Hamnet is quite brilliant in its examination of both art and grief. We see the difficult and grief-filled life of William and Agnes Shakespeare as the playwright struggles to start his career. And the acting is excellent. But viewers must sit through scenes featuring misery, sensuality, mysticism and a child’s death.
William and Agnes are from very different walks of life. And neither of their families are pleased by their proposed union.
Will is, after all, an overeducated nobody who wants to be a playwright, of all things. Which means he has no financial expectations in any quarter. Agnes, on the other hand, is a woman whispered about in quiet tones; not because of impropriety, but because she’s rumored to be the free-spirited daughter of a forest witch.
But when Will first spots Agnes—walking out of the forest, her skirts crumpled and tussled, leaves in her hair, a hawk on her arm—he knows he must meet this enchantress. Will fumbles his introduction and butchers his banter. (He never was very good with words he didn’t write out on paper.) But he and Agnes somehow make a connection. And love blossoms.
Now a baby is coming, so further objections to their marriage are pushed aside.
However, this adoring couple lives in the mid-1500s, a time filled with far more dangerous things than troubled courtships or family squabbles. This is a time when day-to-day life is a tedious, dirt-encrusted battle for lodging and food. It’s a time when childbirth is an edge-of-life-and-death agony. It’s an age when seeking a career with a pen requires absence from home and distant journeys. And this is an era when plague sweeps in with its boils and pustules and gruesome death.
All of this and more will tug and pull at Agnes and William Shakespeare. And these miseries will shape all that they feel, all they strive for, all they produce. Will it be enough to tear their love asunder or drive them to madness? Will it cause them to wrestle with the value of living over dying?
Ah, that is the question.
It’s clear that Agnes and Will love one another and their family. They are pulled apart and driven to anger and grief because of the difficulties they find themselves in. But they stay connected. For instance, Will becomes inebriated and distraught at one point. And Agnes asks, “Is it because you wish we had never wed?” Will instantly replies, “You’re all I live for.”
There is a point when Agnes believes that Will has turned to things of fame, disassociating himself from his family’s grief. But she sees the truth when she watches his play and spots so much of their lives woven within it. The stage performance of Hamlet becomes a therapeutically healing moment for both Agnes and Will.
We see the rifts between Agnes and Will’s families. But Agnes’ brother, Bartholomew, is a constant support to her. The movie also artfully displays how Will and Agnes’ son, Hamnet, valiantly tries to live up to his father’s charge to protect the family—even going so far as to offer his life in exchange for his sister’s.
Agnes is portrayed as an unconventional woman with a mysterious, “witchy” reputation. We hear that her mother simply appeared one day out of the forest. And before her death, the woman taught Agnes about creating healing balms and connecting to nature.
That mystic element is woven throughout the story. Agnes creates potions and poultices for the sick. She sleeps in the forest and goes there alone to give birth to her child. Agnes also claims to be able to “read” a person with a touch. “The women in my family see things that others don’t,” she tells Will. Agnes has divination dreams filled with signs and portents. (Though they don’t all prove true.)
Agnes gives birth to twins, and her second child appears to be stillborn. “The girl has gone to heaven,” Agnes’ mother-in-law proclaims. But Agnes states that though she goes to the woman’s church, she doesn’t believe like her. Agnes clutches the child and whispers fervently to her daughter until the baby gasps for breath.
Agnes performs a funeral service for her hawk and calls on her children to participate. She looks skyward and wishes the bird a swift and safe journey. The symbol of the soaring hawk appears later in the film, representing spiritual departure.
Hamnet dies, and his death is portrayed through a dual lens of mysticism and stagecraft. Firstly, the boy huddles with his plague-stricken sister and declares that he will trick death into believing he is her. In the morning, Hamnet is deathly ill while his sister, Judith, is recovering. We then see Hamnet’s spirit crossing dramatically through a veil representing life and death. The boy calls out and eventually “exits from stage.”
Will tells Agnes the story of Orpheus (from Greek mythology) descending into the underworld to retrieve his wife after her death. A puppet show depicts people dying and rising toward heaven as angelic figures. A woman who lost children in the past says she believes that God gives and takes away life.
Someone gives gifts at Christmas.
Soon after Agnes and Will meet, he declares that he wants to be “handfasted” (married) with her and she agrees. They flirt and kiss. The two then have sex against a table in a nearby woodshed. They’re both dressed, but Will’s pants slide down his backside as they move and pant. (It can be presumed that either this or another premarital interlude results in Agnes’ pregnancy before marriage.)
We see glimpses of bare leg and stomach through a sheer shift as a very pregnant Agnes gives birth. She also bares cleavage at one point while working in her garden.
Will’s father thumps him upside the head, calling him useless. But that stops after Will slams the man into the wall, declaring his father will abuse him no more.
Agnes has a flashback memory of her mother’s death during childbirth. We see the woman in a bloodstained smock. We watch Agnes go through two very painful births of her own. She cries and pushes through the pain.
Two different children writhe in agony during the death throes of a plague. And the camera glimpses wrapped and stacked corpses of adult victims.
Someone stands at the edge of a precipice and wonders whether or not to end his life. (He does not.)
In a play, characters are poisoned and die in swordfights.
None.
While writing, Will drinks wine, getting drunk in one instance. We see others drink wine at dinners and at a Christmas celebration.
After Hamnet dies, Agnes becomes very angry over the fact that Will wasn’t there because of his theater work in London. She holds the ember of that anger against him for many months.
Director Chloé Zhao skillfully pulls from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet—a book that weaves its fiction from real-world fragments of William Shakespeare’s life—to create a somber and emotional movie narrative.
There’s no denying the craft of this film, but somber is a key word here.
Nearly three-quarters of Zhao’s movie focus on Will and Agnes’s difficult and heartache-laden life together. And eventually, viewers watch the child Hamnet’s plague-induced death. The film then speculates on how all of that hardship and grief may have significantly impacted William Shakespeare’s classic masterpiece, Hamlet.
However, the dramatic brilliance of Hamnet is that we see everything through Agnes’s eyes. And when she watches her husband’s new stage tragedy performed at the movie’s end, we see the effusive scenes through her lens: through her past grief and loss and anger. The stage presentation of Hamlet, a classic known by many, unfolds in fresh and fervently cathartic ways. Therein, the movie becomes a heart-wrenching and poignantly therapeutic examination of grief and art.
Of course, there’s that first three-quarters of the film to contend with—filled with misery, sensuality, “forest witch” mysticism and a child’s emotionally devastating death. So, as Shakespeare might put it: The course does not run smooth.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
