Hamnet

Initially, I had a big disconnect with the film. I know the book is a dramatisation or even a fiction, but the core premise is that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet to grieve about his son’s passing. I believe that may be true, but after first watch the story of Hamlet felt nothing like the story of his actual son. It even felt dishonourable to make the Hamlet die in his play, in his grief he writes a play about himself, his son, and his wife all dying. I couldn’t understand this. But second watch I had a moment in the theatre that literally shook me with realisation. I think it stemmed from the difference in regular grief and the grief of a parent. Grief of someone close to you is inherently and inconsequentially selfish. If my father dies, my grief is because I miss him, it’s about me. But parental love is almost always the opposite, it’s one of the few true scenarios where grief is selfless. When a child dies, the parent grieves the longer life their child should’ve had, that if they the parent can live to that age, their child should’ve as well. They should’ve started a family of their own, had love, found happiness. But that’s all gone for them, and now they grieve and ache thinking about the pain and fear their child suffered. Shakespeare doesn’t need to use his work to deal with what he lost, he needs it to give his son what he should’ve had. So he writes a tale of an honourable quest, he writes one of the hero hamlet, who protects his family, he writes a story where he himself passes before he ever has to see his son go. He doesn’t write a fantasy as though Hamlet never died, he creates one where he’s allowed to truly live.