Maggie O’Farrell’s imagining of Hamlet‘s genesis has been translated into a film of extraordinary passion. Forest witchery so vibrantly portrayed means theatre goers experience the forest’s innumerable life-and-death stories that have imbued Agnes Hathaway’s life with irrefutable power. Shakespeare’s wife, a ghostly presence referred to as Anne in most histories, becomes in O’Farrell’s fiction a match for the Bard in every way. She gathers her healing herbs, tends to her bees, and intuits her falcon’s needs as one who resonates more with the unfolding stories of an ancient forest than with the humans who give her shelter and do their best to “civilize” her. She is an authentic Wild Woman, rich in the ways of the first medicine women, the first growers of food and magic, the first midwives of life and death, the first of those burned and drowned and hanged and tortured to death because of their knowledge and wisdom. With Will, viewers fall under this forest woman’s spell. This, we know, will be a cataclysmic coupling when . . . never if . . . it happens.
Month: Last updated Apr 10, 2026
On Creativity
The human journey, on every continent and in every age, presents human beings with the contrasting experiences of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, kindness and cruelty. It is widely believed that when we are children, we are so pliant and so teachable that many religious and educational practices use these contrasting life and death forces to instil their belief systems, claiming:
“Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll show you the man . . ..”
This saying is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, sometimes to Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and sometimes to self-appointed gurus who claim to be its source because they do not bother to research their materials or even know that they should. In these days of technological glamours, “likes” trump everything, especially the search for truth.