Abstract
The last time I wrote a review of a play called Hamnet (Cahiers Élisabéthains, 97[1], 2018), I thought it necessary to differentiate between the characters of Hamnet, the son of playwright William Shakespeare, and Hamlet, the title character of Shakespeare's most famous play. This time around, it is necessary to distinguish between the plays themselves, the former Hamnet being a play co-directed and co-written by Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel for the Irish collective Dead Centre about William Shakespeare's son, and today's Hamnet, a five-act play by Lolita Chakrabarti, currently being performed at the Garrick Theatre in London and adapted from Maggie O’Farrell's novel of the same name. According to the programme, the play's official title is Maggie O’Farrell's Hamnet, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti. Hamnet Shakespeare's backstory is by now familiar: he was born in 1585 (the twin of Judith), was christened ‘Hamlette’ Shakespeare, and died, aged 11, in 1596. Nothing more of his life, including the cause of his death, is known.
The point is, all three works are worth seeing (or reading), but for different reasons. The Dead Centre version of Hamnet's story takes us to a kind of limbo where the 11-year-old boy has been squirreled away for several centuries and where he has become a child of the times. He even carries a cell phone. Does he meet the ghost of his father there? Indeed, he does, and he even manages to confront the rivalry that he feels for his father's invention. O’Farrell's novel is named for the son and begins with his story but is really about the mother, who is called Agnes (pronounced ‘Agn-nez’) Hathaway and who, like her mother, is a healer and herbalist, not to mention a bit of a witch. In the play, she denies being a witch, but her familiar is a kestrel, and she puts a sort of spell on Will when they meet in the apple store and she gives him a quill made from a kestrel feather; however, her magic lets her down when she fails to save her only son from death by plague. O’Farrell's book is about transformation and grief; one of the novel's conceits is that William Shakespeare is never mentioned by name, although he is often identified as the ‘Latin tutor’. Chakrabarti's play, on the other hand, suggests that there is something akin to magic in the lives of the Shakespeare family; it holds the mirror up to nature, but only as it is understood by Agnes. I repeat, all three works are worthy of your consideration.
The play by Chakrabarti had a huge success at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) last year (beginning April 2023) before transferring to the Garrick Theatre in September. It starts at a different place from the book, and it doesn’t visit Limbo at all – not really, although the first characters to appear on stage are Hamnet and Judith, probably at the age Hamnet died (aged 11), and they remain a ghost-like presence on the fringes of the play, until their story takes over, momentarily, in Act 3, from that of Will and Agnes. The colour-blind casting of Agnes and the twins as being ‘of mixed heritage’ works to underscore the otherness of Shakespeare's family and perhaps to suggest ‘otherness’ as a theme in his plays. One trope that we are familiar with, from other plays and novels, is the depiction of the poet as a sort of savant, an Orlando-adjacent simpleton, who takes his strength from Agnes. His father has nothing but harsh words for him: ‘Y’nothin’, boy. Y’bring nothin’. Y’ll be nothin’,’ he says. One is reminded of Lear and Cordelia.
The first act of the play concerns the ‘shotgun’ wedding of Will and Agnes, aged 18 and 26, respectively, who make love after they become hand-fasted but before their marriage. As in O’Farrell's book, it is John Shakespeare (almost Falstaffian here) who finds a way to profit from the union. In fact, it could be said that several characters in the play are reminiscent of characters in Shakespeare. The case for Agnes as Ophelia is made in the playbook, where it is ‘ironic that the greatest writer who ever lived should be married to someone who couldn’t read’. But, like Ophelia, Agnes ‘reads’ the language of flowers and herbs. Her wisdom comes from her mother (called, as in the book, Rowan), a tutelary spirit of the play. Meanwhile, Hamnet and Judith are proleptic of Viola and Sebastian, who are so alike, they are mistaken for one another. There are several moments in Chakrabarti's play, as well as in the book, when Hamnet looks ahead to other moments in Shakespeare's plays, including the famous speech by Lady Constance, in King John, when she mistakenly believes her son Arthur is dead:
In a scene late in the novel, Agnes tries to imagine that Hamnet's clothes yet hold his form. In the play, she says, ‘His boots are there, his clothes wait to be worn’. Judith, too, senses her brother's presence. As in the book, she wonders what the word for a twin who has lost her sibling might be: ‘If you’re a wife and your husband dies then you’re a widow. And if parents die a child becomes an orphan. But what's the word for me?’. No such word exists, not even in Will Shakespeare's vast lexicon.
One of the triumphs of the play is its staging. Apart from a couple of brief moments in London, at Will's apartment and at the Globe, the bulk of the play takes place in one of several Warwickshire houses associated with the Shakespeares and with Anne's family. They are, of course, the same house, only slightly differentiated. For example, when Will and Agnes move into an annexe to the house on Henley Street (Will's birthplace), the House on Henley Street changes into the annexe, in the shape of an ‘A’, identified as Agnes’ ‘letter’. The annexe is further associated with the twins, who live there together until Hamnet's death. Early in her marriage, Agnes has a vision of the children and says there will be ‘two’. This is the first time her magic fails her, as it turns out that she will have three children: one daughter, Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamlet. She describes what it's like to see dead people: ‘Death surrounds a single room. The living inhabit that room while the dead mill about outside, pressin’ their palms and faces to the window, listenin’ at the door.’
All tragedies end in a death, or so said Lord Byron. Hamnet doesn’t exactly end there. With Act 5 comes a miracle. The death that has separated Will and Agnes reunites them, after four years, in the form of a play (Hamnet and Hamlet being the same name, according to Stephen Greenblatt and others). The play that started in an apple barn comes full circle, when Agnes finds the words she cannot articulate in the words of her husband's play, presumably written with his kestrel quill. It's an abbreviated scene from the novel, but it works. She says, ‘In that apple store, that first time, I felt all this, all of it but I couldn’t speak it, I didn’t have, the words … But you, you William, you possess them completely, and you have written him and make him live again’. All the Hamnets and the Hamlets come together in the play's last words, in an echo of the novel as well as Shakespeare's play, ‘Remember me!’.
[N.B. The play is being turned into a film, with O’Farrell one of the writers and a projected release in 2025.]