Shakespeare's Times...And Ours

    In popular media, the presentation of Shakespeare has become a clue to the cultural leanings of the time. A great number of variations on his plays have come and gone, including those with modern reworking like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, revisionist performances featuring all-female Casta, and popular retellings like She’s the Man and Ten Things I Hate About You. But writers and directors have also taken an interest in the life and experiences of Shakespeare himself, a shift from the dramas to the dramatist, from plays to biography - or rather pseudo-biography, since we know pretty much nothing of Shakespeare’s personal life. One enticement, it appears, is not how much but rather how little is actually known of the person who created the greatest dramatic writings the world has ever known…in any language.

    The dearth of information about Shakespeare’s life still inspires those who try to find someone else to credit for his accomplishments. These imaginative revisionists always manage to find someone who embodies their own idea of genius. In Shakespeare’s day, the real author was presumed to be one of the upper-crust, Oxbridge-educated intellectuals of the period - Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or any of a number of more or less prominent earls. (The 2011 film Anonymous egregiously picked up on that tradition.) In more recent times, the faux-laurel crown has passed to Emilia Lanier, the first woman in England to claim the title of poet. Here we find the original literary conspiracy theory that just won’t die: I expect that the honor will next be bestowed upon a person of color, very likely one of Islamic heritage.

    I am grateful that the cinematic works I’m focusing on here do at least allow Shakespeare to be Shakespeare. Still they tend to tell us considerably more about ourselves than about the Bard. Which I am certain is how he would want it! The playful and witty Golden Globe and Academy Award winning 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, directed by John Madden from a screenplay co-written by the late, great Tom Stoppard, could hardly differ more from last year’s dark and tear-jerking Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao and based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Both films are fictionalized presentations of a limited part of Shakespeare’s life. And in both, the fictional experiences undergone by the protagonist lead directly to the creation of one or more of his actual plays. And that’s where the similarity ends. 

    In the 1990s, it seemed like (from a movie industry angle, at least) we were wired to seek joy, even if it came from those difficult literary works thrown on us in high-school English class. In the 2020s, on the other hand, almost any work of fiction that hopes to be taken seriously must rely heavily on personal trauma. Redemption may be possible but only after traveling through the muck and mire of grief. So while Madden’s film chose to focus on a sweet and purely fictional love affair early in Shakespeare’s life, Zhao’s directs attention to a dark fictionalized version of the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, which occurs quite some time after the adventure of life and hope for success have lost their energy. (That the earlier film is entirely the work of male writers and filmmakers while the latter is the work of female ones is a point I can’t help noting but won’t go into here. You’re on your own with that piece of information.

    Shakespeare in Love does not, to say the least, romanticize the bonds of marriage. As in Stoppard’s brilliant play Arcadia. Marriage does little to serve the interests of either women or men. Love, however, does have a prominent place. Shakespeare is married, having left his wife to fend for herself in Stratford while he plays the stage and the field in London, but we are not invited to berate him for undertaking a passionate love affair with a wealthy merchant’s daughter, the entirely fictional Viola de Lesseps. To the contrary, we sympathize with him because his marriage will prevent his entering an official union with the love of his life. Sixteenth-century marriage had little to do with personal choice or love, but the moral atmosphere of the film was surely drawn more from the 1990s than the 1590s.

    Madden and Stoppard are candid about the liberties they have taken in revising Shakespeare’s life. Long before Sofia Coppola inserted a pair of baby-blue Converse high-tops into Marie-Antoinette’s shopping scene, Madden placed a Stratford-upon-Avon souvenir mug in Will Shakespeare’s dressing room. The film is as fictional as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night—the romantic comedy his love affair supposedly inspired. With one important difference: Shakespeare’s comic play takes place in a magical world removed from the social restraints and class restrictions that would inhibit marriages based on love. As a result, the real play, unlike the unreal real life of the film (it does get confusing), can end with most of the major characters paired off happily ever after. The cinematic Shakespeare, on the other hand, loses his love as she heads to America for a new life with her aristocratic husband, but she has provided the inspiration for another great play, which is reward enough. And so Will begins to write as the life- and art-affirming music swells and the credits roll. Stream it! It really is a wonderful film!

    Twenty-some-odd years later, our world has changed and so has Shakespeare’s. Let me admit that I enjoyed O’Farrell’s revisionist novel and Zhao’s screen adaptation of Hamnet. My biggest complaint was, and is, that many readers and/or movie-goers now think that Hamlet, the greatest literary work ever written was based, in any way, on the death of his son; which is categorically false. (I know, I know…it’s trivial, sort of, but I’m a dork.) Both versions of Hamnet have been warmly received by audiences, critics, and awards ceremonies alike. At the time of this writing, the film has already won the 2026 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture-Drama. Apparently, the age of trauma drama is not yet over. In this case, an outcome of some merit supposedly results from all the woe and misery—the creation of Hamlet. But I found the implied connections between Shakespeare’s grief and specific lines in the play strained beyond plausibility. It is true that Shakespeare wrote the majority of his great tragedies after his son died—but that was years later, and none of those plays directly or even indirectly addresses his son’s death.

    And then there is the film’s protagonist, who is neither Will nor Hamnet, but Agnes (Anne) Hathaway-Shakespeare, Will’s long-suffering wife. I don’t mean to undercut the suffering that the families of hyper-talented people were and are exposed to, but I found this version of Anne more annoying than sympathetic. She is first introduced as a falconer (shorthand for tough-skilled-independent-nature-woman-dealing-with-trauma-or-oppression-in-an-artificial-world. Falconry was actually a rather brutal form of hunting, but that is, of course, glossed over. Along with that, Agnes is known as a witch, specializing in herbal remedies and screaming for the freedom to give birth alone in the forest. But she, too, is burdened with unmanageable trauma; even before Hamnet’s death, she can’t forgive Will for leaving her to make his way in the London theater world. Only seeing a production of Hamlet finally persuades her to reconnect with her grief-stricken, self-pitying husband. Marriage, we can see, has transformed from a socioeconomic construct that obstructs true love and happiness, to a source of pain for both parties, one that is only resolved when they come to share an even greater source of trauma.

    And as Hamnet pours on the misery, Zhao’s film does everything it can to convince us of its absolute realism. The indoor scenes are so dark and the conversation so muffled that it’s difficult not to miss about a third of what passes on the screen. I haven’t noticed much concern about that though, because it is easy to soak in the despair without any words at all. I am not someone who typically turns away from the dark side of literature or film. But when I’m reading a profoundly dark novel, it’s the words that matter most, like Cormac McCarthy. And yet, Hamnet is the version of Shakespeare’s life that is capturing the mood of the moment, the one that apparently speaks to viewers of their own lives, their own fears, their own suffering - real or imagined. It appears that people now find comfort in the idea that the life of even the greatest of writers is no more satisfying than their own. Creative genius can be understood simply as a particular response to the same kind of trauma we all face.

    Upbeat contemporary movies like Wicked: For Good (which I have seen) and K-Pop Demon Hunters (which I have not) may entertain, but they aren’t considered serious works of art - and they are ostensibly directed at a very young audience. It might be cool to embrace them, but it certainly does not signal your intellectual bona fides the way Shakespeare in Love once could. Only immersing ourselves in someone else’s spirit-breaking trauma can do that. Though I’m not proposing that we should - or even could - return to a ‘90s-style age of innocence, I’m long since ready for the trauma era to come to an end.

    However, one further media offering does provide me with a sense of hope regarding Shakespeare. If Shakespeare In Love is one extreme and Hamnet is the other, another version of Shakespeare’s life occupies the middle ground: Ben Elton’s hilarious British television series Upstart Crow, which appeared from 2016 to 2018, and can be seen on Prime as well as BritBox. Neither soaking itself in love nor wallowing in grief, this Shakespeare is characterized primarily by comic anxiety, particularly regarding his lack of either formal education, aristocratic birth, or the status that accompanies those advantages, especially in 16th century England. How can he ever compete with the “posh-boy folderols” he is up against?

    But even as he’s consumed by self-doubt, which plays against his desperate need for affirmation, our hero continues to pen one masterpiece after another. He is surrounded by a small group of London friends and supporters (all of whom are engaging, fully developed characters themselves), but his nemesis, the poet and critic Robert Greene, constantly appears, ready to bring him down another notch. The series title draws on an actual criticism the real Greene made of Shakespeare in 1592, when he described him as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” Elton’s script ingeniously integrates knowledge of Shakespeare’s time, plays, and sonnets, and of the critical reception of his works from the 1500s to the present, with satire of present-day British culture.

    The themes of love and loss are both included. This Shakespeare makes comically bumbling and thoroughly unsuccessful efforts to impress others, including the Dark Lady and Fair Youth, the two love objects of his sonnets. So much for passionate love affairs. And one episode in the series, the only one that does not provoke laughter, treats the death of Shakespeare’s son with sensitivity and compassion. Bring tissues for that episode. You’ve been warned!

    Equally relevant is the show’s presentation of Anne Hathaway Shakespeare. Living and working in London, Will makes regular trips back to Stratford for her assistance. Here I find an Anne I can truly admire: uneducated but smart, independent, capable, and clear-sighted, she is a thoroughly believable character, and an ideal counter-point to her brilliant but often misguided husband. She is the one who sees before Will does that the story of Macbeth should be a horror-filled tragedy not a comedy, and that it might be possible to present a Jew with actual human characteristics.

    Like Shakespeare in Love, Upstart Crow makes no claim about the truthfulness of its vision. Instead, it revels in revealing the silliness of those revisionists who do make such claims. In one of its ingenious conceits, we learn that Will is writing plays attributed to Christopher Marlowe in an effort to secure the cool, popular courtier’s continued friendship and support. Elton’s most brilliant move is to have Robert Greene and his friends finally come up with the best way to destroy their highly successful, disturbingly low-class rival; they will start the rumor that some mysterious person of high rank actually wrote his plays. Greene cackles as he imagines the oafish future generations who will fall for his trick.

    It is fair to say that both Shakespeare in Love and Hamnet present versions of Shakespeare that effectively capture the cultural milieu of their times. But Upstart Crow presents us with a Shakespeare for all time. And what could be more Shakespeare than that?!

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com