Whereas Hamnet tugs at a few well-worn heartstrings to make us weep, Shakespeare in Love opens out onto a whole new world, stretching our imaginations to other times and places.
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An Academy Award may capture a cultural moment, hold a mirror up to show the age itself, to paraphrase Hamlet’s lines to the players. So it was with Hamnet, nominated for eight Oscars and winning one. I’m a sucker for anything that takes me into Shakespeare, and I liked Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, so my boredom with this film surprised me. It got me remembering how much I’d liked Shakespeare in Love, which, nearly thirty years ago, ran off with seven of its thirteen Oscar nominations.
Rewatching that film, I found the contrast painful. Whereas Hamnet tugs at a few well-worn heartstrings to make us weep, Shakespeare in Love opens out onto a whole new world, stretching our imaginations to other times and places. I got caught up, as I had before, in its Monty Python zaniness (Will takes a quill from a souvenir of Stratford mug), its laugh-out-loud lines (“who’s that?” “nobody – that’s the author”), its lively wit and evocation of one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard had the savvy to harness the power of the play they’re piggybacking on, so we feel we’re present not only at the creation of Romeo and Juliet but also at a stunning performance of the play. The film Hamnet did no such thing with Hamlet.
Hamnet
There’s a lot to like about O’Farrell’s novel. Her refiguration of Shakespeare’s wife from the dreary baggage the bard left behind into a woman of great powers (“daughter of a forest witch”) made me think, yes, there must have been something extraordinary about a twenty-six-year-old woman not without prospects to have been so taken by a bookish lad seven years her junior. I found Agnes, as she’s called, convincing, and was fine with O’Farrell’s shunting Shakespeare to the edges of the story, giving the wife center stage – there have been plenty of fictions focusing on him, let’s imagine her, for a change. (Though, face it, we’d have little interest in her story if we didn’t know the identity of “her husband,” as he’s called.) I had no problem with the woo-woo – Shakespeare has a touch of that himself.
Shakespeare in Love did not hit us in one single place like this but evoked a wide range of emotions, funny and poignant, a lot going on in it. We’re in the madcap theater of the 1590s, beset by threat of closure from plague or penury, one step ahead of the law and the Puritans, a chaos not conducive to creation. But out of these inauspicious conditions a new play emerges, a new voice, and we see even hard-nosed businessmen going wide-eyed with wonder, astonished, as they hear the language of Romeo and Juliet for the first time. Even the loan shark Tom Wilkinson, “the money,” as he describes himself, who’s interested only in a return on his investment, falls under the spell.
The film hilariously transposes lines from the bedchamber onto the stage (“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?”), as a parallel story of star-crossed lovers unfolds in the main plot, the romance between Will and the high-born Viola de Lessep, doomed because her father barters her away in marriage and Will already has a wife. Yet the sadness of the lovers’ parting is tempered by the inspired ending, as the two of them fantasize his writing a new play that bodes brilliant new creation for him and a hopeful future for her, a future in which she survives shipwreck and strides toward a happy ending, even as she will always be Shakespeare’s muse. “Write me well, Will,” she says, and we know he will, as Viola of Twelfth Night, one of the most attractive characters in all his plays (we know this, that is, if we have any familiarity with Shakespeare, which Norman and Stoppard assume we have). Even Harvey Weinstein’s name in the credits could not dim the dazzle of this gem for me.
Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal are appealing actors. It’s nice to see loving camera work lavished on a face fresh and expressive as Buckley’s, though it’s hard to believe in a Shakespeare as taciturn and inarticulate as the film portrays him, a sort of suburban dad just trying to balance family with work and a beastly commute. A scene (YouTube video below) that worked for me was when Mescal is coaching the Hamlet actor how to say, “I am myself indifferent honest … yet … it were better my mother had not borne me … what should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven” – browbeating the actor to speak the lines again and again with the self-loathing he wrote into them. It gives us a rare glimpse into the way Mescal’s Shakespeare is channeling his bottled-up grief into his play. The film needed more of this. But it’s hard to conceive of this character as reaching within himself to write the complete works of Shakespeare.
When you Google a film and find more than one YouTube promising “Hamnet’s ending explained,” you suspect something maybe didn’t get across. The final scenes fell very flat for me. Agnes has made her way to the Globe, and we watch her watching scenes from Hamlet that make her understand that her husband has been processing the loss of their son through his art. As she watches the father’s ghost urging his son to revenge, she realizes her husband has imaginatively changed places with the son and killed himself off to leave his son alive (alive only for the next four and a half acts, though, which is not all that hopeful when you think about it). Those scenes needed another beat, perhaps more dialogue, to make their meaning clear. Dialogue, now there’s a thought – Hamnet has precious little, relying on visuals for effect. It would be interesting to compare word counts of the 1998 and the 2025 films.
In the scenes from Hamlet, Mescal plays a good enough ghost, a role Shakespeare himself acted, but Noah Jupe is not up to the part of Hamlet; it is, to be fair, one of the most challenging roles ever written. He was cast, I suspect, because of his resemblance to his brother Jacobi Jupe, who played the boy Hamnet. But a performance as wooden and amateurish as his would hardly have enthralled the rough-and-tumble audience of the Globe, or even got its attention. And about that painted backdrop – we’d be in a castle, not a forest, if the Globe had scenery, that is, which it did not; Shakespeare knew that a few words were sufficient to set a scene with an audience good at listening as his was.
I’m willing to believe that losing his son deepened Shakespeare, perhaps turned him to tragedy, but there were influences besides this that went into the creation of Hamlet – a centuries-old Scandinavian version of the story, Amleth, and a lost play Hamlet, among them. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is brooding and melancholic, but his speculations range widely – “what a piece of work is man,” “one may smile and smile and be a villain,” “there is nothing either bad or good but thinking on it makes it so,” “there are more things in heaven and earth,” and more. It feels a little reductive to tug so hard on this one heartstring, the death of the son. We’re left with a shrunk landscape as well as a considerably compromised rendition of Shakespeare’s play. Every Shakespearean I know, even those who liked this film better than I did, had problems with the Hamlet scenes. (Not that scholars are the last word, of course; I remember my disgust, at a Shakespeare conference long ago, hearing scholars take pedantic potshots at the director Franco Zeffirelli for his Romeo and Juliet, a film I thought worked beautifully to bring the play alive for generations.)
For years, I could use Shakespeare in Love in courses and could count on students getting into it, really enjoying the film. Though the plot is pure fantasy, the depiction of the theater conditions out of which Shakespeare conjured masterpieces has a certain truth. Also useful in teaching was the subplot of Christopher Marlowe (played by Rupert Everett). It was gratifying to hear Shakespeare acknowledge his debt to his fellow playwright, for a very real debt it was – it was Marlowe who revolutionized the English stage, leaving it to Shakespeare in a form he could work with. But I wonder if students or audiences today would even find the 1998 film “relatable,” all those mental gymnastics, words whizzing by, plots and subplots mirroring one another, references to Shakespeare’s other plays and his contemporaries. I doubt it, when sensibilities have been so blunted by sensationalist effects, honed on video games and TikTok, leaving character and dialogue a thing of the past. It’s a very different cultural moment we inhabit now.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
