Hamnet

Most of us prefer to view great art as an act of magic: unexplainable, beyond the realms of reason, otherworldly, divine. We often speak of a landscape-altering movie or book like it’s conjured from nothing but fateful creativity and limitless vision. We perceive their creators as those who create; as those blessed with a little extra, almost as if they see worlds that we cannot. It’s not dissimilar from how we think of top athletes as supernatural beings. Terms like “gifted” and “immortal” are freely employed to describe record-breaking feats. Reframing talent as a cosmic value is the most traditional way of preserving the sanctity of ordinariness. We see them as extraordinary because it not only gives us something higher to trust in, it also absolves us from the complexities of being human. It’s easier to believe that they’re built superior so that we can reckon with our own regularity.

I first heard it about 15 minutes into the film, when Agnes tells the village tutor whom she likes, and who’s crazy for her, that she can read landscapes on his hand. “You saw a landscape?” he asks with a smile. “Mm hmm,” she replies. Later on, the tutor tells Agnes, whom he’s now married and has three children with, that he’s acquiring a house in Stratford for them. To this also she says, “Mm hmm.” Hamnet wants Shakespeare as a hook to hang its tragic story on. It wants a few details of his life. It wants a smattering of the plays. But it wants nothing to do with the language. I don’t know if they said ‘mm hmm’ in 16th century England; for all I know they said ‘uh oh’ and ‘uh uh’. But it feels inadequate. It’s a strange impulse, to want to make a film about someone who changed the way people speak, yet have barely any of that speech coursing through it.