TO DIE, TO WEEP - "Hamnet."

Two families, unconcerned with dignity.

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

The Hathaways are farmers, in the English county of Warwickshire, with close ties to the land—some would say too close, at least in the case of Agnes, a young woman so eccentrically at one with nature that she is rumored to have been born of a forest witch. The Shakespeares are led by a glover, whose business has seen better days. His eldest son—William, of course, though he is not immediately identified as such—defrays his father’s debts by tutoring Agnes’s younger brothers in Latin, an arrangement that begets many reversals of fortune. Agnes and William fall in love; conceive a daughter, named Susanna; and marry, over the protests of their families. A few years later, Agnes bears twins, Hamnet and Judith, introducing a note of dread: Agnes’s dreams have shown two children, not three, standing at her deathbed. In more than one sense, the stage is set for tragedy.

What’s in a name? Plenty. At the beginning of “Hamnet,” a tempest of a movie from the director Chloé Zhao, we’re told that, in sixteenth-century England, the monikers Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably. The premise of the film—and of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same title, published in 2020—is that, after his son’s death, in 1596, Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” in a burst of raw, unexpurgated grief. It’s a notion made for scholarly dispute: several other plays, including two comedies, “Much Ado About Nothing” and “As You Like It,” came between the death of Hamnet and the creation of “Hamlet.” Still, loss hews to no temporal logic but its own, and it would be foolish to hold O’Farrell’s unabashed historical fantasy to a persnickety standard. The more trenchant critique, surely, is that the entwining of art and life has become a tiresome conceit, predicated on the bland notion that all great fiction must have an autobiographical component and a therapeutic aim.