Why not make a movie about Jonson and his son, since we know much more about Jonson’s life than Shakespeare does, and we know that Jonson’s son Benjamin actually died of the plague? Because Jonson is no longer as famous as Shakespeare. Hamnet cynically exploits Shakespeare’s fame to manipulate the facts of his life and work.
Like the novel on which it is based, Hamnett History is openly distorted. Because this is about Shakespeare, who died long ago, we might think it doesn’t matter. But it happens. This not only presents a series of lies to many viewers who know little or nothing about Shakespeare’s works but it also encourages them to develop the habit of deriving fake history and fabricated facts from the films.
It also encourages viewers to fall into the current illusion that geniuses are just like the rest of us, and that they do their work because they are traumatized. The film captures the wild strangeness of the genius (the wildness in the film belongs to Shakespeare’s wife, not him) and presents us with Shakespeare as an ordinary family man like no other.
one in wall street journal article title, Paul Mescal Finally Appreciates ShakespeareMescal says that when he acted in Shakespeare’s plays as a student he was not appreciated. But now that he may be nominated for an Oscar for playing Shakespeare, he realizes that Shakespeare’s “real gift is what he wanted to share with us as an artist. The private corners of his heart and mind that he shares with us religiously in all his plays. To me, that’s why we’re talking about him 400 years later.”
So, according to Mescal, Shakespeare is great not because of his unique creative use and expansion of the English language or because he created a variety of complex and shocking male and female characters, but because he shared his personal feelings with us. The trouble is, he didn’t. Some of his contemporaries, such as his friend and rival Ben Jonson, did so.
And if Shakespeare shares his personal emotions with us “in all his plays,” as Mescal claims, what else are we to expect? A Shakespeare who, while murderously jealous of his wife, wrote, “This is reason, this is reason, my soul”? A Shakespeare who wrote “Is this a dagger I see before me?” Perhaps a senior and more successful playwright – while plotting to kill Marlowe?
Shakespeare, as John Keats pointed out, is the epitome of artistic genius because he doesn’t tell us what he thinks or feels. Shakespeare, Keats wrote, was “the smallest egoist that it is possible to be.” Shakespeare completely identifies with each of his characters and becomes them. His own personality disappears. The only work in which he possibly reveals his personal feelings sonnetsWhich I will come to later.
Hamnett Makes the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet the source of Shakespeare’s play small village. The reality is not so romantic. Hamnet and his twin sister Judith, born in 1596, were named after their godparents, Hamnet and Judith Sadler. This was a common naming convention at the time. Hamlet, the Danish prince in the 1600 play, takes his name not from Shakespeare’s son but from the famous early medieval Viking prince Amleth. The twelfth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus recorded the story of Amleth in his history of den.
Shakespeare got the story from a 1570 French translation of the book, and possibly from an earlier, now lost, play based on the story. Like Amleth, Shakespeare’s Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to avenge his father, who was murdered by his own brother. And as in the original story, the killer marries his victim’s wife, Amleth’s mother. The name “Hamlet” is the Anglicized version of Amleth. When Belleforest’s book was translated into English in 1608, the name Hamblett appeared.
Shakespeare must have found it a happy coincidence that his son’s godfather, Hamnet, had the same name as the Viking prince. But Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is certainly not named after Shakespeare’s son. a reader of Hamnett The viewer of the novel or film would not know this because Shakespeare has not read about Amleth. Hamlet disappears, and Hamlet arises directly from Shakespeare’s son.
According to the film, Shakespeare contemplated suicide after his son’s death and then wrote Hamlet in his son’s memory. This is utter nonsense. Between the death of the child Hamnet in 1596 and the appearance of the play small village Around 1600, Shakespeare wrote a cheerful comedy. much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Julietand three historical plays. One of these historical plays was king johnWritten around 1596–97. The play takes place closest to the time of Shakespeare’s son’s death.
king john It contains only lines that may have been inspired by Hamnet’s death. Constance, mother of 12-year-old Arthur, who was stabbed to death by the king, says:
The room of my absent child fills with sorrow, lying on his bed, walking up and down with me, assuming his beautiful form, repeating his words, remembering me with all his kind features, filling his empty clothes with his form…”
the film Hamnett Doesn’t bother to quote these moving lines. Why not? Because who’s heard it except Shakespeare scholars? king john? The film uses Shakespeare’s most famous play and most famous line (“yes or no”) to create your own success.
Hamnett The child Hamnet is comically portrayed as sacrificing himself for his sister through wishful thinking while both suffer from the plague. It is unlikely that Hamnet died of the plague. The main plague years in Stratford were 1564 (beginning in July, when Shakespeare himself was three months old), 1592–93, 1603–04 (when Jonson’s child died), 1606, and 1608–09. Hamnet died in 1596, which was not a major plague year, and Shakespeare bought his new house in Stratford in 1597.
Regardless of the cause of Hamnet’s death, the fact is that child mortality was very high in Shakespeare’s time. Nearly half of all children died before the age of 15 due to a variety of diseases, such as smallpox, influenza, scarlet fever, dysentery, and whooping cough. Of course, parents mourned for their children, but they had far more children than most people today and the loss of a child was no less shocking than it is today.
The central irony of the novel and film appearances is that in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet’s father (presumably played by Shakespeare himself) is the most unloving father imaginable. He entrusts his son with the impossible task of taking revenge on his uncle without hurting his mother, who is now his uncle’s wife. He tells in detail about his virtues and sufferings and the wickedness of his brother, but does not say a word about the plight of his son. He reserves all his pity and sorrow for himself, not for his son.
Shakespeare’s plays depict many loving (as well as unpleasant) relationships between fathers and daughters, but rarely any romantic relationships between fathers and sons. In King LearEdmund wants to murder his father Gloucester, who in turn wants to kill his other son, Edgar. Edgar, in disguise, cares for his father but reveals his identity to him moments before he dies. Most fathers, such as King Henry IV, distrust their sons, and most sons, such as Prince Hal, are eager to displace their fathers.
As far as we know, Shakespeare was not a kind husband and father. At the age of 18 he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. A few years later, he moved to London and lived there for at least two decades, except for brief visits.
The years between 1585, when Hamnet was born, and 1596, when he died, were Shakespeare’s most productive years in London. He wrote 15 plays, two long narrative poems, and several of his 154 sonnets. He was actively involved in theatre, with both his own plays and those of others. He hardly had time to spend with his wife and children in Stratford. This is very different from Ben Jonson, whose family lived in London.
Like most readers, the poet Wordsworth thought that sonnets This was the “key” with which Shakespeare “opened the lock of his heart.” the whole sonnets Addressing two unnamed suitors (126 of them to a handsome young man, and 26 of them to a dusky woman), Shakespeare’s speaker calls himself Will, a short form of the author’s name, William. Most scholars are content to accept that the Will who has sex with a black woman is Shakespeare.
But many people (though fewer in recent decades) are uncomfortable admitting that she was also having an affair with a young man whom she refers to as “sweet boy,” “my rose,” “my sweet boy” and, with whom she says she has had “an affair” on more than one occasion. The image of the lock and key is Wordsworth’s sonnet 52 Where Shakespeare’s speaker compares himself to a rich man who can open the cupboard using his key and take out his treasure. He compares the young man to a garment hidden in the wardrobe that he does not wear often because he does not want to “blunt the fine point” of “rarely happy”:
So am I like the rich man whose blessed key can lead him to his beloved locked treasure…Blessed are you, whose ability gives room to be, to overcome, to lack, to hope.
Whether or not the “Will” speaker in the sonnets is Shakespeare, who was called “Will” by his friends, it is certain that sonnets She has a passionate romance with both a young man and a dark-skinned woman, and so we would call her bisexual. And these romances either occur or are intensely remembered or imagined during the short period when Hamnett was alive, and when the film wants us to believe that Shakespeare was a monogamous man devoted to his wife.
His wife, Anne Hathaway, was born into a middle-class Ottoman family that lived a mile from Stratford. The film transforms her into a sorceress who spends her time in a forest cave and tames a wild falcon. It’s all invented, with no basis in fact.
The only poem by Shakespeare that is definitely addressed to his wife is Playful sonnet 145Who sensually and elegantly plays with her name “Hathaway”. No one would place it among the most powerful sonnets. It is a small work which any skilled poet of that time could have written. It is very different in this respect Amoretti89 powerful sonnets that Edmund Spenser addressed to his second wife in 1595, and epitheliumHis 1594 poem celebrates his marriage with her.
Hamnett He is not alone in distorting Shakespeare’s life and works. Its brilliant predecessor is the 1998 film Shakespeare in LoveWhich won the Oscar for Best Picture and many other awards. This film, even more clearly HamnettMakes Shakespeare heterosexual. We are told that Shakespeare was never in love with a boy, but with a girl who disguised herself as a boy to act in his plays. Screenwriter Tom Stoppard adapted (without acknowledgement) from Oscar Wilde’s brilliant story, Portrait of Mr. WH, The idea that Shakespeare’s unnamed male favorite may have been a boy actor. Stoppard gets the boy out of the way and presents us with a safely heterosexual Shakespeare.
Any attempt to explain the gifts of any writer, and especially the unique genius of Shakespeare, by diving into the miseries and accidents of his life is doomed to failure. Because the unanswerable question remains – did the loss of a young son lead to Shakespeare’s birth? small villageWhy did Ben Jonson, a brilliant writer who also lost a young son, and mourned him deeply (as we know from his poetry) not produce a masterpiece like the Immortals? small village?
Ruth Vanitha is an academic, activist and writer who specializes in British and Indian literary history with a focus on gender and sexuality studies.
