Directed by Chloé Zhao
Certificate 12A
125 minutes
Released 9 January

Shakespeare’s romantic relationship, family life and the tragedy of bereavement resulted in his writing one of his bestknown plays, Hamlet. In Elizabethan England, we are told at the start of Hamnet, the two names were interchangeable. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, this film is well-served by the landscape-friendly sensibilities of the director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland).

This is Merrie England, a countryside of forests and hawks, where the unnamed William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) must survive helping to pay off his father’s debts by working as a Latin tutor, a position to which he is clearly unsuited and finds stifling. More to his liking is local girl Agnes (Jessie Buckley), with whom he fathers a child and whom he marries against his parents’ judgement.

Agnes is something of a visionary who has a portent that she will die survived by two children, so it’s a bit of a shock when her second child turns out to be twins, less so that one of them, a baby girl, looks as if she is stillborn, although somehow Agnes manages to revive her. I would say miraculously, but in O’Farrell’s imagining of the character, Agnes very explicitly rejects the faith of the Church, preferring to go back to nature and rely on herbal remedies.

Which is very strange, considering that if you read Shakespeare’s plays or see them performed, they are strongly infused with the values of Christianity (albeit bound up with the world-view of Elizabethan England). These values must have come from somewhere, but in O’Farrell’s version, it would seem, not from his wife, though there may have been a tension between his and her religious beliefs.

The screenplay doesn’t spend a lot of time on the question. Instead, it moves its focus onto the twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). Tragedy strikes in the form of plague. Agnes’s brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) persuades her unwillingly to attend her husband’s new play Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, which turns out to be both a cathartic experience for this bereaved mother and a deeply moving one for the audience.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. His website is jeremycprocessing.com