Focus on Indie Women Filmmakers

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What would it have been like to stand among the first audiences of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Rough-clothed shoulder to rough-clothed shoulder, muscles swollen from a hard day’s work, a stink of garlic and beer in the air – yet, from on stage, those words of madness, of the futility in grief, quietly tethering heart to heart, stranger to stranger? At least five major outbreaks of the bubonic plague struck London within Shakespeare’s lifetime. It’s hard to imagine who in his audiences would not have been touched by some untimely loss of life.

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s largely speculative novel about the play’s conception, builds to an immaculate depiction of one of its first performances. We see only a handful of its scenes performed. Still, you feel the full force of its impact, like an enormous, shuddering release of long-held breath.

What we know is that Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, lost their only son Hamnet to unknown causes in 1596. Names, at the time, were more fluid. Anne was often recorded as Agnes. Hamnet was often written as Hamlet. O’Farrell’s book, and in turn Zhao’s film, which she co-wrote with the author, view Hamlet then as an act of collective catharsis. Shakespeare is played by Paul Mescal, Agnes by Jessie Buckley, Hamnet by Jacobi Jupe, and Hamlet (pointedly) by his older brother, Noah Jupe.-Independent UK