A World on Film

  Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Golden Globes Best Motion Picture winner and a top Academy Awards contender with eight nominations, including Best Picture, has reduced to tears not only its audiences but nearly every professional film critic who has viewed it. Based upon Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, it presents an origin story for William Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, Hamlet: the death in 1596 of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son named Hamnet. A caption attributed to the Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt informs us that the two names, Hamnet and Hamlet, were used interchangeably in 16th-century England. Greenblatt’s own scholarship, especially his books Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and the best-selling Will in the World (2004), theorizes that Shakespeare obliquely worked his own private experiences into his plays, from his difficult family relations to his troubled responses (at least as Greenblatt would have it) to the religious and cultural upheavals of the Reformation. In Hamlet, Greenberg argues, Shakespeare transformed his child’s death into the tale of the ill-fated prince of Denmark tasked with avenging his royal father’s murder at the hands of his brother, Claudius, who craved his throne and his wife. Greenblatt’s interpretive hand lies all over Zhao’s movie, for good or for ill.

  Zhao collaborated with O’Farrell in writing Hamnet’s screenplay, and in their telling the boy Hamnet succumbed to an outbreak of bubonic plague, which periodically erupted in Europe for centuries after the Black Death. We don’t actually know how the real-life Hamnet died (he could as well have fallen off a horse or gotten tetanus from a rusty nail), but plague is also a reasonable hypothesis. Shakespeare, the film tells us, wrote the play as a way of processing his grief over the boy’s death and also the near-destruction of his marriage to the boy’s mother that the death had occasioned. Most of us know that woman as Anne Hathaway, the farmer’s daughter from the outskirts of Shakespeare’s home town, Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in the West Midlands, whom he married in haste because she was three months’ pregnant. O’Farrell and Zhao, departing from convention, call her Agnes, with the medieval-Latin pronunciation “Ahn-yez,” the name her father, Richard Hathaway, used for her in his will. Also departing from convention, they have made Agnes the daughter of a reputed forest witch (during Shakespeare’s day the Forest of Arden covered much of the West Midlands, including Stratford), who, they tell us, was Richard Hathaway’s first wife. Agnes (played by Jessie Buckley, with a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance) is a folk-healer adept at herbal medicine and given a preternatural gift of being able to foresee the future. Her wildness as well as her rough-edged beauty turns young Will Shakespeare on, and it is Agnes, not Will or even the boy Hamnet, who is the central character in this film.

  The movie ends—and this is not a spoiler but its very point—with the first production of Hamlet, during the year 1600 or thereabouts, at the Globe Theater in London, newly built by Shakespeare’s own acting company, Zhao’s shrewdly cast real-life brothers to play the two connected roles: adorable Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet and handsome Noah Jupe as the actor who plays the Danish prince in the Globe production. Early on in the movie we see Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) in Stratford teaching the child Hamnet the art of sword-fighting; at the film’s end we see Hamlet and Laertes sword-fighting in earnest until they kill each other via a blade whose tip has been poisoned by Claudius. Will himself plays the Ghost: Hamlet’s father who is also named Hamlet. Wrapped in a sheet and plas- tered with white face-paint, he emerges from either Catholic Purgatory or Protestant hell (where he would be a demon in disguise) to inform Hamlet that he himself was poisoned by Claudius, that master of poisons, and to set his son on an errand of revenge that young Hamlet does not know how to fulfill.

  In the Globe’s audience is Agnes. Alienated from Will over Hamnet’s death, she has traveled on her own to London from Stratford still in a mother’s deep mourning and enraged that her husband might have desecrated their son’s memory by working him into a gory melodrama in order to further his own fame. She sees the dying Hamlet, so like her son, pass into the undiscovered country right before her eyes, and the performance is so real to her (she has pressed herself up against the stage so she can touch him) that she sees even more: a vision of her own dead boy, whose spirit, like that of Hamlet’s murdered father, has wandered restlessly between this world and the next, at last finding repose. She is moved to cathartic tears. So is her husband, who has spotted her in the audience and been watching her from backstage. So is the rest of the Globe audience, enraptured by the spectacle on the stage and also the spectacle in its own midst of the weeping mother from the Midlands boonies who has never seen a play before and for whom there is no line of demarcation between representation and reality.

  And so moved, too, have been the vast majority of Hamnet’s critics. “I really did not expect to cry so much,” Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote. “Hamnet is the most devastating, most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.” Some of the critics did wonder whether Zhao’s film wasn’t just shamelessly jerking their emotions. The film’s score, by Max Richter. features his haunting strings-and-synthesizer composition On the Nature of Daylight as the background music for Hamlet’s dying speech:

  If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

  Absent thee from felicity awhile,

  And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

  To tell my story….

That’s laying it on with a trowel, helped along by the sobbing strings. And yet, as the New Yorker’s Justin Chang wrote, “My [eyes], I confess, were soon blurred by tears, brought on with such diluvial force as to both quench my skepticism and reawaken it.” Deborah Ross of the Spectator chimed in: “You can hold out and hold out and refuse to be emotionally manipulated, as you’re better than that, but when Max Richter’s ‘On The Nature of Daylight’ kicks in at the end you will give up the fight. Take a hanky if you do not wish to deploy your sleeve.” And then there was… me, sitting in the darkness of the movie theater with the tears rolling down my cheeks.

  Ross, Chang, and other critics who have voiced similar suspicions are absolutely right about Zhao’s calculated maneuvers. Indeed, Hamlet himself in Hamlet marvels at the at the ability of professional players to “drown the stage with tears” over fictional events. But Zhao’s calculation is aimed at producing something more constricted: a view of literary art, whether written on a page or acted out in a theater, as primarily therapeutic. In this movie the writing of Hamlet mends its author’s broken marriage—Agnes finally understands that Will’s mourning was as intense as her own—and gives the grieving parents closure. Chang writes that there is “inherent kitsch in reducing one of the richest, most intellectually prismatic works in English literature to an instrument of healing.” Yet this is not an uncommon take these days on the function of art. Open to the list of book-club prompts at the back of any prestige novel currently published, whether the author may be Tolstoy or Sally Rooney, and you are likely to find that it largely consists of invitations to compare the characters’ feelings and experiences to your own.

  It is exactly this narrowness, of reading and ultimately of ideology, that makes Hamnet, if truth be told, a lightweight movie. This is disappointing; Zhao’s 2020 film Nomadland, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, avoided the ideological trap of using either its displaced female protagonist or its lonely Western landscapes simply as synecdochic stand-ins for de-industrialized America. Zhao strives for similar grandeur in Hamnet and in some aspects achieves it, for example in the gorgeous, depth-rich cinematography of Łukasz Ża. The film’s forests scenes—Agnes lives in the woods most of the time—were shot largely in Wales, even greener than England itself. Every saturated-hued fern tendril, every clod of black earth looks moist and palpable in front of Ża’s camera. (He is less successful with the Tudor interiors, which can look boxy and stagey.) And there is nothing essentially off about Zhao’s fictionalization of Shakespeare’s domestic arrangements, which cry out for fictionalization because almost nothing is known about what they were really like.

  As everyone who has taken a Shakespeare course in college knows, the Bard left behind almost no written records reflecting his personal life—or even his professional life. Unlike say, Chaucer, whose career can be traced almost from year to year because he had a day job as a highly placed public official, Shakespeare left such scarce life-records that there have been centuries of speculation that “William Shakespeare” was merely a pseudonym used by the actual author of his works (“another person of the same name,” as the joke goes). There are no diaries, letters, or notes of his. We have only a handful of church records from Stratford—baptisms, weddings, burials—and an occasional family will, including his own. In London we have lists of players’ names that include Shakespeare’s, plus some written hints as to when some of his 39 extant plays were written or produced. We know that he was born in 1564, married Anne/Agnes in 1582 when he was 18 and she 26, had a daughter, Susanna, in 1583, and Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, in 1585. By 1592, Will Shakespeare was already an up-and-coming figure on the London stage—not, perhaps, the best or best-known actor but certainly a reliable journeyman—and he had written and produced his first plays. He was also by then a shareholder in his acting company, which became the biggest and most successful in London; in 1599 it built the Globe on the south bank of the Thames as its own proprietary theater. In 1613 Shakespeare retired back to Stratford, where he had bought the largest house in town, and he died three years later, in 1616. He was already famous by then, and most of his plays, plus his 154 sonnets and several longer narrative poems, were already in print.

  O’Farrell and Zhao have taken an admirable step in depicting Shakespeare as married to a woman he deeply loved: “I wish to be hand-fasted to you,” he declares within days of their first meeting, and his forthright passion is genuinely moving. The conventional view of Shakespeare’s marriage is somewhat different. Although nineteenth-century artists enjoyed crafting sentimental depictions of the Shakespeare family—Anne, the three children, and sometimes even the family dog— nestled by the hearth listening to Papa Will read from his works, most Shakespeare scholars, including Greenblatt, have noted that the Bard spent nearly half his life in London separated from Anne/Agnes, and that his will left “my wife” (not even naming her) his “second-best bed,” with Susanna, apparently his favorite, as the prime beneficiary of his estate. They have duly concluded that his marriage was not a happy one. Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 hit comedy fictionalizing the making of Romeo and Juliet, was downright churlish in its treatment of Anne, whom Will describes as a less-than-desirable older woman who seduced the young playwright and tricked him into a shotgun marriage. Germaine Greer, in Shakespeare’s Wife, her polemical 2007 biography of Anne—or “Ann,” as Greer spells the name—, disputes this reading, pointing to evidence that the Hathaways were a prominent and well-fixed family, that age 26 was not uncommonly old for a sixteenth-century English bride (Northern Europeans married relatively late), and that young Shakespeare likely courted Anne aggressively as a financially advantageous match.

  Nor is it inconceivable that Anne/Agnes Shakespeare might indeed have been the local medicine woman. Herbal healing was a largely female art; midwives often doubled as “cunning women” with their stores of plant-based remedies and their verbal charms. Ecclesiastical authorities might disapprove of the latter (although the texts of the spells themselves sometimes mixed in snippets of prayers and Scripture), but few of them regarded cunning women as actual witches, who were thought to be sexual intimates of Satan. Prosecutions of cunning folk for witchcraft were rare. This was perhaps to be expected; after all, their potions and poultices tended to work, at least some of the time, and especially if they were sedatives. It is unlikely that Richard Hathaway, Agnes’s community pillar of a father (he died in 1581, a year before her wedding), would have married Agnes’s mother had she taken on black magic. Furthermore, we know from Shakespeare’s plays that he admired high-spirited, convention-defying young women. They are legion in his comedies: Rosalind in As You Like It taking up residence in Warwickshire’s own Forest of Arden, Viola in Twelfth Night, and especially the fiery-tongued Katherina of The Taming of the Shrew.

  All this could be the stuff of a richly rendered exploration of the psyche of a mother —who can foresee everything else about the future but who cannot foresee the death of her own son—and of a wife with a sixth sense who nonetheless doesn’t know her own husband. “You think you know all, you think you can see inside everyone. But you cannot. No one can,” Agnes’s stepmother tells her. But Zhao instead simplifies Agnes, turning her into a cliché of feminist rebellion. She dresses her in blood-red gowns redolent of The Handmaid’s Tale that contrast pointedly with the drab homespun her female neighbors wear. Agnes is also conspicuously bareheaded at all times, whether as a maiden in her 20s or a matron nearing age 40—in an era in which most respectable European women, and certainly all married women, covered their tresses with kerchiefs and bonnets when out and about. (The village-life paintings of Shakespeare’s Flemish contemporary Pieter Brueghel the Younger attest to the ubiquity and variety of female head-coverings during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Agnes looks charmingly free-spirited when she is roaming through the forest with her pet hawk, her hair flowing to her waist as Will courts her. But in the crowd at the Globe Theater she stands out like a sore thumb. Her appearance isn’t helped by Zhao’s other venture into anachronism in this scene: planting an incongruous diversity quotient of black people among Agnes’s fellow audience-members. It’s not that black people didn’t exist in sixteenth-century England, a few hundred of them at any rate in a population of about 2.5 million. But it’s unlikely that indigent workers or house servants spent their Sunday afternoons among London tradesmen and their goodwives watching a Denmark-based tragedy. Their presence gives the climax of Zhao’s film a decidedly bizarre character, as if it aspired to be a sixteenth-century Bridgerton.

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  Even more chronologically problematic is the nature of Agnes’s witchery. As Zhao’s and O’Farrell’s screenplay presents her, Agnes rep- resents a remnant of Britain’s indigenous pre-Christian religion, handed down covertly for centuries after the official Christianization of the islands during the early Middle Ages. “I will go to your church but I shan’t say a word there,” Agnes hisses at Will’s long-suffering mother (Emily Watson excelling in a minor part). Over and over in the movie, including under her breath at her own wedding while the priest recites the nuptial rite, Agnes chants the “Nine Plants Spell,” an Anglo-Saxon medicinal charm that mentions the god Woden:

  You defy three, you defy thirty,

  you defy venom, you defy air-illness,

  you defy the horror that stalks the land.

(The translation is by Joseph S. Hopkins, founder of Hyldyr, a small press specializing in pagan Germanic folklore.) The Nine Plants Spell survives in a single parchment manuscript dating to around the year 1,000. Its original Old English dialect would have been unintelligible to people of Shakespeare’s time, and even the script the charm was written in would have been difficult to decipher. Positing that the charm survived verbatim through 600 years and a major refashioning of the English language after the Norman Conquest is a stretch.

  But the biggest problem is the film’s premise that witchcraft itself was a pre-Christian holdover—a pet theory of nineteenth-century occultists that contemporary scholars of pagan European religions have pretty much demolished. The University of Bristol historian Ronald Hutton has concluded that almost no pagan practices, except possibly Yuletide greenery and May Day flowers, outlived the Christianization of Britain. It is almost embarrassing that Zhao and O’Farrell saw fit to indulge this tired topos.

  It is, however, a topos that fits in well with the screenplay’s lazy substitution of feminist chestnuts for genuine character development. A sequence in which Agnes and Will make love for the first time, in a garden shed at the Hathaway farm, is endlessly protracted, seemingly designed to assure the film’s audience that the “enthusiastic consent” rules of the #MeToo movement have been complied with. “I choose you,” Agnes declares—twice. Even more protracted are the movie’s three childbirth scenes, in which Agnes gives birth to Susanna all by herself in the forest, then undergoes two excruciating bouts of labor inside the house with a midwife in order to bring forth the twins. What is the point of all this? To show that it’s somehow more natural to deliver your baby under a tree? By contrast, Will’s father, John Shakespeare (David Wilmot), is a caricature of patriarchal awfulness: a drunkard and bully who physically abused young Will throughout his childhood and threatens to do the same to Hamnet. John does all he can to stymie his son’s literary career, forcing him into the family glove-making business and in his spare time into tutoring Agnes’s younger half-brothers in Latin so as to pay down his enormous debts. (As with the rest of Shakespeare’s family, we know nothing about the real-life John Shakespeare’s personality traits and alcohol consumption. We know only that he had once been one of Stratford’s leading citizens, even elected as alderman, and that he indeed fell into serious financial trouble as Will neared adulthood; Zhao’s Latin-tutor hypothesis isn’t far-fetched.)

  Hamnet’s worst failing, however, is that it short-changes Shakespeare himself. This is an unforgivable sin. In Zhao’s telling, young Will is a loner introvert, physically unprepossessing (Agnes’s brother describes him as “pasty-faced”), cowed by his overbearing father and not very good at, and certainly not very interested in whatever he sets his hands to, whether it’s laboring in John’s workshop or trying to pound Latin grammar into the heads of farm-boys. At the film’s beginning we hear the kids rote-reciting a ho-hum passage from Virgil’s Georgics. Why doesn’t Will, who his plays tell us relished and took his plots from the most exciting of classical literature—the lives of the Romans in Livy and Plutarch, the myths of gods and mortals in Ovid—dazzle the boys with the burning of Troy in Virgil’s Aeneid? The very burning of Troy that figures famously in Hamlet’s speech to the players in Hamlet?: “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?” In Zhao’s movie Will does tell Agnes one of those stories—the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice—and she’s enchanted. “He has more hidden inside him than anyone I’ve ever met,” she tells her brother. But that’s exactly where it stays throughout the movie: hidden inside Will’s head. Feeling stifled by his humiliating existence under his father’s thumb, Will retreats whenever he can to the attic, where he writes incessantly. He is presumably fashioning the first drafts of his plays, but they’re drafts that he never shows anybody. Finally Agnes has to push him out of the house and down to London, on the premise of an opportunity to expand his father’s glove operations. This may comport with feminist “strong woman” ideology but does little to bolster our opinion of Will. “And what if I fail?” he whines.

  All this rings thuddingly false. We may know nothing about the real-life Shakespeare’s personality, but we do know one thing about him from his writings, including Hamlet: that he was mesmerized by the theater. And that shy and self-doubting as he might possibly have been in his private life, he was an extrovert in his public life—because he had to be in order to survive in the raucous, high-pressure, intensely competitive world of the Elizabethan stage, where he might have been the greatest of geniuses but was far from being the only talent on hand. He had to fight off Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and his most gifted rival of all, Christopher Marlowe, who, if he hadn’t gotten into a fatal bar brawl quite so early in his life, might have given young Will a run for his money. Shakespeare in Love is a slapstick farrago barge-loaded with historical impossibilities, but it does (thanks perhaps to Tom Stop- pard’s work on the screenplay) present a credible picture of the crowded, chaotic, ever-changing tableau of actors, theater owners, hack playwrights churning out material, and the all-important money-men who financed the stuff, as they jostled and fought and cut corners to lure paying audiences to their entertainments. Sometime between Hamnet’s birth in 1585 and the production of his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, during the early 1590s, William Shakespeare became a star: a top supporting actor if never quite on the A-list like his colleague Richard Burbage, a reliable producer of reams of audience-pleasing copy, and an astute businessman who wangled for himself a substantial cut out of every one of his company’s hits.

  One of the things that Shakespeare had to learn—or die—was exactly how to write a play, and he had to learn it early. There was—and still is for playwrights—only one way to do that: an endless watching of—or better yet, acting in—other writers’ plays so as to imitate their plots and structures, their rhetorical flourishes and their actor’s tricks. The records show, for example, that when Will was five years old, John Shakespeare as alderman invited a troupe of traveling players to Stratford. They couldn’t have been the only roving thespians the boy Shakespeare saw perform. In addition, the Midlands were holdouts of England’s pre-Reformation Catholic culture, and the medieval mystery plays, dramatizing the Gospels and other biblical narratives, continued to be staged through the 1570s. Will might have seen some of them as a child, since there is some evidence that John Shakespeare was a recusant Catholic himself: Hence Hamlet’s “out-herods Herod” in the speech to the players. Shakespeare filled his dramas with theatrical motifs: ruses, masked figures, fantasias, tableaux vivants, exchanges of identity. He learned all this from somewhere.

  But Hamnet doesn’t provide a hint of this: how Will Shakespeare the country Latin teacher (if he was that) came to be William Shakespeare, the most superlative of dramatists, or, rather, grew into that status in short order. We never see him staging amateur theatrics in Stratford or even reading a book that might have provided him with source material for his plots—and most of Shakespeare’s plays are massively reworked versions of stories that he had read elsewhere; not only the classics but popular tales, potted histories, and other playwrights’ works. Hamlet, for example, draws on the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth, the son of a murdered king who pretends to be a simpleton until he grows up enough to avenge the killing. Nor do we ever see the film’s Will devouring the English language as he did and showing off his acrobatic skill at employing it. One of Shakespeare’s minor accomplishments, as Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, was to coin hundreds of new English words that are still in use today. Stratford-upon-Avon was a bustling market town during Shakespeare’s time; in Zhao’s film it’s a sleepy hamlet (no pun intended) where the Shakespeares and the Hathaways seem to be the only residents. Zhao’s London is equally denuded of population. Where in this sad, plague-ridden urban landscape did the boisterous Elizabethan theater crowds come from, with their unquenchable appetite for blood-and-guts revenge tales and lowlife comedy?

  And so, when 11-year-old Hamnet died, I wasn’t as moved as perhaps I should have been. The death of a child is always pitiful, and it’s touching that the boy effectively chooses his fate, sacrificing himself to trade places with his beloved twin sister, who is the first to come down with the virus. This is sad, I thought, but I wasn’t feeling it. And then, when Will rushes home on horseback from London, too late to see his son alive for the last time, Agnes lashes out: “You weren’t here! You weren’t here!” This is pure soap opera.

  Fortunately for Zhao and O’Farrell, there was someone else at work on the screenplay they crafted, and that someone was Shakespeare himself. And so at the movie’s end, on the stage of the Globe Theater, Shakespeare completely takes over. The very words alone that he wrote are so cadenced and beautiful, so powerful that the rest of the story—Agnes and her problems, Will and his—simply disappears. Hamlet cries out in his soliloquy;

  How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

  Seem to me all the uses of this world!

And we are suddenly in a completely different world that is both ghastly and mesmerizing. Zhao and O’Farrell have done a remarkable job of paring this longest of Shakespeare’s plays down to a few minutes of its emotional essence. Much is missing: Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern, Fortinbras, and even the players with their dumb-show that reenacts King Hamlet’s murder right in front of his murderer. But the essence is all there: the Ghost in his agonies, pathetic Ophelia (“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”), loyal Horatio, impulsive Laertes, fratricidal Claudius, quasi-adulterous Gertrude. I didn’t even have to wait until Hamlet’s death to start crying. The tears began streaming as soon as the Ghost in his sheet declaimed,

  O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

  If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.

I wanted the play never to end, for there to be more and more of it. I wanted to hear Horatio say, “Good night sweet prince /And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” I wanted those glorious words that Shakespeare wrote never to stop pouring out.

  Hamlet is a play about death. Nearly everyone in the play ends up dead, not just the two Hamlets, father and son, but Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Claudius and Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even poor Yorick of the skull. Its settings are graveyards and venues for homicide. Its characters debate fine points of theology about the post-mortem fate of souls: Does the drowned Ophelia, who might have been a suicide, merit a Christian burial? If Hamlet kills Claudius while the latter is saying his prayers, does Claudius go straight to heaven despite his crimes? (In this sense Hamlet is, oddly, the most Catholic of all of Shakespeare’s plays.)

  Hamlet is also about something worse than death: the total de- struction of moral order. The perennial question that English professors ask their students assigned to read Hamlet is: What is Hamlet’s tragic flaw? But the answer is that Hamlet doesn’t have a tragic flaw. He is a very young man, an innocent, sheltered at university while his father was at war. Zhao’s casting of Noah Jupe, 19 years old when Hamnet was filmed in 2024, was a brilliant stroke. Hamlet returns to Elsinore and everything he knows is shattered: his father slain viciously, his mother faithless, his uncle— who should be the guardian of his claim to the throne as son and heir—in fact his father’s killer and potentially his own. Reduced to rubble is the orderly world in which he was raised: the world of Polonius’ tidy and sensible aphorisms (Polonius is a doddering sycophant, but “first to thine own self be true” is, or should be, wise advice), and the world of the childlike faith of Marcellus and Bernardo in which the cock crows all Christmas night to celebrate Christ’s birth and “no spirit dare stir abroad.” All this is in shreds. And then there is the Ghost prodding Hamlet to wreak revenge—but Hamlet can’t tell whether it’s his own father or the Father of Lies. He hopes that the players’ reenactment will goad Claudius to clear up the matter by confessing to the murder: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Except that Claudius has no conscience.

  Hamlet feigns madness, but he is in fact driven as mad as Ophelia, and he becomes even more lethal than Claudius himself. He is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of Claudius, Laertes, Polonius, and Ophelia, plus the executions he arranges for Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern, which are pure premeditated murder, or would be if Hamlet were not by then insane. In Hamlet evil is ubiquitous, and it wields frightening power—and the most frightening aspect of that power is death itself, swinging its scythe against all, the guilty and the innocent alike. Art, Shakespeare shows us, isn’t therapeutic. It’s the reverse of therapeutic. It unveils, among other things, the world’s vast potential for destroying the human body and the human soul.

  It is this—the tears of things, as Virgil himself wrote—that moves us to crying in spite of ourselves at the end of Hamnet. Zhao’s movie and O’Farrell’s novel might be fundamentally cheesy, reducing great literature and the creation of great literature to overused commonplaces of pop psychology and pop feminism—but at the end Agnes, the mother in the Globe audience weeping over the inexplicable death of her child, is all of us. Hamnet had one singular effect on me. It made me race home to reread Hamlet. I advise everyone to do so. It will blow your mind.