Why not make a film about Jonson and his son, since we know so much more about Jonson’s life than we do about Shakespeare’s, and we know that Jonson’s son Benjamin actually did die of the plague? Because Jonson is now nowhere near as well-known as Shakespeare. Hamnet cynically exploits Shakespeare’s fame to manipulate the facts of his life and work.
Like the novel on which it is based, Hamnet blatantly distorts history. Because it is about Shakespeare, who died long ago, we may think that this does not matter. But it does. Not only does it present a string of lies to many viewers who know little or nothing about Shakespeare’s works but it encourages them to develop a habit of deriving fake history and cooked-up facts from the movies.
It also encourages viewers in the present-day delusion that geniuses are just like the rest of us, and they produce their works because they suffer trauma. The film domesticates the wild strangeness of genius (the wildness in the film belongs to Shakespeare’s wife, not to him) and presents us with Shakespeare as an ordinary family man like any other.
In a Wall Street Journal article titled, Paul Mescal Finally Appreciates Shakespeare, Mescal says that he did not appreciate Shakespeare’s plays when he acted in them as a student. But now that he may be nominated for an Oscar for playing the part of Shakespeare, he realises that Shakespeare’s “real gift is what he was willing to share with us as an artist. The private corners of his heart and mind that he shares with us religiously in all of his plays. That’s, to me, why we’re talking about him 400 years on.”
So, according to Mescal, Shakespeare is great not because of his uniquely creative use and expansion of the English language or because he created a wide variety of complex and startling male and female characters but because he shared his private emotions with us. The trouble is, he didn’t. Some of his contemporaries, such as his friend and rival Ben Jonson, did.
And if Shakespeare shares his personal emotions with us “in all his plays,” as Mescal claims, what else do we have to look forward to? A Shakespeare who wrote, “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” while murderously jealous of his wife? A Shakespeare who wrote “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” while plotting to kill a senior and more successful dramatist – Marlowe perhaps?
Shakespeare, as John Keats pointed out, is the epitome of artistic genius precisely because he does not tell us what he thinks or feels. Shakespeare is “the least of an egotist that it is possible to be,” Keats wrote. Shakespeare identifies completely with each of his characters and becomes them. His own personality vanishes. The only works in which he perhaps reveals his personal emotions may be the Sonnets, which I will come to later.
Hamnet makes the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet the source of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Reality is not as romantic. Hamnet and his twin sister Judith, born in 1596, were named for their godparents, Hamnet and Judith Sadler. This was a common naming convention at the time. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in the 1600 play, gets his name not from Shakespeare’s son but from the legendary early medieval Viking prince Amleth. Twelfth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus recorded the story of Amleth in his History of the Danes.
Shakespeare got the story from a 1570 French translation of this book, and possibly from an earlier, now lost, play based on the story. Like Amleth, Shakespeare’s Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to avenge his father who was murdered by his own brother. And as in the original story, the murderer marries his victim’s wife, Amleth’s mother. The name “Hamlet” is an Anglicized version of Amleth. When Belleforest’s book was translated into English in 1608, the name appeared as Hamblet.
Shakespeare may have found it a pleasing coincidence that his son’s godfather, Hamnet, had the same name as the Viking prince. But Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is definitely not named after Shakespeare’s son. A reader of Hamnet the novel or a viewer of the film would not know this because Shakespeare does not read about Amleth in either. Amleth disappears, and Hamlet springs straight from Shakespeare’s son.
According to the film, Shakespeare contemplated suicide after his son died and then wrote Hamlet to commemorate his son. This is arrant nonsense. Between the child Hamnet’s death in 1596 and the appearance of the play Hamlet around 1600, Shakespeare wrote the cheerful comedy Much Ado about Nothing (1598-99), The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and three historical plays. One of these historical plays was King John, written around 1596-97. This play is the closest in time to Shakespeare’s son’s death.
King John contains the only lines that may perhaps be inspired by Hamnet’s death. Constance, the mother of 12-year-old Arthur whom the King has driven to his death, says:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,Remembers me of all his gracious parts,Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form …”
The film Hamnet does not bother to quote these moving lines. Why not? Because who, besides Shakespeare scholars, has heard of King John? The film uses Shakespeare’s most famous play and best-known line (“To be or not to be”) to manufacture its own success.
Hamnet absurdly depicts the child Hamnet sacrificing himself for his sister through wishful thinking, while both are suffering from the plague. It is unlikely that Hamnet died of the plague. The main plague years in Stratford were 1564 (starting July, when Shakespeare himself was three months old), 1592-93, 1603-04 (when Jonson’s child died), 1606, and 1608-09. Hamnet died in 1596, which was not a major plague year, and Shakespeare bought his new house in Stratford in 1597.
Regardless of what Hamnet died of, the fact is that child mortality was very high in Shakespeare’s time. Nearly half of all children died before the age of 15, due to a variety of illnesses, such as smallpox, influenza, scarlet fever, dysentery and whooping cough. Of course, parents mourned for their children but they had many more children than most people do today and the loss of a child was less shocking than it would be today.
The central irony of the novel and the film’s pretensions is that in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet’s father (probably acted by Shakespeare himself) is pretty much the most unloving father it is possible to imagine. He burdens his son with the impossible task of taking revenge on his uncle without hurting his mother, who is now that uncle’s wife. He declaims at great length about his own virtues and sufferings and his brother’s wickedness but says not one word about his son’s predicament. He reserves all his pity and grief for himself, not his son.
Shakespeare’s plays depict many loving (as well as unloving) relationships between fathers and daughters but scarcely any loving relationships between fathers and sons. In King Lear, Edmund wants to murder his father Gloucester, who in turn wants to kill his other son Edgar. Edgar, in disguise, does look after his father but reveals his identity to him only a moment before he dies. Most fathers, like King Henry IV, mistrust their sons, and most sons, like Prince Hal, long to displace their fathers.
Shakespeare was not, as far as we know, a doting husband and father. At 18, he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. A few years later, he moved to London and, except for brief visits, lived there for at least two decades.
The years between 1585, when Hamnet was born, and 1596, when he died, were Shakespeare’s most productive years in London. He wrote 15 plays, two long narrative poems, and many of his 154 sonnets. He was actively involved in the theatre, both with his own plays and those of others. He would have had hardly any time to spend in Stratford with his wife and children. This is very different from Ben Jonson, whose family lived in London.
The poet Wordsworth, like most readers, thought that the Sonnets were the “key” with which Shakespeare “unlocked his heart.” Throughout the Sonnets addressed to two unnamed beloveds, (126 of them to a beautiful young man, and 26 to a dark lady), Shakespeare’s speaker calls himself Will, the short form of the author’s name, William. Most scholars are content to accept that the Will who has a sexual affair with the dark lady is Shakespeare himself.
But many (although fewer in recent decades) are uncomfortable with accepting that he also had an ongoing relationship with the young man whom he addresses as “sweet boy,” “my rose,” “my lovely boy,” and who, he says more than once, he has “had.” Wordsworth’s image of lock and key comes from Sonnet 52 where Shakespeare’s speaker compares himself to a rich man who can use his key to open a cupboard and take out his treasure. He compares the young man to a robe hidden in a cupboard which he does not wear too often because he does not want to “blunt the fine point” of “seldom pleasure”:
So am I as the rich whose blessed key Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure …Blessed are you, whose worthiness gives scope,Being had, to triumph, being lack’d, to hope.
Whether or not the speaker, “Will,” in the Sonnets, is Shakespeare, whom his friends called “Will,” it is certain that the speaker in the Sonnets has a passionate romance with both the young man and the dark lady, and is therefore what we would call bisexual. And these romances either occur or are intensely remembered or imagined during the short period when Hamnet was alive, and when the film would like us to believe that Shakespeare was a monogamous man devoted to his wife.
That wife, Anne Hathaway, was born in a middle-class yeoman family that lived a mile away from Stratford. The film turns her into a witchy woman who spends her time in a forest cave, and tames a wild falcon. All of this is invented, with no basis in fact.
The only one of Shakespeare’s poems definitely addressed to his wife is the playful Sonnet 145, which erotically and gracefully toys with her name “Hathaway.” No one would place it among the most powerful Sonnets. It is a minor work that any skilled poet of the time could have written. It is very different in this regard from Amoretti, 89 powerful sonnets that Edmund Spenser addressed to his second wife in 1595, and Epithalamion, his 1594 poem celebrating his marriage to her.
Hamnet is not alone in distorting Shakespeare’s life and work. Its illustrious predecessor is the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, which won the Oscar for best picture and numerous other awards. This film, more explicitly than Hamnet, heterosexualises Shakespeare. Shakespeare was never in love with a boy, we are told, but with a girl who disguised herself as a boy to act in his plays. The screenwriter Tom Stoppard took (without acknowledgment) from Oscar Wilde’s brilliant story, The Portrait of Mr WH, the idea that Shakespeare’s unnamed male beloved may have been a boy actor. Stoppard gets the boy out of the way and presents us with a safely heterosexual Shakespeare.
Attempts to explain any writer’s gifts and especially Shakespeare’s inimitable genius by diving into the traumas and accidents of their lives, are doomed to failure. Because the unanswerable question remains – if losing a young son caused Shakespeare to produce Hamlet, why didn’t Ben Jonson, a gifted writer who also lost a young son, and mourned him bitterly (as we know from his poem), not produce a masterpiece as immortal as Hamlet?
Ruth Vanita is an academic, activist and author who specialises in British and Indian literary history with a focus on gender and sexuality studies.