As many movie fans I also watched Hamnet, and I was sad to see it did not have the emotional effect I thought, hoped, it would. And I am a person that gets teary eyed from shows to soaps when the topic of family comes up. I even cried at adds.
So, knowing this, I was surprised the movie did not move me more, and I tried to understand it. Why?
I honestly think that it is because it was too artsy, it tried too much. Don’t get me wrong, it is worth the watch, but it does not feel like a believable story.
What I did find enjoyable was the fact that the movie reminded me just how much the English language owes to Shakespeare and his work, so many of the day to day expressions we use come from him, and that is outstanding.
The movie made me want to pull out of my library the huge complete works and read through them. I haven’t read him for years and I want to refresh my memory of his work.
To get back to my catchy title, do I think Shakespeare would have liked Hamnet the movie? I think maybe a bit more than the book.
Shakespeare wrote plays with his mind to the public, on how to keep them focused and engaged, and coming back for more, so a movie would be much more up his alley than a book. And his public was brutal, so he really need to be on top of his game.
I love language and like to find out the source of certain sayings, and I am pretty sure you did not know that these saying we have from Shakespeare, so some 400 years ago.
Break the ice; Wild-goose chase; Green-eyed monster; Heart of gold; In a pickle; The game is up; Lie low; Fair play; What’s done is done; Too much of a good thing; Mortal coil
We owe William Shakespeare half of our emotional vocabulary, many of our dramatic exits and some of our really good insults.
Hamnet contains moments of visual beauty, the period tools, the houses, the carefully reconstructed world, but even these are pulled into the same atmosphere of artificiality that surrounds the characters.
While writing this I wonder if that was not on purpose? Maybe they wanted ti to be more like a play and that is why it is like that? Not sure to be fair.
I am happy I saw the movie because now I can have my own opinion of it. It is a bonus that it brought Shakespeare back to my mind and made me want to refresh his works in my mind.
In the end, Shakespeare might have admired Hamnet’s intentions, but he might have bristled at its certainty. His work thrived on ambiguity, contradiction, and restraint, qualities the film replaces with insistence. And Shakespeare, above all, seemed to distrust insistence.