Is Hamlet really about Hamnet’s death?
The film Hamnet asks us to accept that William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet at least partly in response to the death of his son Hamnet five years previously. Does this argument hold up?
The Historical record
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet argues that William Shakespeare wrote his play Hamlet at least partly as an expression of his grief over his son Hamnet’s death 5 years before, and that it was Agnes’ recognition of that when she saw the play that healed a rift that had grown between her and William.
The same arguments are at the core of the film adaptation.
But there are more convincing literary and historical explanations for the form and content of Hamlet than any biographical link to Hamnet’s death.
Firstly, the basic structure of the story already existed. There are clear connections between the plot of Hamlet and the historic Danish tale of Amleth, a prince of Jutland (Denmark), and Shakespeare was almost certainly aware of Amleth’s tale.
This story is told in Gesta Danorum, a 16-volume history of the Danes written around the turn of the 12th century in Latin, lost for many centuries, and rediscovered and printed for the first time in Paris in 1514. Two more editions were published before 1600, when Shakespeare likely wrote Hamlet.
In the legend, Amleth’s uncle murdered Amleth’s father, the King, married the Queen Gerutha, and assumed the throne. In response, Amleth feigned madness to survive while he plotted his revenge, even fleeing to England for a time, before eventually taking action. He set the palace on fire, and then killed his uncle in the royal chambers of the burning building.
But, although it seems irrefutable that the story of Amleth provided the template for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Shakespeare was thinking about the death of his son when he came across Amleth’s story, and decided to adapt it.
The framework may be almost identical, but Shakespeare’s version adds many more layers of meaning.
The original has no ghost of Amleth’s father demanding justice, no Ophelia who must be spurned, and no dithering pompous Polonius. Nor is Amleth paralysed by crippling self-doubt. Unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Amleth of the Gesta Danorum was celebrated for his relentless single-minded pursuit of vengeance.
Might not one of those extra layers, and the air of melancholy fatalism that pervades the play, reflect the playwright’s feelings about his son?
But then, what about the 5 years and nine plays between Hamnet’s death in 1596 and the first performances of Hamlet around 1600-01? We can see Hamlet as just the conclusion of an extraordinarily productive 6 years, during which Shakespeare also wrote The Merchant of Venice; Much Ado about Nothing; As You Like It; The Merry Wives of Windsor; King John; Henry IV pt 1; Henry IV Pt 2; Henry V; and Julius Caesar.
Why don’t we see reflections of Hamnet’s death in all those plays?
Perhaps we can – if we look hard enough. Some have seen evidence in a speech in King John, where a mother mourns her son’s death,
‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me..
Or perhaps the seeds of the story lay dormant in Shakespeare’s heart and mind for all those years, waiting for the right vehicle to carry them.
What about the content?
Can we find connections to his son’s death in Hamlet’s content?
Clearly, any connections – if there are any – are not allegorical. Nobody is arguing for parallels between the characters in the play and Shakespeare’s family. Agnes is not Gertrude, or Ophelia. William is not the King, nor his murdering brother.
The connections, if they exist, must be more subtle. And must go beyond the ghost of Hamlet’s father asking Hamlet to ‘Remember me.’ That seems to me a perfectly reasonable request from a ghost.
What about moral or philosophical cadences? Is the impact of Hamnet’s death on Shakespeare’s family reflected in the moral and philosophical themes of Hamlet?
Again, I’m not convinced. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet there was already a strong tradition of revenge tragedies in London theatre, such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.
A good man is murdered. A ghost demands justice. Madness is feigned. A plan is hatched – the hero stages a play within a play, with each of the major characters played by a key player in the real story. But the weapons on stage are real, not theatrical fakes – and the hero kills the guilty parties on stage.
Sound familiar? And to top it all, in the end, everybody dies.
Which is in keeping another major influence on Shakespeare’s writing – the recently rediscovered plays of Seneca, which focused on the moral ambiguity and uncertain consequences of revenge – the core of Hamlet’s dilemma.
‘To be, or not to be…’
Finally, Hamlet reflects the times. Elizabethans were still wrestling with the religious tumult caused by the break from Catholicism, which took away the church’s power to define moral boundaries and forgive transgressions, and instead handed moral responsibility to the individual, and their direct relationship with God.
And then the plague arrived. Was that God taking revenge for rejecting The One True Church? (If He was, it was non-discriminatory. The plague decimated the Catholic countries before it crossed the Channel to England.)
We don’t need to revert to Shakespeare’s personal tragedy to explain the existence, form and content of Hamlet. But that’s only one half of O’Farrell’s argument.
Whatever William’s intentions in the play – conscious or unconscious – perhaps Agnes found the meaning she needed.
Is it possible to separate the two stories? To reject the argument that Hamlet is about Hamnet’s death, and accept that a genius gets their nourishment from many sources, and works of great art are great not because of what they impose, but because of what they engender?
