Strongly Felt Opinions on Stuff That Doesn’t Matter
By 
Hello everyone! We are still in the midst of our annual fundraiser. One reason to support LGM is that it is among the last remaining vestiges of the old blogosphere, on an internet currently dominated by walled gardens, toxic social networks, algorithmically selected content, and (just around the corner) AI slop. So I thought I’d remind us all of what made blogs so great: the ability to bore thousands hundreds dozens of people with your insistent views on a matter that nobody but you cares about.
Case in point: last week I read Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, and then watched the movie based on it. Directed by Chloé Zhao, the film was considered a major awards contender going into this year’s Oscar season, but its star faded a bit by the time the nominations were announced, and in the end it had to content itself merely (“merely”) with a best actress win for star Jessie Buckley. Hamnet, in case you haven’t heard, is a fictionalization of the life of Anne (here called Agnes) Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare. The book/film depict her courtship and marriage to a teenage Shakespeare, the birth of their children, the separation of their lives when he moves to London and becomes a successful playwright and theatrical impresario, and the crisis they undergo in the wake of the death of their son, Hamnet.
Overall, I’d say Hamnet is a good book and a somewhat less good movie. The basic conceit—that Shakespeare’s wife was a person in her own right, with an inner life that was just as rich and complex as his—is interesting and well-handled, and the story does a good job of portraying Agnes and Will as very different people, with different perspectives and approaches, without insisting that either of their worldviews is better or more correct. The depiction of Shakespeare as a loving husband and father who nevertheless lives a different—intellectual, but also romantic—life when he’s away from his family also manages to convincingly argue that both aspects of his life are important to him and necessary to his happiness. (To be clear, most of my praise here belongs to the book; the film, though well made, flattens much of the nuanced depiction of the characters and their relationship, and I might have liked it less if I’d watched it without reading the book first.)
What I want to talk about, however, is the story’s final act. After Hamnet’s death, Agnes and Will drift apart. He buries himself in his work while she retreats into herself, a state she’s only shaken out of when she learns that her husband has named his latest play after their son (one of the conceits of this story—noted in the novel’s epigraph and reproduced in the movie’s opening title card—is that Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable names in 16th century England; I have no idea whether this is true). Traveling to London, Agnes attends a staging of Hamlet, where she’s initially disgusted by this glimpse of her husband’s creativity, seeing in it no connection to their lives and their shared grief. But when the young actor playing Hamlet appears on stage (Will plays the ghost of Hamlet Sr.), she has a different realization.
It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.
And look, I get why this is a tempting interpretation. Shakespeare was one of the greatest poets in the English language, who not only wrote movingly about a vast range of human experience, but invented a non-trivial chunk of the language we use to talk about those experiences to this day. It is inconceivable that he could have experienced one of the worst tragedies a person can endure without allowing it to impact on his writing in any way. The explanation people used to default to—”well, children died so often back then that parents just didn’t react to the death of a child the way parents today would”—increasingly seems reductive and dehumanizing. Add to that the similarity between Hamnet and Hamlet, and O’Farrell’s interpretation—which she states as fact in the book’s end notes, and has apparently repeated as fact in public appearances—starts to take on a certain logic. In the wake of the book and film’s success, it will probably turn into something everyone just knows is true.
And in the face of that last fact, I must stand up and say: no, that’s absolute nonsense. For one thing, Hamlet is based on a series of older revenge stories, some of them Scandinavian in origin, about a prince who must avenge the death of his father at the hands of his uncle. One of those stories is called “Life of Amleth” (if that name sounds familiar, you may be recalling the main character of The Northman, which is based on the same sources). Which explanation makes more sense: that Shakespeare took an existing character name and changed it a bit to sound more English, or that he named a character after his son but also changed the name so that it sounds completely different?
More importantly, did anyone involved in Hamnet actually watch Hamlet? Well, probably they did, because both book and play curtail the story dramatically—it basically goes from Hamlet speaking to his father’s ghost to Hamlet dying, with nothing in between—in order to avoid all the ways in which the play is far from a loving tribute from a father to a son. Did you enjoy the bit where your dead son’s expy murdered a helpless old man, Agnes? How about the bit where he spurned his lover and drove her to madness and suicide? Or when he played a nasty prank on his former schoolfriends and sent them to their own execution? The idea that one would memorialize a beloved child by imagining the adult version of them as someone who is tortured by indecision, and whose inability to commit to a course of action dooms everyone in their orbit (and also themselves) to a horrible death, is far more dehumanizing, in my opinion, than the theory that Shakespeare didn’t have strong feelings about his son’s death. It’s particularly disappointing at the end of a story that is precisely about imagining historical figures as familiar, comprehensible humans. I get that O’Farrell needed a strong ending to her story, but this just threw me completely out of it.
And that, my friends, was how you relentlessly grind away at a topic that no reasonable person could possibly care about. Where else are you going to get that sort of content? No algorithm is going to float this sort of thing to the top of your feed, I can tell you that. If you’d like to maintain one of the last places on the internet where such content is produced, please consider donating to support LGM. This year’s silent auction also includes the option to bid on a review by yours truly on a subject of your choice, and maybe if you’re lucky you will pick something that will inspire me to rant for five or six paragraphs on something objectively meaningless.