There were some questions about whether or not Hamnet would be released this year, partly because Focus Features also has Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, along with Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. Hamnet, to my mind, always looked like their strongest Oscar player, sight unseen.
Here is the press release:
Focus Features Sets US Release Date for Chloé Zhao’s HAMNET
- Focus Features has announced a limited Thanksgiving release on November 27th for Chloé Zhao’s HAMNET ahead of a wide release beginning on December 12th.
HAMNET
Directed by: Chloé Zhao
Written by: Chloé Zhao & Maggie O’Farrell
Producers: Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nic Gonda, Sam Mendes, Steven Spielberg
Executive Producers: Kristie Macosko Krieger, Laurie Borg, Chloé Zhao
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
Logline: From Academy Award® winning writer/director Chloé Zhao, HAMNET tells the powerful love story that inspired the creation of Shakespeare’s timeless masterpiece, Hamlet.
Additional Background: Hamnet is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 New York Times bestselling novel, which has sold 2 million copies in the UK and US and has been translated into 40 languages
Photos below are screenshots from this video, can’t verify who took them. The screenshots depict Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as a young family in love.
You can read summaries of the book here. And here is a review of the book (which I think I will read):
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (or, Hamnet and Judith in some markets) is one of books in recent memory that I’ve been genuinely really excited to read.
After reading Bill Bryson’s wonderful (non-fiction) biography of Shakespeare, I’ve been interested in reading more historical fiction about the famous Bard, but haven’t found much to catch my eye. I tried a couple that I disliked enough that I gave on the pursuit for a while, but Hamnet has gotten great reviews and it sounded like a unique take on Shakespeare.
Hamnet is largely told with a focus on Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare. (Anne Hathaway is the name that’s commonly used, but Agnes and Anne were commonly interchangeable at that time.) The death of Hamnet, their only male child, due to the plague features prominently in the story as well.
O’Farrell never actually refers to William Shakespeare by name, which helps to detach the story from all the mythology that comes with Shakespeare and his reputation. It also helps to reinforce that, although he is still a main character here, he’s not the main character.
O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a work of historical fiction, with a lot of emphasis on the word fiction. The reality is that what’s really known about Shakespeare is spotty at best (if you want to know more, I’ll reference Bryson’s Shakespeare biography here again), but it still makes for a delightful story to wonder about his life. (I also suspect that this story wouldn’t stand up to careful scrutiny about Shakespeare and all the details of his life, see the Historical Accuracy section below, but I’m not enough of a Shakespearean scholar to say for sure.)
Instead, facts serve as the rough contours of this book that gets filled in colorfully and vividly by this moving and beautifully written story. It’s not a complex or even terribly clever rendition of Agnes and William’s story, but O’Farrell tells it in a way that’s powerful and alive.
Quick (Minor) Criticism
The character of William Shakespeare in this book is humanized and made smaller. I understand why O’Farrell might want to do that, to avoid writing yet another tribute to the greatness of the towering figure of the William Shakespeare. However, I have to admit that this aspect of the book wasn’t entirely satisfying to me. Unlike his portrayal in the book, ultimately, he wasn’t just a guy who became financially comfortable writing plays. Instead, he wrote masterpieces and a lot of them.
Apart from a very brief section where he plays a quick word game with his sister Eliza, there’s nothing in the book indicating that this is or was a brilliant person. Instead, he’s depicted as a disappointment to his parents, an absent father, a weakling and kind of an unmotivated loser in general, all of which made it hard for me to view this as a story that was about Shakespeare at all. I understand this wasn’t intended to be an origin story about William Shakespeare, but I also can’t imagine that this useless lump of a man described here would become the mythological creature that he is.
As a final note, even with that criticism, Hamnet not even being longlisted for the Booker Prize still says a lot more about a deficiencies of the Booker Prize’s judges panel (in my opinion) than it does about Maggie O’Farrell’s newest novel, which is well worth a read.
You can read more info here.
