of inward, answering fire? Let her strike it in him? They might have let him be as good with words as she with mugwort. But no: he scritches with his quill and crumples, howling. He’s even rather inarticulate, poor soul, though he does get to tell her Orpheus and Eurydice: not brilliantly, but still.

It’s a badly-needed moment of Elizabethan-ness. Mostly Hamnet feels oddly like a modern problem play, backdated: a marriage breaks down over the tragic death of a child and the husband’s absence at work. The dialogue is flatly modern. It’s as if these people were strangers to their own world. Getting on for 20 years into their marriage, she doesn’t know what a play IS (did he never talk about his day job?); he calls her falcon a “bird.” This guy is supposedly Shakespeare. He could have talked varvels to her.

Of course, the Thing about Hamnet—the central conceit—is that Shakespeare’s son’s death was his inspiration for Hamlet. This is, to say the least, reductive. It turns Hamlet, in all its complexity and wit and rage and glory, to a form of couples therapy. And it plays hell with the actual timeline of its creation. On all the evidence, Shakespeare spent the years 1596-1600 writing festive comedies and Falstaff. Yet the film shows him living monkishly in London (no lovely boy, no Gwyneth Paltrow), at the point of breaking from his grief and guilt. He wasn’t there for his family, he wasn’t there. It even—oh, good gravy—has him looking down one midnight on the Thames beneath a cloud-wracked moon, about to jump, reciting (or composing?) “To be or not to be.” That’s when I slunk down into my seat and covered my eyes. If they’re not ashamed of that, I am.

What scraps we get to see of Hamlet are severely cherry-picked, distortions and excisions. There is no place here for fratricide, incest, antick madness, or revenge, no room for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, alive or dead. This is not a Hamlet that I long to see in full. Indeed, I don’t see that Zhao had a vision of the living whole in mind: she’s sampling.** What we do get (besides that bathetic soliloquy beside the river) are the bits that O’Farrell can use to back her thesis: “Get thee to a nunnery” (self-loathing); the tettered Ghost, who so far forgets himself as to kiss his son; the duel, to echo Will’s teaching his boy swordplay; Claudius’s murder (daddy issues with John Shakespeare); “the rest is silence.” Hamlet falls far downstage. And Hamnet’s mother, reaching from the yard, takes his dying hand.

You could say, that is all the Hamlet Agnes can see; but all the audience sees it too, in a wave of catharsis rolling backward through the groundlings into the galleries. All reach out. A lovely moment built upon two hours of contrivance.

Well, I didn’t spend quite the whole thing gnashing my teeth.

So what did I like?

The casting of brothers, Jacobi and Noah Jupe as Hamnet and Hamlet.

Anything with the children, who did beautifully. I liked the three little boys chanting Latin to the tutor’s inattentive ears. (But then, I always did like John Aubrey’s note that Shakespeare had been “a schoolmaster in the country.”) I liked Susanna (“witty above her sex,” as her epitaph says) reading Sonnet 12 aloud, as if she’d had it in a letter from her dad. I really liked Hamnet and Judith’s gender-swap, foreshadowing their bed-trick with death. I could believe this as the genesis of Twelfth Night, with its death and resurrection of the brother twin. But no, it had to be Hamlet: tragedy not romance. The three of them—Susanna, Hamnet, Judith—playing at the wyrd sisters was charming if wildly anachronistic.

I liked Emily Watson’s small part as Mary Shakespeare.

I smiled at Shakespeare’s Chandos-portrait earring.

They found a really lovely forest of Arden. Welsh, I think.

That was a convincing Stratford, both in sunshine and pathetically fallacious rain. Indeed, most of the settings were good, though the Globe within was shockingly rough-hewn and unpainted. More of the drab aesthetic: only Agnes is allowed to be a splash of color in the crowd, though by this time, her old red dress has faded to a rustier vermilion. The very few gentry in view wear black. Even the players, the peacocks of the age, are in dreary colors, and Hamlet in what looks like faded denim. And really, there was no reason to have a forest backcloth at Elsinore, except that the Arden icongraphy required it.

I’d be shocked if a prestige piece like this didn’t win Oscars, which is one in the eye for the Oxfordians. Or perhaps, seeing what a tarradidle this makes of Shakespeare’s life, they’ll smirk.

Nine


* Leaning her back against an oak. I wonder if this is a deliberate inversion of the ballad, the Cruel Mother turned Hecuba?

** This will be taught in schools: it matters.