I have seen a plethora of commentaries on Hamnet that boil down to one belief: The film is made up and therefore a film they can dismiss. While much of William Shakespeare’s life is actually “unknown,” I do believe that Shakespeare himself would love that a novel about his life was something of fanfic. And my thesis is based in facts!
William Shakespeare is known for distinctly different kinds of fiction. He has his tragedies, his comedies, and his histories. There are other bits of Shakespeare’s work but for the purpose of this argument, we’ll focus on these three. Obviously both the tragedies and the comedies are works of fiction created by Shakespeare but I also hate to break it to you that his history are also fiction. Much like Hamnet.
In a lot of ways, Shakespeare was kind of the kind of fanfiction. While we wouldn’t really understand what fanfic was until the 1900s (it is largely attributed to the Star Trek fandom), Shakespeare’s work is narrative fiction and therefore, his own brand of fanfic.
The plays of the Henrys and the power of the Richards are rooted in history but they’re not word for word what happened to these men. That brings a layer of fiction to Shakespeare’s histories and therefore is, in his own way, doing what Hamnet does.
Growing up as a young theatre student, we’re taught things about Shakespeare. He’d often leave his family for London, there were rumors about his affairs, and there is also the lore that says Shakespeare never existed or that he was just a “figure” for the works of other playwrights. Nothing is really sacred about the playwright but one thing is clear to me: He’d love that Hamnet exists.
Hamnet really feels like a Shakespeare history
Agnes (Jessie Buckley) meets a man (Paul Mescal) when she is young. The two fall in love, start a family with each other, and share their love of life together. Through most the film, we do not hear the name William Shakespeare. But we do get to see hints of his work through Mescal’s performance and it all leads to Agnes and her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) going to London to see a play.
It takes place after the death of their son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). And the name Hamnet and Hamlet are connected and the idea is that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while processing his own grief over his son. This is something I learned in school. And so all Hamnet does is allow us to see Agnes’ grief and how she would respond to Shakespeare’s exploration of his own pain.
If anyone was going to love that, it’d be Shakespeare himself. The man wrote Coriolanus on the idea of a man who maybe existed that Shakespeare decided was the most chaotic human man of all time. (This comes from me, someone who loves Coriolanus a lot.)
The point is that Shakespeare was not someone who held history to some higher existence when it came to art. He would tell the stories he wished to under the guise of historical fiction and that’s what Hamnet is.
(featured image: Focus Features)
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