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.
Category: Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Aging and Prince Hamlet’s Fifth Act
The bodies are everywhere, well, figuratively speaking. For those of us privileged to experience old age, like pall bearers, we carry our share of losses. We mourn, and . . . we celebrate. For while death is inevitable, so is life in all its wild and willful glory.
Recently, I’ve had to meditate on loss because of a visual impairment that makes unsafe activities I used to relish. After moving to Ontario from Vermont, I discovered a theatre lab that holds readings once a month. These are at night, making it necessary for me to figure out how to attend without my usual sense of independence. This is a safety issue, mine and all those who might be on the road with me when darkness falls.