"Hamnet"

The new movie about the Shakespeares' domestic life is quite good.

The outstanding, sentimental movie Hamnet, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about the death at age 11 of Hamnet Shakespeare, son of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Anne Hathaway (1556-1623), is the opposite of what the late Sir Tom Stoppard would have written about Shakespeare’s family life in Stratford: not brilliant but deeply moving.

Bring a handkerchief. I sniffled throughout the last 20 minutes as the alienated wife goes to London see the first play she’s ever seen by her husband, Hamlet, and begins to realize her seemingly uncaring husband has memorialized their son.

Hamnet is not a particularly empirical movie, but it’s realistic statistically on how many children used to die, and how big cities like London were demographic sinks compared to small country towns like Stratford.

Jessie Buckley, who played the fictitious lady genius scientist in Chernobyl, and Paul Mescal, the star of last year’s Gladiator sequel, are good as Anne and Will Shakespeare. The movie doesn’t attempt to deal with Will being only 18 (Mescal, a Russell Crowe-style star, is only 29 but looks 39). But there aren’t many good young movie stars these days, which is why Timothy Chalamet usually gets the role.

Shakespeare’s private life is notoriously open to speculation, leading to a vast amount of imaginative historical fiction.

We have excellent vital records about Shakespeare’s life, such as him marrying at age 18 the 26 year old Miss Hathaway, and her giving birth to their daughter Susanna Shakespeare six months later, followed in February 1585 by their fraternal twins Judith and Hamnet.

But what Shakespeare was thinking at the time is hard to say.

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