Shakespeare the everyman: constructions of the Bard in Hamnet
Isabel Soole Sanchez
For as long as Shakespeare has retained relevance, his works have been reinterpreted, with every generation bringing with it new iterations. With new adaptations comes new avenues into the understanding of Shakespeare—ultimately symptomatic of current mood and widespread anxieties. In this manner, Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, itself an interpretation of Hamlet, proposes a radically new manner of thinking about Shakespeare.
Preserving a reverence and thus great distance from the “true” figure of Shakespeare, in their co-written screenplay Zhao and O’Farrell depart from the endlessly revised identity of the playwright through an engagement with the culture’s current tastes. In line with the rise of historical fiction and the biopic craze of recent years, Zhao and O’Farrell make use of the very little information available upon Shakespeare’s life to enact a process of filling in chasmic gaps. Both the novel and film thus become tributes to the power of Shakespeare as a generative force, his work inspiring an imaginative construction of his life.
Early on in the novel, Agnes finds the nameless playwright ‘too big, too complex’ to comprehend. Zhao and O’Farrell are, likewise, utterly transparent about what they’re able to offer to the reservoir of creative and critical engagement with Shakespeare.
O’Farrell, as both a writer and student of literature at Cambridge, possesses an understanding of Shakespeare’s identity as a literary institution within England, and employs this knowledge towards her own ends in a process of constructing the man behind the legacy. By contrast Zhao, by her own admission far less familiar with Shakespeare’s works beyond secondary school teaching, offers a focus upon complicating traditional depictions of womanhood, as with her portrayal of drifter Fern in Nomadland (2020). Zhao also offers a great understanding of the prestige drama and what may find resonance in mass audiences and critics alike, having previously won best director for Nomadland. What makes Zhao so uniquely well-equipped in translating O’Farrell’s work of fiction to screen is precisely how unequipped she seems.
Having not directed any period pieces prior to Hamnet, Zhao’s vision highlights how modern and pertinent O’Farrell’s work truly is. The qualities which ensured its widespread popularity as a novel – its uncompromising efforts to elevate female voices within spaces dominated by men – mirror Zhao’s own position as a female director promoting women’s stories.
In defiance of the male lens which Shakespeare inherently imposes upon his subjects, Zhao and O’Farrell assert the potency of a mother’s love and the domestic space as an influence upon Shakespeare. Shakespeare, notably taciturn in the film adaptation, will become a vessel for the rich emotional landscapes he observes within his family life. As Farrell’s Shakespeare asserts, ‘he will be a husband and a father, and his life will begin’.
In having Agnes be a near-illiterate woman, O’Farrell makes the bold assertion that Shakespeare may be best understood not through a chronicling of his sources, but rather an understanding of how we may all be moved by the people in our lives. Each character in O’Farrell’s novel is in possession of a certain dignity. No matter how diminutive in rank or how marginal their place is in Shakespearean biographies, each is given an interior life, and a voice within the history unfolding before their eyes.
In the same manner, we as viewers are encouraged to adopt the notion that the experiences Shakespeare was drawing on were ultimately ones that we ourselves endure, universal and quotidian. Shakespeare is merely afforded the virtue of an education with which to hone these great imaginative capacities.
In the final scene, Zhao makes her most direct appeal to the viewer through her use of the near-hackneyed ‘On the Nature of Daylight’, signalling an awareness of her audience as consumers of prestige drama. Intended to be as accessible as Shakespeare was to early modern audiences, the film looks to revive the version of Shakespeare introduced in our school days, with references to plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth lending infamous lines a renewed resonance.
In performing ‘To be or not to be’ later in the film, viewers are encouraged to reflect upon how such poignant scenes of motherhood, grief and loss are echoed and articulated in the words of Shakespeare. Zhao grants her viewers entry into the Globe Theatre and into Shakespeare’s works, allowing them to both watch the performance as Agnes does, and marvel with Mescal at her outpouring of emotion. Shakespeare’s works and landscapes would seem to draw, thus, from the immense emotional capacities of common people, incited perpetually through events of loss and new life.
The question remains whether this widely acclaimed film will achieve its desired reappraisal of Shakespeare within public culture, or fade from memory as merely another film observing the formulas of previous award winners – another narrative of grief and suffering set to the same tear-jerking music.
