Hamnet: the perils of the predetermined ending
Writing to a predetermined ending often distorts both character behaviour and narrative causality to get there. Is that what Hamnet does?
What’s the story’s argument?
It’s August 1596. William Shakespeare is away with his theatre company, again. Probably touring Kent for the summer season. His wife Agnes is back in Stratford-upon-Avon with their three children: Susanna, 13, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, 11. And then his son Hamnet dies, and is buried on August 11.
That much is history. The rest of the story of Hamnet is speculation, serving a greater argument about the nature of the relationship between the literary genius William Shakespeare and his illiterate wife, Agnes. (Given that William allowed both his daughters to grow up illiterate, perhaps it wasn’t a problem for him.)
The entire story is working towards a big ending, where the relationship between William and Agnes following Hamnet’s death is healed by her seeing his new play Hamlet, and recognising in it William’s profound grief at Hamnet’s death. But for this ending to work, there must have been a rift between them earlier in the story. The predetermined ending demands the creation of an ongoing rift in the relationship, whether it ‘really happened’,or not.
Both book and film centre that rift on the death of Hamnet. But does the filmmaker fudge the story to create that rift? And is it a problem? Isn’t it just another act of creative imagination?
Judith’s illness
According to the book and film of Hamnet, Judith falls ill with the bubonic plague and then gives it to Hamnet. When Judith falls ill Agnes sends a message to William, urging him to come home. London was three days from Stratford by horse, Kent further. So, six days minimum there and back.
In those six days, Judith recovers, but Hamnet falls ill, and after a terrible struggle to save him, dies. Shortly after that William arrives home, too late.
Why invent Judith’s illness? Is it really necessary?
I see three reasons. The first is that it creates more story to fill the time between Judith’s illness and William’s arrival, which increases William’s culpability for arriving too late for Hamnet’s death. He wouldn’t have even arrived for Judith’s death if she had died, let alone Hamnet’s unexpected death. But this is a minor reason.
The second is that it introduces a twist to the story, reducing the sense of coincidence surrounding Hamnet’s death. Even though Hamnet’s death was real, and Judith’s illness imaginary, without Judith’s illness as a precursor, Hamnet’s illness would have felt like a plot device.
But the most important reason is that it allows Agnes to punish herself: while nursing Judith, she had accepted her imminent death as something foreseen, so she was blindsided by Judith’s recovery and Hamnet’s unforeseen death.
Which means she could read William’s joy at Judith’s unexpected survival as his caring more about Judith than Hamnet, and, by extension, not recognising or caring about the depth of her grief.
Does that amount to fudging a key moment to get to the desired outcome? Not for me. I think that kind of speculation is fair game.
But there’s a deeper problem.
The creation of the necessary rift undercuts the film’s central argument. In this telling, despite William’s genius, he and Agnes are equals because he may have the words, but she has the vision.
But Hamnet’s unforeseen death destroys her faith in herself, in her ability to see the world fully, and her ability to know William more deeply than he knows himself. There is no evidence that it undercuts William’s respect for her, but it clearly undercuts her sense of self-worth. More than profound grief, she feels psychically lost.
In the end, this makes her eventual return to completeness pivot on something William has created. So Hamnet, a story that is designed to empower Agnes within her marriage, makes her recovery dependent on William’s genius. His agency, not hers.
We can see the efforts to avoid this contradiction in the lack of clarity about the psychological beats in the scene of William’s arrival and discovery of Hamnet’s death. Not only what each character is thinking and feeling – the surface level – but also at the deeper level: what they believe the other person is thinking and feeling, and how they feel about that.
We never see what Agnes thinks William feels or thinks, or how that makes her feel, and vice versa. For the rift to begin and grow through all they go through, there must be a self-perpetuating misunderstanding between them.
But instead of subjective storytelling that might give us psychological insight into how such a profound misunderstanding might have arisen and been perpetuated, the filmmaker uses inflected objective visual language to tell us what they think is happening.
Ironically, in a story about insight, and about what each character believes about the other, the storytelling shows no psychological insight.
This is clearest in the shot that shows William’s arrival.
Portals and the dominance of visual language.
The film’s visual language is dominated by portals. The very first image of the film begins with two strong tree trucks, side by side, reaching into a clear blue sky. Then it tilts down to reveal their joined trunks and intertwined roots, and beneath them a deep portal reaching into the earth, with Agnes curled up at its entrance.
It could hardly be more explicit in its meaning.
But this is just the first of many portals. The film shows us portals into the earth and up to the sky. Portals between nature and civilisation, and vice versa. Interiors are filled with shots of rooms within rooms. There are doors and tunnels in Agnes’ dreams, and in Hamnet’s journey to death.
Even, in that last set piece in the Globe theatre, we see a portal in the backdrop between the world on stage and the world backstage, and another portal in the boundary between stage and audience.
The rift
At the moment William bashes on the door and shouts, ‘Am I too late?’ we cut to a shot of another portal – the doorway into the room where the women are gathered around Hamnet’s still body – a tiny womb of warm femininity behind a vast wall of darkness. Hamnet’s body is totally masked by the woman standing, waiting for William’s arrival. It’s like a piece of religious iconography.
But rather than see William arrive through the door, or better yet, see Judith run to embrace him before he comes through the door, we see William hurry into the doorway, a dark shadow that at first completely blocks the door, and then dominates it, masking all the women in the room.
Again, the implied meaning could hardly be more explicit.
And because making that shot work means that William is already inside the tiny room when the film cuts to a shot of him joyfully embracing Judith, it requires Paul Mescal/William to be completely oblivious to what else is in the room. A room that the shot before has told us is tiny, and not only contains his unexpectedly alive daughter, but also the body of his dead son, and his distraught wife and mother-in-law.
A performance is fudged to make a point. But worse, despite her centrality to the rift, we do not know what Agnes feels about being ignored. Nor do the shots ask us to imagine what she might feel.
If the rift is to be created in this scene, then Agnes – and what she perceives – is the real centre of this scene. But we hardly see her. Because instead of using close-ups to imply thought processes through application of Theory of Mind, the filmmaker uses them to wallow in ‘acting.’
Instead of letting us understand what the characters are perceiving, beat by beat, and constructing a chain of psychological causality, the filmmaker is telling us what she thinks the characters are feeling, or ought to feel.
To be fair, the acting is pretty good – in Jessie Buckley’s case wonderful – but it shouldn’t be necessary.
The story needed to help us understand the characters’ mutual misunderstanding – how it arose, and how it persisted through a funeral, through sharing a bed, and through five years of increasing estrangement.
Instead, it kept telling me what the filmmaker thought, leaving me confused and unsatisfied.
My take
Hamnet doesn’t just explore grief, it wants to use grief to make two specific arguments: that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in response to the death of his son Hamnet; and that the widely-held view that the marriage between the literary genius William and the illiterate half-wild Agnes was a nagging mismatch is wrong. William and Agnes may have been different, but they were equals in passion and in talent.
It then chose to tie these arguments together by inventing an intensely emotional scene where Agnes goes to London for the first time, goes to William’s theatre and sees a play for the first time, and is overcome by the realisation that the play is her husband’s response to Hamnet’s death, which she had assumed he didn’t care about.
I don’t find it credible that the creation of Hamlet was primarily driven by Shakespeare’s grief over his son’s death. But perhaps it’s enough that Agnes believes that.
I also think that there’s a fundamental contradiction in making an argument for Agnes’ agency in the marriage dependent on her husband’s creation.
But most of all I think that the storytelling falls into the trap of the predetermined ending because it fudges the nature and origin of the rift that was necessary to get to the emotional conclusion.
Where, for me, Jessie Buckley and Max Richter together dragged the stumbling body of the story across the finish line.
