Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal shine in adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway
FILM
Hamnet ★★★★
(M) 126 minutes
Germaine Greer was the first writer to set about rehabilitating the reputation of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway.
Her speculative biography, Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), was an eloquently forthright feminist look at a woman who had been dismissed by several other scholars as an illiterate opportunist who forced the young playwright into a loveless marriage through pregnancy.
Jessie Buckley (left) and Paul Mescal in Hamnet.
Hathaway’s detractors had let their imaginations loose on a meagre supply of known facts. So had Greer. But she backed up her interpretation with a hefty amount of research into Elizabethan history and custom. Hathaway’s social status, Greer wrote, suggested that not only could she read and write, she might have been considered more eligible than Shakespeare himself.
Then in 2020, Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell offered up an even more audacious portrait of Hathaway in Hamnet, her lyrically heartfelt treatment of Shakespeare’s most personal tragedy – the death of Hamnet, his 11-year-old son, from the plague.
O’Farrell co-wrote the script for this adaptation – which has just won a Golden Globe – with the film’s director, Chloé Zhao (Nomadland), and with a few changes, it maintains the novel’s shape, mood and themes. O’Farrell’s Anne – or Agnes, as she’s called – is a healer, more at home with the plants and animals of the forest than she is in the house where she lives with her father and straitlaced stepmother.
Buckley (centre) is a revelation in Hamnet, and won the Golden Globe for best female actor in a drama.Credit: AP
The book conjures a setting in intimate contact with the natural world and the film’s design vividly evokes its ambience. These families may have grand houses by Stratford standards but their nearness to the surrounding woodlands hints at the presence of something untamed and unpredictable. That threat is borne out when the plague comes to town.
Agnes’ intuitions make her aware of all this but the only person who makes any effort to understand and appreciate the acuteness of her instincts is her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn). Then Will, a neighbour’s son making a living of sorts as a Latin tutor, falls in love with her and everything changes.
