He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone,
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
The day I turned 17 I watched Hamnet. And, without being dramatic, I think it may have changed my life.
Mental Health UK defines grief as “a natural reaction to loss, which manifests itself in emotional pain or sadness. It can occur when you lose someone or something that you care about.” I believe grief to be something far more ambivalent than that.
Poets have examined it, pinning down and dissecting loss: Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. For centuries people have crafted ballads, stories, artworks, plays and films to distil, comprehend and capture this state of being. Though none in recent memory have succeeded in the way Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet does.
The film opens with a quote from Stephen Greenblatts epigraph: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet is his tragic hero Hamlet’s namesake. This interpretation changes the entire reading of a piece of literature that is widely considered the greatest play of all time. And this is what the film explores.
Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, Hamnet recounts Agnes Shakespeare’s (née Hathaway) relationship with her husband William, and the loss of their only son Hamnet. The film suggests that the couple's love for their son has transcended time, his memory commemorated in every performance of Hamlet for the last 426 years. In every actor's utterance of “To be, or not to be”, Shakespeare has simultaneously offered the audience an answer - to be. To be, for his young son taken by the plague. To be for all those loved who have passed. Hamlet’s story is a tragedy to reflect our own mortality back to us. To remind us to live.
I have had the fortune of loving many in my short life, which also means that I have had the misfortune of losing them too. Though this is a universal experience, I think this displacement of a human in your life burrows far deeper into our condition and psyche than purely being a state of “emotional pain or sadness”.
When I see English roses and jam sandwiches, I will always think of my Grandad. Silver nail polish and nurseries for my Auntie. And Wimbledon and lemons my Grandma. These are inextricable entities now entwined with their memory for the rest of my life. Maybe that's my way of honouring them. Maybe that's my way of funnelling this misplaced love into common headstones, ordinary objects acting as eulogies to those who I have lost. Just as I imagine, Agnes Shakespeare saw her son in every actor who played his namesake.
In the last scene of Hamnet she reaches out to the actor on stage, quickly followed by all others in the pit at The Globe. The audience understood. And then at 4pm when the lights turned back on at The Duke of Yorks Theatre, all those sitting in the cinema clung to their loved ones and cried. Again, the audience understood. Because we had just watched a performance that reflected to us the silence that fills the space when a once speaking voice is ripped from you. When memory wanes and proof exists only in photographs and voicemails and videotapes. In handwritten notes and favourite songs.
Grief is a passage that we spend the rest of our lives passing through. I think the hardest thing to accept in grief is that there is no turning around in this passage, the way back is shut. So, what is grief? A force that we loathe because it pushes us onwards? An aching reminder of loss? Perhaps it is merely a shadow, following quietly behind us down every road, into every building entered, across every field walked, every person met, reminding us of our own capacity to love.
Maybe grief is not something to rage against after all, but a companion we can travel with in times of heartache and surrender. Maybe that companion will become our guide back.