“Enter Anne:” Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet on film

One of the many pleasures of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet is its depiction of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway. Far from the conventional portrait of an older woman who entraps young Will with an unwanted pregnancy, or whose bed is described as “cold” in Shakespeare in Love, or the bitter and scolding spouse played by Judi Dench in Kenneth Branagh’s film All Is True, O’Farrell’s “Agnes” (the name Hathaway’s father called her in his will) emerges as not just a loving wife and mother, but as a passionate woman with powerful gifts that rival those of her husband—and are equally inexplicable. Agnes is not just the partner Shakespeare loves but the one he deserves, the one who inspires the women and relationships in all his plays.

Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Hamnet necessarily simplifies the richness and nuance of the novel, but Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes is the fiercest and most fully-rounded onscreen portrait of Shakespeare’s wife ever seen. First discovered lying on the forest floor—“nesting amongst [the] massive roots” of “an ancient tree,” according to the screenplay Zhao co-wrote with O’Farrell—Agnes is introduced as a healer and creature of the earth rumored to be “the child of a forest witch.” Indeed, she has the power to foresee certain aspects of the future, especially when she touches the skin between a person’s thumb and forefinger. She confesses to Shakespeare that when she touched his hand, she saw “a landscape…spaces, caves, cliff tops, tunnels, oceans, undiscovered countries…rises and falls…and…voids…I couldn’t see it all…I couldn’t grasp. The edge of you.” At that moment, all she knows of Will is that he’s the son of a struggling glover who’s teaching Latin to pay off his father’s debts, so she’s intrigued by the worlds contained within him.

And for sure, in the physical form of Paul Mescal, Shakespeare offers a lot to be intrigued by. He’s introduced after Agnes, standing framed in the windows of an upstairs room listening to his students repeat a Latin phrase over and over; a man of letters caged by circumstance to whom the rebellious Agnes offers escape. The hawk he sees circling overhead—it belongs to Agnes but he doesn’t know it yet—symbolizes the yearning Will feels, a desire expressed by the Latin words the students are at that moment memorizing: “I must essay a path whereby I, too, may rise from earth and fly victorious on the lips of men.” (This English translation doesn’t appear onscreen, unfortunately). That his words will end up flying from the lips of actors for centuries seems an unlikely dream for Will, trapped as he is in his drunken and violent father’s glove-making business, but Agnes senses his greatness and desires it as a complement to her own. “He loves me for what I am,” she tells her brother, “not what I ought to be,” and she returns that acceptance and love. She sees him and, more importantly, they see each other.

Buckley and Mescal make an attractive and compelling couple, and their early scenes together tremble with the promise of young love. They soon have children—Susannah, followed by the twins Judith and Hamnet—and their charming scenes of family playfulness are incredibly moving, foreshadowing young Will’s talent for writing joyful comedies.

But when tragedy strikes, the film shifts its focus away from Agnes onto Will in a way the novel never does. It’s hard not to get carried away by Mescal’s star power, of course, but Will threatens to run away with the movie in its second half. (This shift might be intentional, as the screenplay introduces Will before we see Agnes, but in the final edit, Zhao shows us Agnes first.) O’Farrell never identifies Shakespeare by name in her novel, instead defining him by his relationships to others, but her screenplay with Zhao not only identifies him as “Will,” but mentions his full name in dialogue near the end (a revelation that apparently came as a surprise to at least one critic). The film also loses some of the novel’s narrative momentum in the climax when Agnes journeys for the first time to London from the safety of her home in Stratford. The novel has the suspenseful race-to-the-finish energy of a modern rom-com, whereas in the film, she’s just suddenly…there. Zhao chooses to focus instead on Agnes entering the Globe playhouse and seeing, as Zhao explains on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, that Will has designed the scenery to be a “tribute to the world Agnes showed him.” Agnes discovers that Will’s life in London is inspired by their life together in Stratford, including the death of their son.

O’Farrell’s novel, subtitled A Novel of the Plague, was published in March of 2020, just as the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is either a grim coincidence or brilliant timing. She says in her author’s note that she was moved to write Hamnet in part by the fact that Shakespeare never mentions “the Black Death or ‘pestilence’…in any of his plays or poetry.” As I observed in 2021 (after 18 months of isolation), however, Shakespeare uses the word ‘plague’ over a hundred times, and the bubonic plague informs his entire body of work in innumerable ways we’re only now—after our own experience of global pestilence—in a position to fully appreciate. Shakespeare didn’t write a single plague play, he wrote dozens of them.

The film, however, isn’t being sold that way. Katherine Scheil, author of Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway and co-editor of the upcoming Palgrave Handbook of Shakespearean Biofiction, pointed out on my Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast that the film’s promotional trailer calls Hamnet “the untold love story that inspired Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece,” a claim the film can’t possibly deliver on. Did Agnes and Will’s relationship, and the death of their son, inform Hamlet? Of course it did, just as everything in Shakespeare’s life informed hundreds of moments in all his plays, large and small. But the idea that Hamnet’s death was the sole inspiration for Hamlet—a story that was already a play by 1596, written by someone else—is ridiculous, a simplistic notion akin to Laurence Olivier’s contention that Hamlet is “the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” Such reduction plays far better as comedy.

O’Farrell’s great insight is her reminder that there are of course two Hamlets in Shakespeare’s tragedy: the melancholy Danish prince and his dead father. O’Farrell shows us Agnes’s realization that, by writing and playing the ghost of King Hamlet himself, Will was able to channel his grief and make, in Agnes’s words, his “son’s death his own.” And Will immortalizes his dead son through Hamlet’s “gentle curiosity about life” and “his bravery to face the void.” The film quite successfully dramatizes the novel’s great truth that Shakespeare’s art has the same healing power as Agnes’s herbs and potions.

It’s unfair to have expected Hamnet to be the definitive biofictional film treatment of Anne that Shakespeare in Love was for Will; it has a different kind of power than O’Farrell’s novel. The novel centers Agnes/Anne, refusing to sideline her in favor of her more famous husband, and for much of the film—thanks to Jessie Buckley’s extraordinary performance—the movie does the same. Hamnet, like its source material, is a beautiful and moving story of grief, loss, and the cathartic power of art.