​

Two great novels have been given the movie treatment recently: Hamnet and Wuthering Heights, both marketed as powerful love stories. The press on the Wuthering Heights movie has made it seem so unappealing I’ll probably wait to see it until I’m next sick enough to want to spend the day falling asleep in front of Netflix. I did go to see the Hamnet movie. And I enjoyed it, but not as much as I enjoyed the book.

 

When I re-read Hamnet I could see what the book could do that the movie couldn’t and also what the movie could do that is hard to achieve in a book. Physicality is something the medium of film imparts directly – in pictures, no less. Countryside, buildings, streets, clothes ­– all these have to be described by an author and realised in the mind of a reader. Good cinema hands them to you to enjoy in glorious colour. Hamnet the movie does this movie thing very well and then doubles the impact by making a movie of a play. The final scene of both book and movie is Agnes watching a production of Hamlet and seeing her husband on the stage as Hamlet the ghost, the old king. In the book this scene is Agnes’ internal thoughts:

 

‘As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy his place.’

 

It verges on the expository.

 

In the movie, scenes from Hamlet, and Agnes’ reactions to them, show you so much more than words can describe. Her husband is Hamlet the ghost. Young Prince Hamlet is her son, grown older; the man he might have been. She reaches towards him. This is the power of theatre.

 

But movies of books are limited in the amount of material they can convey within their time constraints. They are always in danger of abandoning complexity and of concentrating too much on particular scenes, which unbalances the atmosphere achieved by the book. In Hamnet the movie there is way too much fraught childbirth and mooning around in a forest and far too little of Hamnet the boy and his view of the world.

 

The book, on the other hand begins with young Hamnet:

 

‘ A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.

            The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.’

 

The reader is invested in this boy. Who is he? Where is he? Why is he taking such a hesitant, unboylike approach to stairs? From the very beginning this is Hamnet’s story and the story of the impact his life, and death, has on the people around him.

 

Hamnet the book is told is a dreamlike way, as if the reader is spying the action through a telescope, and this feeling persists even when the story is being told from inside a character’s thoughts. An aspect of a person comes into focus and drifts away again. Judith usually has a kitten in her apron pocket. Hamnet’s grandfather is vicious when drunk. ‘Come back, his older sister, Susanna, will hiss, flicking his ear.’ As readers we get to see characters through the eyes of other characters, slipping and sliding in and out of focus. We are no more granted perfect knowledge of who they are than we are granted perfect knowledge of people we know in life, even the ones closest to us.

 

And this inability to truly know another person and the dangers of believing knowing is the most important element of a relationship is one of the major themes of the book. (Others are grief, love, sorrow, casual abuse, jealousy, mankind’s relationship with nature and the perversity of fate. I did say it was a complex book, didn’t I?)

 

Agnes is Hamnet’s mother, Anne Hathaway as the world generally knows her. Names were not as fixed in sixteenth century England as they are now, or rather they were fluid in different ways than the ways they are now. They were fluid in records as well as in everyday communication. As O’Farrell explains in her forward and afterword, Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable versions of the same name and Anne Hathaway was referred to as Agnes in her father’s will. O’Farrell probably chose that version of the name to help the reader discard previous conceptions of Anne Hathaway, because history, and academic comment in particular has not been kind to Anne. Which is putting it mildly, academic comment has actually been outright misogynistic where Anne Hathaway is concerned, referring to William Shakespeare being trapped in a destructive marriage on the basis of precious little evidence.

 

The Agnes in Hamnet has qualities verging on the supernatural. She is a water diviner, an expert in medicinal herbs, she hangs out in the forest with a tame kestrel and she can see into people’s souls when she pinches their hand in a certain way. (Her teenage daughter, Susannah, takes to approaching her mother with her hands behind her back.) But when she tries to see into her husband’s soul she can only see open plains of things unrealised. She cannot know him.

 

And we cannot know him either. In the movie he is solid man, romantic and present on the screen as Will Shakespeare. In the book he is never named. He is the Latin tutor, the lad, the husband, the father, the ghost. He is important in the story but he is not going to dominate it. This is Agnes’ story, and Hamnet’s.

 

O’Farrell takes her time telling her story. The day that Judith falls ill, the day that begins the book, is told in interludes between swathes of Agnes’ childhood, how Agnes’s met the Latin tutor, scenes with Susannah and her grandmother, scene’s between Will Shakespeare and his sister ( scenes in which he is ‘Eliza’s brother) – many, many scenes before the moment Hamnet lets Agnes know that Judith is sick:

 

‘He does not speak. He shakes his head. He points towards the stairs. Agnes takes them, two at a time.’

 

And even then the chapter ends and the narration swerves back to Agnes’ wedding in the next one.

 

This is O’Farrell’s way of dealing with the fact that many readers of the book will know that Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, Judith’s twin, died when he was eleven years old, while still creating a story for those readers who don’t know. (The story is, I think, more powerful if you do know).

 

Whichever camp you fall (or fell) into, if you like all things Shakespeare, or you like to see a demonised woman being given a different character, or if you just like being immersed in the past, Hamnet is for you.