by David Winner
Jessie Buckley, an incredible actress, breathes life into the role of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, in Hamnet. Like others in the film, her face is always a little dirty (Chloé Zhao, the director, doesn’t fall for the trap of giving characters in dirty times perfectly clean skin), but I was frustrated by her character, which struck me as an odd fusion of romanticized gender essentialism and wild irrationality. Though I (a middle-aged cis male living in Brooklyn, New York, in the present day) could not be further from the Elizabethan woods where the essence of Agnes’s character originated, I still found myself resisting the film’s portrayal of her. Spoiler-alert, this writing reveals the ending.
Born (rumor has it) from a wood witch’s womb, Agnes mixes odd herbs together to create tinctures to heal wounds and reduce fevers. She (and this is a nice touch) greets young William’s desire to “handfast” with her by jumping past the wedding to the wedding night and having sex with him animalistically in nearly plain view. And she gives birth by herself in the woods, real wild-woman style. Her character seems ever wise and in touch with nature, her feelings and instincts spiritually sacrosanct and nearly unassailable—a vision of femininity pretty impossible, I would imagine, for any actual woman to live up to.
Her prophecies don’t always seem correct, however. She predicts a future for her son working on plays with William, though he ends up dying, still a child, when he takes the pestilence about to kill his sister onto himself—a brother bravely and spiritually sacrificing himself to save his sister.
Before her son’s death, Agnes encourages Shakespeare (who is sweet and kind of happy-go-lucky) to go to London to follow his passion. She declines his invitation to move there with the family, uncomfortable, I would imagine, in the large, alienating city. Each time William visits Stratford and leaves to return to London, there is tremendous sadness, which reflects—or so I imagine—not just their upcoming separation but the fragility of those times, when the smallest illness, in a time of plague, was likely to carry someone off.
Yet when their son dies and a grieving William returns, she does not comfort him nor allow him to comfort her but complains again and again that he had been absent, though she had encouraged him to go. This seems (to use the words of a friend from Cuba decades ago when describing a problematic boss of my wife) “a little bit the bitchy.”
My frustration with her character may reveal my own limitations, my failure to grasp the typically female challenges she suffers—her need to maintain a family and a homestead while her partner, the writer, is off in his own world—but still, the flip side of the woodsy, witchy intuitiveness seems to be an anger at William that doesn’t necessarily feel justified.
Of course, there are different ways to read this. She could simply be a complex character, a round one, to use the E. M. Forster’s trope—good and bad like all humans.
While obviously we can’t expect a “realistic” vision of this story, as we can’t know what that would look like, the incursions of Hollywood (Spielberg was involved in the production, which was nominated for Best Picture) occasionally broke the spell the movie had on me. Was it necessary, when Agnes and Bartholomew, her brother, visit Shakespeare’s garret apartment in London, for him to tell her that she needs to keep “her heart open”? A quick scan of the Maggie O’Farrell novel from which this derives reveals no such phrase, and it feels both too contemporary and trite.
When Agnes loudly addresses the actors at a performance of Hamlet soon thereafter (appearing not to understand the very nature of a play despite being married to William Shakespeare), she is shushed. Despite the famously rowdy nature of Shakespearean performances in his day, the audience is subdued and respectful.
By the time Agnes is reaching out her hand to the dying Hamlet, and the audience and the actor are sharing a powerful breakdown of the fourth wall, most of us are beginning to tear up, though the ever-pulsating romantic music (Max Richter’s Oscar-nominated score) and the occasionally trite dialogue may diminish its emotional impact. And no—Agnes’s female intuition does not turn out to be wrong after all. Her vision of her son working with Shakespeare turns out to be quite true, though it may be his ghost, not his living self.
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