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.
For such a couple, grounded in the realities of primal energy, to lose a child is a grief that is untouchable by any of the ordinary-mortal means of mediating loss. No church platitudes comfort. No food fills the emptiness. Not even love can cast its spell and distract from the gaping hole left by their beloved Hamnet. And when Shakespeare, the father, returns to the city, to “work,” Agnes, the mother, feels he is betraying her, their shared grief, and worst of all, their only son.
Their rage expresses mercurially . . . the slamming of a pewter cup upon a wooden table . . . the cold, cold farewells . . . the howls and guttural moans that issue from their souls . . .. None of these grief companions, none, can provide relief for these mythic beings who feel their love and hate and grief too deeply for mortal solace. Will goes to London. To “work.” Agnes remains with her daughters. With their grief. Her brother listens to her anguished mutterings but cannot lessen her terrible sorrow. She lives with the death of a precious child the way a soldier lives with a missing arm – always expecting to see the limb where it should be, beloved, whole.
And then she learns her mate, William Shakespeare, has written a tragedy, not the comedy she feared he uses to distract himself from her bottomless well of suffering. She insists on seeing what he has been doing while she has been with their remaining children, loving and hating, searching for the antidote to their horrifying loss. Finding none.
The name of tragedy Will has been writing, Hamlet, shocks her into wonder. The names Hamlet and Hamnet are interchangeable. She bows her head, pulsing with the discovery that he has been expressing his grief about their child and not distracting himself with frivolous comedy. In this moment, she can never imagine laughing again.
Initially, standing in the pit so close to the stage she can almost touch the actors, she is outraged when they speak her son’s name, cries for them to take the word Hamlet from their mouths. And then, with an understanding that settles in like a warming fire, she knows the theatre is the place that is her husband’s forest, his source of power, his only source of comfort. It is the place Will waits, as she waits in the forest, for their beloved Hamnet to return.
The Play’s the Thing, always, with Shakespeare. The unbearable suffering of a young prince given an impossible task by an insubstantial ghost calms the mother who has lost her child. She listens to the actors’ speeches. She watches their faces. And, at last, she is comforted by the elixir of confession, inner torment, loss . . . and all that is unknowable within the world of the play. Bodies fall to rage and justice. Blood flows. The world comes right again, is restored after the worst has happened.
At the end, Prince Hamlet dies. The ghost her husband became when Hamnet died is flesh and blood, the man, the mate she can weep and howl and perhaps even laugh with once more. This play is his raging grief. It matches her own. Hamnet, the lovely boy their passion for one another sparked into life, is laid to rest in an Earth that knows how to take to itself wild creatures, whether human or no.
We, their witnesses, know love, joy, and peace will return to their family, tinged always with the deepest blue of those graves where each of our loved ones lie buried, whether in the ground or in our hearts. This is how life goes on after tragedy. Someone tells a story. Someone hears a story. Someone, after an endless night, sees a lighter sky and the wonder and promise of a sunrise.
Until next time,
Jane