In which I scratch an itch that started bugging me nearly three months ago, and sadly hasn’t gone away: the film HAMNET. Which I did not like.
1. An Oscar-Winning Performance
I don’t begrudge Jessie Buckley the Best Actress Oscar (she will no doubt be relieved to hear). She was great in Beast, Wild Rose, Men and The Lost Daughter, although she went wildly over the top in Wicked Little Letters; just to complicate things, she was great in The Bride! while also going wildly over the top (in two different roles, three at a pinch). To my mind she also went wildly over the top in Hamnet, but getting the Oscar for that performance isn’t a problem, given that awards are (a) meaningless and (b) very often awarded for Having Been Good In A Bunch Of Stuff, which she has.
Besides, the problem with the part of Agnes wasn’t Buckley. Like bowlers in cricket, actors need to ‘get the length’ of a production – where to pitch a performance, in terms of pace, expression, irony, inwardness… One of the small pleasures of watching Twin Peaks used to be watching newly-introduced actors getting the length of David Lynch World, while veterans like Kyle McLachlan and Jack Nance carried on imperturbably around them. Jessie Buckley had the length of Hamnet – far more so than Paul Mescal, who was often closer to the hollow solemnity of Gladiator II than to the extraordinary still power he can bring to the right part (Aftersun, All Of Us Strangers, A History Of Sound). It was a big part, and so was her acting; if she went over the top, it was (as with The Bride!) because the film needed her to.
But this is odd. I seem to be saying that Hamnet required Jessie Buckley to go just as crazy as The Bride! or Wicked Little Letters, despite those films being a camp Gothic horror riff on Frankenstein and a foul-mouthed burlesque of village-green mysteries, respectively; it doesn’t seem like a club in which Hamnet ought to belong. (I guess all three of them are spun out of well-loved texts, so there’s that.) Moreover, if Buckley’s performance – or the film – was as wildly OTT as my reaction to it suggests, hardly anybody else seems to have noticed; reviews have been respectful at worst, rapturous at best (not to mention that Oscar).
There is a hint of a reservation in a lot of the reviews, admittedly: Buckley “can pull off the kind of scene that on paper could sound trite” (Sight and Sound); “The craft on display alone is enough to bring a tear to your eye.” (RogerEbert.com); “It is a film that moves because of the performances which are so absorbing” (a five-star review in The Guardian). Even critics who were less enthusiastic about the film – such as Mark Kermode, who found it emotionally manipulative – concur in praising the film’s artistry. Great craft, great performances; as for the material, well, never mind. But to my mind this gets it the wrong way round. My problem with the film is that I don’t think Buckley’s performance, or the undoubted directorial and cinematographic craft on display, did elevate the material; I think they were absolutely of a piece with it. Buckley did fine; the problem was Hamnet itself (directed by Chloe Zhao, screenplay co-written by Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, adapted from her book Hamnet (which, I should say, I haven’t read)).
2. Another Gentleman Of The Same Name
To get a sense of the issues with Hamnet, let’s go back to the beginning. We know that William Shakespeare was born in 1564, the son of a glover, and Anne Hathaway in 1556, the daughter of a yeoman farmer – a step above the peasantry. We know that they married in 1582, and that their daughter Susanna (1583-1649) was born six months later; we know that twins Judith (1585-1662) and Hamnet (1585-1596) were born two years after that, that there were no more children, and that Hamnet died aged 11 and had a church burial. We also know that Anne was illiterate; that her father’s will left her the rough equivalent of £2,000, as her future dowry, when he died in 1581; that the will named her as Agnes; and that Shakespeare’s own will was (famously) amended, after it was first drafted, to leave her his ‘second best bed’. That’s about all we do know about Anne/Agnes – or about Shakespeare prior to 1592.
In 1592 Shakespeare, an actor turned playwright, seems to have been denounced anonymously by fellow writer Robert Greene, as an arrogant jack-of-all-trades and plagiarist:
an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country
(The italicised phrase riffs on a line from Henry VI Part 3.) The record goes quiet again after that, till in 1594 we find a 30-year-old Shakespeare as the co-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company which put on his plays in Shoreditch.
And, er, that’s it. For Will Shakespeare’s early life – and his life outside the theatre generally – reliable information is sparse; for Anne Shakespeare it’s basically nonexistent. (The name Agnes was widely pronounced ‘Annis’ at this time; it may have been used as a variant on ‘Anne’ or vice versa. I’m sticking to the more familiar ‘Anne’.)
People have been speculating about what might fill these gaps for centuries. While Shakespeare had (in Ben Jonson’s disapproving words) “small Latin and less Greek”, there are enough allusions to classical authors (Greek as well as Roman) in his work to prove that he wasn’t a complete ignoramus in that respect. Perhaps (as Colin Burrow has argued) this was just the profit a bright student gained from a grammar school education. Others – beginning with John Aubrey in the seventeenth century – have speculated that some of Shakespeare’s “lost years” were spent as a tutor, which would both require a basic competence in Classics and develop it through use. And then there’s the question of religion.
3. Catholic Will and the Death of Ham{ln}et
Henry VIII broke with Rome when Shakespeare’s father was still a child; by the time of Shakespeare’s birth the establishment, or imposition, of a mostly-Protestant Church of England was well under way. Catholic worship continued in some areas, in conditions of increasing clandestinity; adherence to the reformed Church – and acknowledgment of the Queen as its head – was necessary to take any part in public life. There are several invocations of – or at least hints at – Catholic themes in Shakespeare’s work, from the (apparent) references to Purgatory by the ghost of Hamlet’s father to the (possible) reference to the dissolution of the monasteries in Sonnet 73. Were these evocations of a Catholic past, or even signs of lingering Catholic loyalties on Shakespeare’s past? Evidence has been found that Shakespeare’s father John was a recusant Catholic, although the strongest piece of evidence – a document in which John Shakespeare supposedly affirmed his Catholic faith and asked to be buried with the rites of the Catholic Church – was ambiguous in its application to Shakespeare Senior, and has since been lost. Another possible scrap of evidence is the 1581 will in which the Lancashire Catholic gentleman Alexander Hoghton made a bequest to a servant named William Shakeshaft, characterised as a ‘player’ – a pseudonymous reference to a young fellow Catholic with a budding dramatic career?
Put it all together – as Stephen Greenblatt did in 2004, with his book Will in the World and the essay “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet” – and you get quite a vivid origin story, both for Shakespeare and for Hamlet, and one on which O’Farrell acknowledges having drawn. The son of a covertly Catholic father, as a young man Will Shakespeare works – perhaps as a Latin tutor – for a Catholic gentleman in Catholic Lancashire; a year later we find him back in Warwickshire, getting Anne or Agnes Hathaway pregnant. Fourteen years on, he has the agonising experience of seeing his son buried, in the relatively austere rites of the new Church of England and without any possibility of continuing intercession for his soul, Purgatory having been eschewed along with the Pope. Does John – Hamnet’s grandfather – ask for masses to be said, perhaps covertly, for his grandson’s soul? Is Shakespeare pricked by his own conscience – or by memories of the respect he’d seen accorded the dead up in Lancashire? Four years later, Hamlet meets his father’s ghost on stage, condemned to Purgatory by the fact of having died without receiving the sacraments; was this how Shakespeare believed his own son now suffered? Or was it what he feared for his own father? (Inconveniently, perhaps, John Shakespeare was still alive at this point, dying the following year.) Or was the ghost’s purgatorial afterlife a paradoxical portrayal of the death-in-life of a bereaved father? And did Hamlet’s inwardness and indecision parallel Shakespeare’s own predicament? He too may have found that family affection and respect for his father bound him to to a course of action that could not be publicly avowed – namely, trying to ease Hamnet’s passage through Purgatory by having masses said and candles lit.
And Hamnet’s mother had a fair bit to cope with, too.
4. Capable Anne, Alone
There’s not much evidence about Anne Shakespeare, but you can do quite a lot with the absence of evidence. We know that Shakespeare had left Stratford-upon-Avon for London by 1594, that he died in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616 and that his wife Anne died in 1623; putting these fixed points together with the lack of any evidence of Anne Shakespeare being reduced to penury in the mean time, it’s reasonable to assume that Anne kept the Stratford-upon-Avon household going for the best part of twenty years. She will almost certainly have baked bread, brewed beer and provided for the household practically in other ways – perhaps keeping chickens or a pig, perhaps keeping bees for honey or growing fruit for conserves. We don’t know, but we do know that it was normal for married women of this period to do these things, and that if they didn’t, they and their dependants would probably go without; there was no possibility of making up any shortfall by nipping out to the shops.
Along with Greenblatt, O’Farrell draws on Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, which is concerned to rescue Anne Shakespeare not only from the condescension of posterity but from the disdain of Stephen Greenblatt (who argued that Shakespeare used London as an escape route from an unhappy marriage). As well as leaning heavily on our knowledge of the kind of thing women of that period were likely to have done – in which she includes wine-making and herbal medicine – Greer makes full use of the absence of evidence. There is, after all, no firm evidence that Anne was illiterate all her life; surely the poet she was married to – and who had punned on her name in a sonnet – would at least have encouraged her to learn to read. (And if she could read, might she have been the addressee of some of the sonnets – the ‘Fair Youth’ whose attractions are counterposed to the aloof and imperious ‘Dark Lady’, perhaps?) The marriage may have been unhappy, but it may not; in the absence of evidence either way, why shouldn’t we assume an affectionate and supportive relationship, albeit one mostly conducted at a distance? There are no surviving letters from Shakespeare to Anne, admittedly, but then there are no surviving letters from Shakespeare to anyone. Conversely, the lack of any correspondence with Anne may indicate that Shakespeare didn’t send any money home, which in turn would mean that Anne must have been raising a bit of money by her own efforts. Perhaps she brewed beer for sale as well as for her household; perhaps she grew mulberries, kept silkworms and spun silk. We just don’t know…
5. Rewind
But that’s the problem: we don’t know. We don’t know any of it. We’ve got no evidence that Anne could read (and if she couldn’t, of course, the lack of correspondence with her husband wouldn’t be an issue). We’ve got no firm evidence that the relationship was affectionate and supportive, or that it wasn’t. In the cosmically unlikely event that a record of Anne Shakespeare’s daily routine in the late 1590s were to be found, I’d be astonished if it didn’t include both brewing and breadmaking, but we can’t be that confident about anything else. My chickens and fruit-trees, Greer’s herbal medicine and silkworms, it’s all speculation; it’s all, not to put too fine a point on it, made up.
As for Catholic Will, a ghostly emissary from Purgatory – as written by a believing Catholic – would surely be recognised as such by the grieving son who witnesses him. In Hamlet, whether the ghost is the ghost of Hamlet’s father is a major plot point – is Hamlet losing his mind? might it be a demonic visitation, trying to lure Hamlet into sin? Again, what you’d expect a visitor from Purgatory to do is yearn for Heaven and ask for his son’s prayers – not to yearn for, and ask his son to carry out, bloody eye-for-an-eye vengeance. Whatever Shakespeare’s religious beliefs may have been, Hamlet doesn’t provide evidence of orthodox Catholicism. Nor is there any evidence that Shakespeare was the ‘William Shakeshaft’ mentioned in Alexander Hoghton’s 1581 will; in fact it seems highly unlikely, given that (a) Shakespeare would have been 17 at the time (b) Lancashire was an awfully long way away from Stratford-upon-Avon and (c) there’s no need to assume that ‘Shakeshaft’ was a pseudonym at all, as it was a local surname. As for John Shakespeare’s ‘testament’… well, show me John Shakespeare’s ‘testament’. I can’t put too much weight on telling pieces of evidence that have disappeared.
Shakespeare may not even have been the ‘upstart crow’ that Greene wrote about (in which case the ‘lost years’ extend to 1594). He’s certainly not the only candidate. The ‘absence of evidence’ problem returns here. If the passage was about Shakespeare, this would suggest that Shakespeare was reasonably well-known at the time – well enough to be worth lampooning. But the argument cuts both ways: we could equally argue that the passage should be read as applying to someone we know to have been well-known, and as such that it probably wasn’t about Shakespeare. A “shake-scene” could be an actor just as much as a playwright, after all – an actor who had starred in Henry VI Part 3, perhaps. As the sceptical commentator linked to above asks, if you saw somebody being attacked with the words “so go ahead, _____, make my day”, would the name you put in the blank space be “Joseph”? It was Joseph Stinson who wrote that line, after all…
We seem to have come a long way to end up with very little. And that’s no fun at all.
6. Fast Forward
I’m not saying that O’Farrell should just have written about an illiterate farmer’s daughter who stayed at home and brewed beer while her semi-estranged husband was knocking around with actors, hack writers and aristocratic patrons in that London, even if that is how I’d ultimately sum up The Anne Shakespeare Story. I wouldn’t choose to make Anne Hathaway literate and give her a brewing business – which is why my book about her would be a lot shorter than Germaine Greer’s – but that doesn’t mean it’s not a legitimate interpretation. Both Capable Anne and Catholic Will are good stories; you could get quite quite an interesting drama out of putting them together, and one which – as Greenblatt shows – might well have the death of Hamnet at the centre of it. Put that lot on screen and, while it would definitely irk the purists, a raised eyebrow and a muttered “well, maybe…” would be as bad as it got; I wouldn’t be raving about it, but it wouldn’t have positively annoyed me.
But then, I’m not sure anyone else would be raving about it either. (Ben Elton’s All Is True filled in the gaps in the story of the Shakespeare family in some interesting ways, and nobody remembers that.) What annoys me about Hamnet is not so much that it took the Catholic Will and Capable Anne speculations as its starting-point but that it built on them, and how it built on them – and I’m afraid that in many cases it’s those additions that have given the film popular appeal.
Thinking about it subsequently I’ve been reminded of sixth-form Latin. Sometimes, after translating a line of poetry, I’d look again and find I had a word left over; I’d fit it into my translation somehow, and as often as not the teacher would sigh and say “but how could that possibly be right?”. Coincidentally, the ‘Latin class’ scene in the film is a small example of what I’m talking about. We see teenage Will tutoring a group of boys in Latin; he does this by giving them a brief passage to read, and having them read it out. Which, fair enough, might form part of Latin tuition – reading a foreign language out loud is a good test of whether you understand how the language fits together or you’re just decoding, a syllable at a time; it would be more usual for the teacher to ask the student to translate what they’d just read, though. In this case, not only do the students not translate the Latin, they all read the Latin passage together, like a choral reading of a Latin grace (you too, which college?). I can’t imagine any reason for doing this; to get any pedagogical benefit out of simple reading you’d surely want to do it one student at a time. When they get to the end of the passage, moreover, they start again and read the same passage over and over, rendering an already pointless exercise completely meaningless. That’s not right; how could that possibly be right?
7. I am not Prince Hamnet, nor was meant to be
A much more significant rewrite or embellishment is represented by the climactic scene in which Agnes joins the audience for a production of Hamlet. The play Hamlet, the character of Prince Hamlet and the name Hamnet are at the heart of Stephen Greenblatt’s extended version of the Catholic Will speculation. For Greenblatt, Hamlet – and Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost – were significant for Catholic Will in a whole variety of interconnected ways:
- The Ghost’s references to Purgatory show that Shakespeare still believed in it and was hence a Catholic
- The scene dramatises the pressure Shakespeare felt to remain true to John Shakespeare’s religious beliefs (“Swear!”)
- The scene expressed Shakespeare’s fear that Hamnet, having died without Catholic rites, was now in Purgatory
- The scene dramatises the purgatorial state Shakespeare felt that he was in as a bereaved father
- Hamlet’s indecision dramatises Shakespeare’s uncertainty over whether to have masses said for Hamnet
- Hamlet’s indecision, and his inaction for most of the play, represent a new development for Shakespeare, who now for the first time was dramatising states of mind and thought processes; this was brought to a head by the thought of Hamnet’s death and (Anglican) burial, which gave him a newly heightened awareness of the complexity of his own state of mind
You have to buy into Catholic Will for most of this to make sense; if you think – as I’ve suggested earlier – that the Ghost’s references to Purgatory don’t suggest Catholicism on Shakespeare’s part, the rest of the ideas put forward here tend to drop away. But they’re interesting ideas. The last may be the strongest, at least up to the semi-colon: Greenblatt makes a very good case for the progressively more sensitive and adventurous dramatisation of mental states in Shakespeare’s plays, drawing examples from Richard III and Julius Caesar as well as Hamlet. But that in itself is a separate question from the effect of the death of Hamnet on the plays.
Having said all of that, whether or not the Ghost is in Purgatory doesn’t figure in Hamnet: O’Farrell retains Greenblatt’s focus on a Hamlet/Hamnet connection without adopting his speculations about what that connection was. Which is a problem. Remember, Hamlet is a revenge tragedy: an addition to the genre of The Spanish Tragedy, The White Devil, The Changeling, The Courier’s Tragedy et al. It’s the story of a young man who wants to avenge himself on his uncle for killing his father and marrying his mother, and (in the play’s great innovation) spends most of the play not taking revenge but gathering evidence, going mad with grief and rage, or both.
The bridge that Greenblatt builds from the inwardness and indecision of Prince Hamlet to the clandestinity of recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England is long and rickety, but it is arguable (at least, if you accept the idea of Shakespeare as a recusant). O’Farrell needs there to be a bridge from Hamlet – dead father, betrayed son, indecision, madness, revenge – to the death of Hamnet considered in non-religious terms, as the death from illness of an eleven-year-old boy; and it’s not at all clear to me what that bridge could be. What we end up with is, in effect, “Shakespeare is to Hamnet as the Ghost is to Hamlet (i.e. his father)”, closely followed by “Hamnet was a lovely boy who is now dead, and so was Hamlet”. These analogies are set up by the staging of Hamlet in the scene at the Globe, which is highly selective and distorted. We don’t see Hamlet, we see Act 1 Scene 5 (Ghost appears), followed in short order by Act 5 Scene 2 (Hamlet dies); we don’t even see much of the scene with the Ghost, who appears less as a figure of agonised horror than as a solemn admirer of the young prince. (As one commentator put it, “playing the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, [Will] gets to say goodbye to his son on stage as he never did in life” – fair enough, except that the one thing the Ghost had not returned to do was to say goodbye.) I also couldn’t believe in the groundlings, not heckling and talking among themselves but standing in dignified silence, shushing Agnes when she starts to talk back – or for that matter in Agnes, instantly recognising the (youthful but clearly adult) figure of Hamlet as the image of Hamnet.
There is some warrant for having Shakespeare take the part of the Ghost, as the film shows him doing – Nicholas Rowe says that Shakespeare did this in his 1709 Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (although citing Rowe as an authority on Shakespeare’s acting career is a bit like citing a 21st-century writer as an authority on Vesta Tilley). But the relationship of Will Shakespeare to Hamnet is unlike that of the Ghost to Hamlet in just about every conceivable way, beginning with which of the two of them is dead. And, while Hamlet is a young man, and the play does need him to die at the end, the play isn’t in any sense about a young man dying. In short, these analogies strike me as facile at best, at worst as going directly against what the play Hamlet actually says and does.
In passing, the collective happening that erupts at the end of the scene – giving collective expression to the feeling that it’s very sad when a young man dies – was down to Buckley, not O’Farrell or Zhao:
“There was no hands reaching out. There was no Hamnet. There was nothing. So it was all kind of being discovered in real time. … I was driving home, and Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ came on my podcast, and it just cracked something in me, and I sent it to Chloe, and the two of us met in the morning, and I said to her, ‘I just realized I am amongst 300 people who all have their own private grief or life.'”
A woman then worked with the extras on set, meditated with them and “gave them permission to bring their grief” to the space, Buckley said, which led to them all reaching out with their hands.
Mark Kermode was less complimentary about the use of ‘On the Nature of Daylight’, calling it a major mis-step (the piece is used prominently in Arrival, and features in Shutter Island, The Last of Us and The Handmaid’s Tale). I imagine that Max Richter himself – who had written the score for Hamnet, including a choral piece intended for that scene – was at least a bit puzzled.
But in any case, beyond the bare fact that a father looks at his son in one scene and the son dies in the other, this reading of those two scenes really has nothing to do with Hamlet. It can’t possibly be right as a reading of the play – which is a problem when you’re writing about that play’s author.
8. William Shakespeare: Lust for Glory
Tutor Will, who we met earlier, seems to be a vestige of Greenblatt’s Catholic Will, although in the film he hadn’t gone far from home – it’s while he’s conducting that dubious Latin lesson that he first sees Agnes. But there aren’t many other traces in the film; John Shakespeare appears, but only as an overbearing brute who wants his son to see sense, buckle down and make some bloody gloves. (This is after we’ve seen Tutor Will in action – although he was a pretty rubbish tutor, so maybe his father had a point.)
What we get instead is more of a Hollywood Will, a talented unknown who makes it to the big time from humble beginnings. Not seeing Shakespeare in London is fair enough; it’s Agnes’s story, after all. The trouble is, we don’t get any sense of how Shakespeare’s career as a writer developed – and that is a problem, as that’s also the story of how he came to grow apart (or at least live apart) from Anne. The most plausible reconstruction is that he started acting, left home to act full-time, and after several years graduated to being an actor-manager and a writer; as a writer, he mixed with other writers, who competed, collaborated, borrowed and stole as writers do, and found himself patronage, as writers did. After several years of this Shakespeare began to stand out from the crowd, and what made him stand out was his work rate: rather like David Bowie in the Beckenham Arts Lab (if you’ll excuse the analogy), Shakespeare was doing the same kind of thing as his peers, but at a higher quality and higher volume: he was writing more (and better) material and reading a lot more. Off the stage, most of his time must have been taken up with writing and reading (rather like David Bowie, etc). (Someone who knew Bowie in the late 60s commented that on a Friday night everyone would be trying to look cool by namedropping books they hadn’t read, and Bowie was no exception – but when he did it, you’d see him on the Monday and he actually would have read the book. I suspect Shakespeare was similar, although he’d have been namedropping Chaucer and Boccaccio instead of Colin Wilson and Carlos Castaneda.)
We get no sense of this Shakespeare from Hamnet. What we do get is an aspiring writer stuck in a provincial backwater, who doesn’t know how he’s going to make it but is determined to reach for the stars. When Agnes holds Will’s hand, she senses immediately that he’s going to do great things (she sees “a landscape … spaces, caves, tunnels and oceans, undiscovered countries”). In another scene, Will solemnly tells Hamnet that he Must! Go! to London!; in another, Agnes explains that Will wants something Bigger! than This! What irks me about all this – what makes me think it can’t possibly be right – is that artistic success on Shakespeare’s scale is something that nobody had achieved before: nobody knew what Shakespeare was going to end up doing before he did it, Shakespeare himself included. More to the point, nobody would have understood what he did, or recognised it as worth doing, until he’d done it. Remember the story about Noël Coward and Edith Evans: given the line “on a clear day you can see Marlow”, Evans persists in rendering it “on a very clear day…”. Eventually Coward snaps: “On a clear day! On a clear day you can see Marlow! On a very clear day you can see Beaumont and bloody Fletcher!” We recognise Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont and bloody Fletcher and the rest as foothills in the long shadow of Mount Shakespeare. Subtract Shakespeare from the picture and the scale changes: Shakespeare might perhaps have dreamt of doing what Marlowe did, but the greatness he actually achieved would have been inconceivable to him, and to anyone else. See also the Beatles, circa 1963. (And, when you think about it, David… never mind.)
Speaking of biopic clichés, there’s even a “come back to bed” scene, where we see Will literally burning the midnight oil as he works on a draft of Romeo and Juliet – in Stratford-upon-Avon, some time around 1590. (OK, it may have been a candle.) The implication is that a five-act play about noble families in northern Italy is just the kind of thing that a glover’s son would take it into his head to write. (To write, and then for some reason to hold back while theatres were putting on Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III. But that’s by the way.) This idea of artistic creation, as a spontaneous and timeless outpouring of innate genius, is just fatuous. David Byrne commented once on how, when he was growing up, anyone who thought of a melody and wanted to turn it into ‘a song’ would probably write a chorus and a middle eight – and not, for example, a choral harmony line and a counterpoint. As with music, so with poetry: it’s something that the individual writer (however talented) learns to write, in the style of the writers of their time, engaging with the audiences of their time. Showing Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare isn’t what this film is about, admittedly – but showing Shakespeare always having been Shakespeare is depressingly silly.
9. H is for Hawk (and M is for Mugwort)
Equally silly is the spin O’Farrell puts on Capable Anne. The first time we see Anne, she has a leather gauntlet on her arm and a hawk perched on it. Now, in Shakespeare’s time falconry had a longstanding association with the nobility, but I’m not aware of any legal restriction on commoners keeping birds of prey; this scene isn’t impossible, but it does seem extremely unlikely. Training a bird of prey is a difficult, time-consuming and expensive process, which over time uses a lot of meat that could have fed a dog or a person. And what does the expenditure of all that time, effort and meat get you? A bird that will take game for you: it will catch smaller birds and rabbits, and bring you the carcases. Useful – except that you can catch rabbits with snares and birds with nets and birdlime, with no need to train anything or waste any good meat. Falconry had a longstanding association with the nobility in Shakespeare’s time, because it’s a luxury; no yeoman farmer, however well-to-do, would encourage his unmarried daughter to spend her time teaching a bird to hunt.
But Agnes the falconer isn’t just a farmer’s daughter. In building the character, O’Farrell seems to have started with Greer’s version – which is already largely built on blank spaces in the record – and then built on the blank spaces in that. Greer suggested that the kind of thing women of that period were likely to have done included growing medicinal herbs; O’Farrell’s Agnes is a herbalist with an encyclopaedic, but intuitive, knowledge of what herb should cure what ill.
Not only does she know the properties of herbs, she knows what forms of words need to be said to activate them; herbalism and folk medicine become something more like folk magic. In the film (not, I think, in the book) Agnes has frequent recourse to one charm in particular. The words she recites, in three or four different scenes, are taken from the Nigon Wyrta Galdor (‘Nine Plants Spell’), a charm preserved in a 10th-century manuscript:
Remember, Mugwort,
what you brought to pass,
what you readied,
at Regenmeld.
You’re called Una, that most ancient plant.
You defeat three, you defeat thirty,
you defeat venom, you defeat air-illness;
you defeat the horror who stalks the land.
As the name suggests, the charm proceeds by invoking nine plants in order, mugwort and ‘una’ being the first two. This is followed by an incantation listing the different venoms against which a mixture of the nine was supposed to protect the user, and finally a brief list of instructions detailing how to prepare and apply it. It’s not at all clear what all the herbs are, or all the venoms referred to, or even where ‘Regenmeld’ was – but then, the tenth century is a very long time ago. (The full text refers to both Christ and Odin, incidentally.)
Now, the lines quoted above (and used in the film) are a modern English translation from 2020. The original reads more like this:
Gemyne ðu mucgƿyrt
hƿæt þu ameldodest
hƿæt þu renadest æt Regenmelde
Una þu hattest yldost ƿyrta
þu miht ƿið III & ƿið XXX
þu miht ƿiþ attre & ƿið onflyge
þu miht ƿiþ þa[m] laþan ðe geond lond færð
I’m not criticising the film’s Agnes for speaking 2020s English; it’s what everyone else in the film is speaking, after all. Historical fiction often works like the Tardis’s Translation Circuit, and for similar reasons. But I do think it’s staggeringly unlikely that the Nine Plants Spell would have survived in oral tradition from the tenth to the seventeenth century, handed down from mother to daughter through 30+ generations, translated into successive versions of English as they developed, without the text being corrupted with nonsense words or mondegreens. Not only do we have absolutely no evidence that this did happen, it’s just not the kind of thing that would.
As for Anne’s folk magic, I don’t know what kind of recipes seventeenth-century herbalists used, although I suspect that by and large they weren’t spells invoking the herbs so as to bind them to the herbalist’s service; I should think they were more of the “simmer without boiling until the liquid is reduced by half” variety. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the recipe for a sleeping draught used by someone like Anne Shakespeare would begin “O valerian, mighty closer of eyes” and go on from there, only getting round to quantities and timings five minutes later. Now: is it likely that someone like Anne would launch into a recipe/charm like the Nine Plants Spell repeatedly, sometimes in public, sometimes apparently for the sheer fun of it? And is it likely that she would only have that one spell? Her repeated recourse to it is made all the more obvious by the fact that she never gets much beyond the two verses quoted above; you’re left with the impression that this girl really likes mugwort.
We also learn that Agnes has an affinity with wild things and the natural world; that she insists on giving birth to her first child in the woods; that her birth mother was a ‘forest witch’ (her father has since remarried). Not only that, but (as we’ve seen) she has a kind of contact-based second sight which allows her to see that Will is destined for greatness when she first holds his hand. Green Witch Anne, meet Hollywood Will! (It’s probably churlish of me to note that Hamnet’s death still comes as a surprise.)
Just to recapitulate, we know nothing about Anne Hathaway’s family, except that her father was a lawyer who, like her mother, hailed from Philadelphia… ah, I see what I’ve done there. Start again. We know nothing about Anne Hathaway’s family, except that her father was a yeoman farmer and had a bit of money put by when he died. We know nothing about her mother except that she must have existed and was almost certainly married to Anne’s father, the alternative tending to leave historical traces. I don’t know if there was any such thing as a ‘forest witch’ in seventeenth-century England – although the phrase, and the idea, is so popular now as to be basically impossible to google, which may be a clue – but we’ve got about as much warrant for thinking that Anne Hathaway’s mother was one as for thinking that she practised double-entry book-keeping. But (quoting the link above) the idea of being a green (or forest) witch taps into a set of ideas that “[appeal] to those seeking alternative, nature-based spiritual paths … [and] speaks to a feminist perspective too, as it advocates a feminine ethic of care and respect for nature and living in harmony with the earth, as well as offering a means for empowerment, self-determination and self-growth”. (The article in question is on the academic self-promotion site The Conversation; it was written by a Senior Lecturer in Strategic Marketing.)
A Green Witch is, among other things, a very flattering role to play. As presented in the film, it can’t possibly be right as a reading of the historical Anne Shakespeare’s life, but that’s not the only job it’s doing there. Like the myth-making of Hollywood Will, like the secular sentimentality of Beautiful Boy Hamlet, the soothing dream of Green Witch Anne is very much of its time – the time in question being the 2020s.
10. Here We Go Again
Going back to the Greenblatt and Greer sources we started with, I’m not a big fan of Catholic Will, Capable Anne and recusant’s-dilemma Hamlet. I think all these ways of looking at Shakespeare and his work are speculative to the point of being fanciful, while also being reductive of the real complexities of Shakespeare’s life story and his work. I think it’s far more interesting to think of Will Shakespeare as an unusually able and hard-working hack writer in a turbulent creative milieu, Anne as the wife he (for reasons we’ll probably never know) left behind, and Hamlet as an extraordinarily rich and complex text which imagines a thoughtful protagonist with a rich inner life, then drops him in the middle of a revenge plot.
But I’d take Catholic Will, Capable Anne and recusant’s-dilemma Hamlet all day long over Hollywood Will, Green Witch Anne and Beautiful Boy Hamlet. All of these go far beyond even the most speculative interpretation of the material. We end up in a fictional realm with about as firm a mooring to history as Mamma Mia 2; a realm where historical figures can be used like action figures, moved about as the writer chooses. And this, I think, is why the main performances in the film had to be so histrionic – a register that Jessie Buckley inhabits with ease, but one where Paul Mescal struggles. We might have been looking at Will and Anne Shakespeare, but what we were watching was all from our own time: a dramatised rendering of contemporary anxieties, contemporary fantasies, contemporary clichés.
Workers’ Playtime 
