Marc Berley
Shakespeare gave us the deepest explorations of grief in the history of entertainment, and Jessie Buckley won an Oscar for her wonderful portrayal of his wife as grieving mother. Hamnet is a film about the playwright’s loss of his only son, Hamnet, and the writing of Hamlet. Many critics have attacked the film for making audiences too sad, accusing it of manipulation and solicitation of grief. But grief is not manipulation in Hamnet—it is the right subject, because it is the subject of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s iconic play opens with Hamlet grieving after the death of his father, and Claudius—the usurping king who murdered his father—tells the noble Prince that his grief is “unmanly,” effectively outlawing the ritual of mourning. With Buckley winning an Oscar for her masterful and emotive performance, it is time to ask why critics are echoing Hamlet’s least empathetic character.
It would be foolish to imagine that Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet was the simple cause and effect that Hamnet makes it out to be, with the literal linkage of every family event to Will’s play. But the film (like Maggie O’Farrell’s novel on which it is based) is full of insights one would be foolish to dismiss. Hamnet’s focus on grief is as true to Shakespeare as it inducive of sadness.
Hamnet is a fictive imagining of Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet, which it sees as a byproduct of mourning. Not untrue. Hamlet is a play built entirely around a son’s grief for his dead father written only a few years after the playwright lost his only son. Perhaps schoolmarm historians must complain that there is no documentary evidence that Hamnet died of plague and that there is no biographical document linking the death of his son to his writing of Hamlet, but it is callous to be meticulous about the cause of Hamnet’s death at the age of eleven. There is, moreover, a preponderance of circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare was thinking deeply about grief when he wrote not only Hamlet but also Twelfth Night, plays written back-to-back. and performed in 1600 to 1601. Both plays focus on the death of a family member and mourning. This confluence, a constellation of focus on grief and mourning, was not a coincidence. It was Shakespeare, with Hamnet gone, at once brooding, persevering, and forging reasons to laugh—like his remarkable character Hamlet—in witty and feeling intellectual high fashion.
In both Hamlet and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare pondered deeply the value of mourning, as well as what one’s manner of grief portends. This is a fact. It is also a fact that with Hamlet and Twelfth Night Shakespeare catapulted to a new level as a playwright. The focus on grief was good for his art.
Twelfth Night depicts a woman (Olivia) who has been mourning her brother for seven years, which, Shakespeare tells us through scathing comedy, is much too long. Olivia “like a cloistress…will veiled walk,/ And water once a day her chamber round / With eye-offending brine.” While she could be accepting suitors in hopes of having a love life, Olivia instead sits at home pickling herself in the brine of her tears. To mourn for seven years is to give up one’s life to death.
Viola, the heroine of Twelfth Night, in another extreme mishandling of grief, does not mourn the death of her brother at sea for even a second. The antithesis of Olivia, she is ready to jump into the arms of the first man she sees on the island where she has been shipwrecked. Even worse, she needs only to hear his name, Duke Orsino, to fall in love. Failing to mourn the loss of her brother, Viola jumps into the arms of a narcissistic misogynist who will never respect her.
The inability to mourn and bear grief is an illness, Shakespeare shows us, preventing the reflective insight that is required for good judgement and self-respect. A person who does not mourn—Viola—is a person who does not reflect and therefore cannot think to keep herself away from harms, including marriage to a self-loving prick. It is as good to pickle oneself as to marry a prick. Olivia and Viola, whose names contain identical letters, are two sides of a damaged coin.
Shakespeare contemplates the value of mourning in Twelfth Night. One must not mourn too long (seven years), but one must not repress grief intent on dodging inviolable human feelings in the manner of lovable and pitiable Viola.
Twelfth Night, arguably Shakespeare’s funniest comedy, presents as examples characters who botch the deep healing made possible by the ritual of mourning. Shakespeare’s focus on the health of grief (a deep unavoidable human feeling) and mourning (a public display of that grief) is obvious in both Twelfth Night and Hamlet. In Hamlet, Shakespeare focuses on the obstruction of grief by others.
Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, has a ruthless murderer devoid of empathy as the engine of the plot. King Claudius’s first act is his prohibition of Hamlet’s grief, especially his outward public expression of mourning. “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” Claudius asks Hamlet in their first meeting early in the play.
Hamlet has been mourning the death of his father for only two months. It is a short period of time to grieve, in between the extremes of Viola (none) and Olivia (seven years). But Claudius commands Hamlet not to mourn his dead father. The King who murdered his father tells Hamlet that death is “common.” Regarding all the sons in human history who “hath cried” for their dead fathers, Claudius asks “[w]hy should we in our peevish opposition” to mortality take death “to heart”? Death, Claudius argues, is “common.” Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, is Claudius’s echo, telling Hamlet to “cast thy nighted colour off,” that dark costume of meaningful mourning. “Thou know’st” death is “common,” Gertrude says, asking Hamlet why it is “so particular with thee.” Claudius tells Hamlet he has a “heart unfortified.”
Hamlet is the character for whom the death of a human being matters, which is why he holds up the skull of dead Yorick in a cemetery, and he therefore considers mourning necessary. The play’s plethora of evil characters, in contrast, are happy to help Claudius put an end to mourning.
Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary in whose plays Shakespeare acted, lost his first son when he was seven years old. Jonson wrote “On My First Son,” a short poem in which he laments, “O, could I lose all father now!” We have no lyric poem from Shakespeare about the death of Hamnet. Instead, we have Hamlet and Twelfth Night, plays about grief and mourning. Shakespeare used as a source for Hamlet a thirteenth-century Scandinavian saga about a Danish Prince named Amleth; it is surely possible that Shakespeare, as part of his mourning, grabbed at the idea of writing about a prince slain in battle who had a name reminiscent of his son.
Patrick Sproull, writing in The Independent, asks: “If a film makes you cry, does that make it good?” That is not the question, but it reveals a deficit common among the critics eager to take down Hamnet for making people cry. The film “tugs at the heartstrings and targets the tear ducts with absolute ruthlessness,” writes Nicholas Barber for the BBC, who objects that Jesse Buckley “erupts with raw-throated screaming which will definitely secure an Oscar nomination.” One must ask how we have come to such carping at the depiction of a mother’s feelings about sick or dying children. Others have called the film “grief porn,” a snarky neologism that is but another instance of man’s inhumanity to man.
Why do the critics of Hamnet sound so much like Claudius and Gertrude, indicting the tears of audiences who cry for Shakespear’s son, blaming the film Hamnet for making those tears inevitable? Are the hearts of the critics “fortified,” and if so by what? Hamnet is not the first film to make audiences cry, and making audiences cry has not before been considered such an aesthetic sin.
Led by evil Claudius, everyone in Denmark is out to prevent Hamlet from exhibiting his grief. Polonius and Laertes are execrable. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are indistinguishable “good Germans” going along with the rotting of the state, throwing in against the noble Prince who is the only one who could save humanity—and he can save it precisely because he has a heart capable of grief that he can join with a mind more able to dissect the rottenness of the world than any other literary character in history.
Critics inveighing against Hamnet’s power to make us cry comprise a chorus that resembles Hamlet’s disloyal friends who give up their humanity, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Shakespeare’s brilliant rendition of soulless toadies spouting talking points to help a tyrant in his evil cause.
Hamlet tells us that his grief is both natural and healthy, proper for public display in the ritual form of mourning. Dressed in black, “the trappings and the suits of woe,” he speaks of “the fruitful river in the eye”—tears. Crying is “fruitful,” grief is fruitful, Hamlet tells us. Mourning is heathy when the death is fresh in memory.
And what about the time Hamnet was in Shakespeare’s mind at the writing of Hamlet, around four years—which is not yet the seven years of Olivia’s morbid mourning? Shakespeare was focused on mourning in two of his greatest plays. O’Farrell’s fictive musing in Hamnet is not farfetched, and it pays homage. The willfulness of critics to put her in purgatory for following Shakespeare seems at best an unseemly mistake. Is the outlawing of grief not part of the rotting of a state, of a culture, of a society crumbling under the control of a tyrant?
Critics devoid of empathy are accelerants to the decay of culture. Jessie Buckley’s raw-throated scream is not a stunt to get an Oscar. It is a cry for Hamnet, Shakespeare’s dead boy.
Audiences are crying over Hamnet because they watch Shakespeare’s only son die in the fullness of cinematic scope. Hamnet the film—like the novel on which it is based, though less expansively—allows us to feel grief for the man who did more than any other artist to help us feel the urgencies of the human condition.
Gertrude, Claudius, Ophelia, and Hamlet all live in eternity, in our minds and hearts, because of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. It took O’Farrell’s Hamnet to make Shakespeare’s son live in eternity in our minds and hearts—a place from which he has been missing for centuries.
Shakespeare himself has been accused of pulling at heartstrings in late great plays such The Winter’s Tale, where he gets us to cry at death only to bring the dead character back to life. O’Farrell is surely not the second coming of Shakespeare—nobody is—but she is not in bad company standing accused of making audiences cry about that great leveler called death.
Hamnet, like life, is imperfect; it casts, for instance, Noah Jupe, the older brother of the actor who plays Hamnet, to play Hamlet at the end of the film, even though he can hardly mouth the words, keeping the audience from feeling more meaningfully lines from Hamlet. But Hamnet is a lovely film that performs the wonderful feat of getting audiences to mourn Shakespeare’s great loss.
Shakespeare coined one-third of modern English language, inventing the ways we think and feel, along with the “conscience” of modernity Hamlet articulates. Shakespeare singlehandedly put modern emotional truth into art. Have we reached a point as a society where we can no longer sustain emotional truth in art? The death of a child is sad. The death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet a few years before he wrote Hamlet is something we should mourn—especially if it is 400 years late. Shakespeare gave us so much, and it is healthy for us to mourn what he lost. It is to the credit of O’Farrell that she has gotten so many people to cry for Shakespeare, the keeper of our humanity against tyrants, and rotten states, and rotting humanity.
Shakespeare had us all figured out long before we came along. We do not watch or read Shakespeare. He watches us, reads us, knows us in ways better than we know ourselves. He asks us to laugh and cry when we view his comedies and tragedies, but most of all he asks us to look into our hearts and minds and ask ourselves who we are, especially in Hamlet. The play begins with sentinel, looking out at the audience, shouting: “Who’s there?” Indeed, who are we? And who are the critics who command, like that tyrant Claudius, that it is criminal for us to cry?
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Marc Berley, editor of LitMag, earned his PhD at Columbia. He was a professor of Shakespeare and English literature at Rutgers, Barnard, and Columbia. His new book Shakespeare on Sex: How Will’s Love Life Shaped the Plays and Liberated the World (Skyhorse/ Simon & Schuster) will be published in May.