"The Hathaways are farmers, in the English county of Warwickshire, with close ties to the land-some would say too close, at least in the case of Agnes, a young woman so eccentrically at one with nature that she is rumored to have been born of a forest witch. The Shakespeares are led by a glover, whose business has seen better days. His eldest son-William, of course, though he is not immediately identified as such-defrays his father's debts by tutoring Agnes's younger brothers in Latin,"
"What's in a name? Plenty. At the beginning of "Hamnet," a tempest of a movie from the director Chloé Zhao, we're told that, in sixteenth-century England, the monikers Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably. The premise of the film-and of Maggie O'Farrell's novel of the same title, published in 2020-is that, after his son's death, in 1596, Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" in a burst of raw, unexpurgated grief."
Two rural Warwickshire families, the Hathaways and the Shakespeares, become bound by proximity, romance and misfortune. Agnes, a nature-tethered young woman, and William, a glover's son who tutors Agnes's brothers, marry and have children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Agnes experiences ominous dreams predicting loss. The film posits that the 1596 death of Hamnet triggered Shakespeare's composition of Hamlet, using the overlap of the two names as a central conceit. The narrative emphasizes grief's irrational timing, the porous border between life and creative work, and the fraught ways families cope with tragedy.
Read at The New Yorker
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