The new film “Hamnet” features two bright young actors, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, playing Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (née Anne) Hathaway. “Hamnet” arrives already widely lauded — it won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been sending millennial cinephiles into critical paroxysms. “Not to be hyperbolic but this movie contains the actual meaning of life,” wrote one such reviewer on Letterboxd. The film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel, recasts Shakespeare’s life in the most youthful and desirable terms possible, positioning itself as a generational gateway for a reanimated obsession with the Bard.
I attended a screening in the fall. (Disclosure: My company, the Shakespeare Theater Company, is presenting a stage adaptation of “Hamnet” by the Royal Shakespeare Company this spring.) I confess that I found some parts of the film extremely powerful, while served up alongside enough biopic clichés to make a Shakespeare nerd like me cringe.
Most of all, I was struck by how the film chose to portray William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the English language, as a kind of Marlon Brando in Elizabethan drag. Mr. Mescal grunts wordlessly, mopes sad-eyed and sighs with inexpressible longing. Other than a brief reference to writing comedies, this Shakespeare exists under a perpetual cloud. Ms. Buckley, similarly, plays Agnes with an emphasis on her suffering. The results played to me like mumblecore Shakespeare, conceived for the TikTok generation.
In reimagining the character of Shakespeare for a contemporary audience, “Hamnet” joins a long history of fictional Bard narratives. For centuries, people have been fascinated with the person behind the amazing plays, and our pseudo-histories about Shakespeare (and his wife) often point to their biographical details as the keys to unlocking his enduring work. So it’s natural that we want to imagine the man and his life in plays and film. Yet every generation imagines a version of Shakespeare that reflects its own aspirations and anxieties, which means every generation gets him wrong in revealing ways.
Attempts at imagining Shakespeare’s life once came largely in the form of statues and portraits. The funerary statue of Shakespeare, created in the early 17th century and installed at Stratford-upon-Avon, prompted the scholar John Dover Wilson, in the 20th century, to lament that it made the Bard look like a “self-satisfied pork butcher.” Beginning in the 18th century, sculptors remade Shakespeare for an age of “bardolatry.” The actor David Garrick commissioned a life-size statue of Shakespeare in 1757 and may even have posed for the statue, in a crowning touch of show business narcissism, replacing Shakespeare’s body with his own.
The Gower Monument, erected in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1888, shows Shakespeare as a seated god of poetic creation. His hand poised over parchment, he looks down upon a garden populated by four of his characters, who point out to the corners of the earth. This is Shakespeare for an age of Empire, a godlike genius whose vision spans the entire globe.
The recent discovery of a Jacobean portrait sent hearts racing in another direction. The Cobbe portrait shows a young man wearing an aristocratic ruff and gazing out at the viewer with sensual directness. His lips are pink. He has a high forehead but a healthy head of hair, with a well-groomed ginger beard. It’s a portrait embraced by those taken with the notion of Shakespeare as a queer icon, an idea that’s gained wider acceptance.
In the late 1990s, the definitive pop-cultural Shakespeare was Joseph Fiennes’s version in “Shakespeare in Love.” Sporting a goatee and earring in the style of the Chandos portrait, Mr. Fiennes’s take on Shakespeare carried a whiff of grungy transgression. In contrast to Mr. Mescal’s sensitive and devoted domestic partner in “Hamnet,” Mr. Fiennes’s Will is seen only out in the city. He is married, but unhappily. We never see his wife and three children, who may as well be on Mars. Instead, the love story is an affair with Gwyneth Paltrow’s aristocratic Viola de Lesseps, and the film, which Tom Stoppard helped write, turns adultery — and the violent, carousing, homoerotic milieu of London — into the engine of Shakespeare’s creative energies.
Compare that with the Shakespeare in “Upstart Crow,” a BBC 2 sitcom that ran from 2016 to 2020, in which the playwright is balding, middle-aged and domestic, as much Mr. Bean as the Bard of Avon, ending nearly every episode at home with Anne Hathaway. As an answer to the troubling mysteries of artistic creation, “Upstart Crow” offers comforting bromides: It takes a village, and a happy nuclear family, to make a play.
In some sense, these debates seem like idle literary gossip. Why should it be important whom and how Shakespeare loved? But the contemporary cold war over Shakespeare’s identity — his marital and class status, his sexuality, his inner thoughts and desires — is one of intense cultural importance. “Hamnet” presents itself as a work of historical fiction, not a political document, but its cultural politics align with feminist attempts to elevate Anne’s influence on his work, as well as with conservative worldviews that prefer to imagine him as a heterosexual married man.
These attempts at imagining Shakespeare’s life ultimately serve as reminders of the continuing fascination with Shakespeare’s plays. If “Hamlet” is one of the greatest plays ever written, it’s not necessarily because of anything that happens in “Hamnet.” While Shakespeare’s plays must have stemmed from some personal experience, they take the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” and, through an act of artistic creation, fashion them into something endlessly inspiring and strange.
Theater artists do not keep coming back to these plays because they promise to reveal, as the online reviewer put it, “the actual meaning of life.” Much the opposite: “Hamlet” confronts, as do all of Shakespeare’s works, the unfathomable mysteries of existence. They offer a “scene indivisible,” a “poem unlimited” — an undiscovered country that travelers are lucky enough to visit again and again.
The play is the thing — as Shakespeare’s melancholy (and funny) Dane famously puts it — and not the life experiences that may have inspired it.
Drew Lichtenberg is the artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington.
Source images by Krit Suppaudom, Oleh Svetiukha and Gwengoat/Getty Images.
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