Some thoughts on Hamnet

1. This feminist approach to Shakespeare’s life tells us nothing about the real Anne Hathaway but freshly reminds us of the playwright’s importance. This Hathaway has no apparent effect on his work — nor even an understanding of it. Her first — and climactic — experience of theatre — she’s unfamiliar with even the basics of casting and roles —  reminds us that he’s the first modern dramatist. Indeed, Harold Bloom says Shakespeare invented human nature by imagining humans as we know them, defined by thought, word and action, of an unprecedented complexity and resonance.
2. This film’s feminism lies in the rich characterization invented for Anne — or Agnes here. Names, indeed words in general, were at the time fluid in spelling and meaning. Anne/Agnes parallels Hamlet/Hamnet. Indeed there were even a dozen ways to spell Shakespeare. (Don’t know how many for Will.) This Agnes is totally invented as a pagan spirit — daughter of a witch, learned in herbs, determined to pop her children in the wilds. She commands a hawk. This character places Shakespeare at the turning point from the primitive to the modern. He is sensitive to both pagan and modern. So while he lives in a humble London garret he moves his family from their primitive cottage to “the largest house in Stratford” (It actually was only the second largest. But enough about unreal estate). When the twins are born the son seems lifeless till Agnes brings him to life — as Will will onstage, to her profound growth from affront to joy. 
3. Anne’s world is coarse, wild, dirty. She has a one-colour wardrobe, dirty nails (like, shrewdly, the whole cast. But alas, her teeth are too good for the period). Where Will will find his expression and insight in words she pours out screams. This marriage makes Shakespeare the pivot from the old coarse world to the modern. His genius lies in apprehending and appreciating the primitive while advancing beyond it. He recognizes and adopts her wild energy.
4. The real Agnes (preggers) married 18-year-old Will when she was 26. The film shrinks that gap romantically. In our world she might have babysat him. (I made 15 cents an hour.) She could have been the most inspiring sitter before Paul Anka’s Diana — but Shakespeare never wrote about her. We’re not even sure he wrote poems to her. Indeed he abandoned his family to create in London. Absented himself from that felicity, a wile, one might say. Only to return to it in grief. 
5. Of course, the entire film can be wound out of the opening shot. The camera pans down what appear to be two dark, thin but real trees — one straight and pure, the other bent, gnarled, kinky. They’re revealed to be branches off the same trunk, which at the bottom reveals even more churning, wild roots. This living organism might be read as a variety of binaries. Art/nature. Drama/life. Male/female. Old/new. Pure/impure. Energetic/calm. Wild/tamed. Active/passive. In some those binaries might be reversed: the straight limb could be either the male or the female. Nature might better be the twisted wild branch, art the straight. Or vice versa. The real tree at the beginning is matched by the backdrop of equally thin but regular painted trees on stage at the end. This art is the flattening of that life. That replays all the binaries from the beginning, but flattened and false. Also, alien to the court setting of the scene.
6. Anent the looseness of spelling and language — this Hamlet yearns to melt his “solid” flesh. Ok. An alternative text spells it “sullied,” making for a richer reading. For the “solid” is already incipient in the “melt.” “Sullied” adds Hamlet’s recoil from his physical being (“or not to be”). 
7. The production we see omits the play’s real ending — the stabilizing invasion by Fortinbras (“strong in arms”). With the focus on Agnes discovering how theatre can address, enrich, even discover her own life, Fortinbras is unimportant. The film prefers to close on the audience joining her emotional union with the actor.  
8. There are two problems with the assumption that the play Hamlet grew out of Shakespeare’s intense loss of his same-name son. The association is tempting not just because of the names but from Shakespeare’s examination of grief, the responsibilities that bind father and son, even beyond the grave, and that old “To be or not to” dilemma. In the revenge theme Shakespeare may rather have drawn from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy than from his own emotional condition.
9. The second issue may invite fuller consideration. Unlike the film’s direct turn from the life tragedy to Hamlet, between his son’s death (1596) and that play (1600) Shakespeare churned out The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597), Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 (1597–1598), Much Ado About Nothing (1598–1599), Henry V (1598–1599), Julius Caesar (1599–1600), As You Like It (1599–1600) and Twelfth Night (1599–1600). Maybe there’s a PhD. thesis awaiting someone’s development of the son’s loss through that sequence.
10. So are novelist Maggie O’Farrell and director Chloe Zhao to be faulted for imposing this feminist testament on our Will? Not at all. Novelists and directors are entitled to their own poetic licence. But more important: Shakespeare earned that respect. Here is a respectful acknowledgment of his unprecedented representation of rich, complex women in his world, in his plays. Though played by boys his women are realistic glories. His Cleopatra dwarfs both Antony and Caesar. Juliet dims Romeo. Indeed, Coriolanus’s mother may well be the tragic “hero” of his play. Desdemona is Othello’s equal as his “fair warrior” as Macbeth’s Lady is his. Portia’s power and intelligence make her the moral — and suspect — counterpoint to Shylock more than the titular Antonio is. The feminist center in this fantasy of a bio is justified by even this modernity already established in the Shakespeare canon. It’s just another way that Shakespeare is — as Jan Kott put it — our contemporary.