I am sorry for everyone. That’s all I can say in this season of devastation, of loss, including my beloved, beautiful, wacky and wondrous Aunt Charlene. Some things are just too much in their time, in immediacy.
But because it’s Christmas, and at Christmas you excoriate foolishness — That’s not a saying? Yet? — I’m going to lift my spirits via one long-favorite game: picking on other writers.
Believe me, this is a punch up, as the writer in question, Maggie O’Farrell, has not only completed books (I’ve tried five, thus far, and am only close to The End on one), but had them published (nine novels, an autobiography, and a pair of children’s books for her; for me, let’s see, zip, zilch, nada, and the ever-popular not a sausage).
She’s not only won awards (I do have a stack of these, from the Associated Press and Alabama Press Association, mostly for column writing, but oddly, also for business writing? Not much competition, I guess. Oh, and cough cough, one sliver of our shiny Pulitzer Prize), but better yet, been read by Reese Witherspoon (Me, not so far as I know, though if so, hey kid, maybe you could adapt my “War on Saturnalia” as a wacky fantasia. Or that year I worked as a Santa in a mall, and kept a recorder running by my throne, could become a holly-jolly vehicle).
Her 2020 novel “Hamnet & Judith” suggests William Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” as, in part, a reaction to the death of his son at 11. There’s a movie out, “Hamnet,” as the novel was known in some editions, directed by the wonderful Chloé Zhao (double Oscar-winner for “Nomadland”), and it’s getting some good reviews, notably for leads Paul Mescal, playing Will, and Jessie Buckley, as Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, who stayed behind and raised the kids, Judith, Hamnet and Susannah. Susannah was eldest; Judith and Hamnet were twins.
So far so interesting. I’m all for tales toting a torch, and creative conjecture is standard when it comes to non-royal figures from 400-plus years ago, about whom there aren’t a lot of printed words to tell us raw truth.
It’s known Hamnet died, and was buried Aug. 11, 1596, but what’s not known is why. The novel and film suggest Hamnet died from plague, and that certainly was a possibility: Bubonic plague had swept the Warwickshire countryside. Nasty stuff, plague. Big news in the 16th century, and the 21st.
“The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” is considered by many the greatest play by the greatest playwright, though I’d lean toward “Macbeth,” “King Lear” or “Twelfth Night.” But Hamlet certainly rings up there in legend, and in name-recognition, with Romeo, and Judith, er, Juliet. Wait! Namesake?
Hahahahayeahno.
While Shakespeare did write masterly tragedies after his son’s death, he also wrote many of his greatest comedies: “Much Ado About Nothing,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” (possibly finished prior to Hamnet’s death, in 1595), “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night,” along with not-so-fine but still-comedic works such as “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “All’s Well That Ends Well.” That period also encompassed some of his harder-to-classify works ― trouble plays, or romances ― such as “Pericles,” “The Winter’s Tale,” “The Merchant of Venice” and “Cymbeline.”
Taken for all in all, it’s more likely Will wrote plays for audiences, not catharsis.
Now the sonnets may be a different story.
But that’s a different story.
“Hamlet” drew on earlier sources, as did many of Will’s works. Notable: a 13th century Scandinavian tale, derived from oral tradition, in which the revenge-seeking prince is named Amleth. Not just an anagram: Move the H up front. Also, Thomas Kyd is thought to have written a version known as the Ur-Hamlet, though the script’s been lost to time. Scholars believe it was performed as early as 1587, nine years before Hamnet’s death.
The idea of grief driving that long play doesn’t, well, play. Hamlet dies ― in his 30s, not pre-teens ― by his own machinations. Pretty much everyone dies. That’s not grief; it’s more existential meditation. It’s about foolhardiness, aka human nature. It’s far more Oedipal than autobiographical.
If we are to believe Will wrote out his agony, then it’s more likely Hamnet drowned. “Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest” and “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” all end on miraculous reunions with those thought dead at sea. Wishful writing: In “Twelfth Night,” female-male twins Viola and Sebastian, each thinking the other drowned in a shipwreck, re-unite, alive.
There are child deaths, and misunderstood not-deaths, in “King John,” “Cymbeline,” “Measure for Measure,” and more. Even “Macbeth” centers on kids, specifically Fleance, who Mackers’ murderers fail to kill, and who thus goes on to father a line of kings, and the usurpers’ inability to raise an heir. Lady M says she has “given suck,” presumably to one who died young, as far too many did.
My mother, who passed this summer, saw her two eldest sons, my big brothers, die. My first girlfriend passed away young. My father was gone too soon. That’s not the sum, the extent, the weight, but a fair sampling. “Hamlet” makes me feel nothing about any of those losses, those tragedies.
In dreams, though, when I skip to a parallel universe, where they’re magically restored to a fuller existence?
That hits.
In act five of “Pericles,” the beleaguered once-noble king is, agonizingly slowly, reunited with Marina, a daughter he’d thought dead and buried. Compounding miracles, the goddess Diana brings them together with Thaisa, his wife and Marina’s mother, thought to have died at sea.
Pericles proclaims: “This! This! No more, you gods; your present kindness makes my past miseries sports! You shall do well that on the touching of her lips I may melt and no more be seen.
“O come; be buried a second time within these arms.”
There’s your grieving artist, drawing out bitter poison, restoring order. Writing love back to life.
Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at [email protected]. To support his work, please subscribe to The Tuscaloosa News.
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