Good Grief
HAMNET
At the end of Hamlet, everyone dies.
The truth finally comes out. Justice is done. Order is restored. And there is no one left to enjoy it.
As Hamlet is dying, Horatio tries to die with him. Hamlet stops him. He asks Horatio to stay alive to tell his story.
“Absent thee from felicity awhile…
To tell my story.”
Only then does he let go.
“The rest is silence.”
In Maggie O’Farrell’s devastating book Hamnet, now a tearjerker of a film nominated for best picture, Shakespeare loses his son just before he writes Hamlet.
The child dies. “In agony,” his mother says, recriminating a father who wasn’t present for it. So the father writes a play where the dead speak.
While Hamnet dies without words, Hamlet cannot stop speaking.
The last ten minutes of the film are transcendent. Prepare for waterworks.
The boy dies and becomes art.
The man becomes art and then dies.
Hamlet starts to feel less like a revenge tragedy and more like a transformation of grief.
Hamnet certainly is.
A way of taking something unspeakable, and giving it voice.
The novel ends with the haunting plea of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
Remember me.
You know what I remembered?
An equally haunting piece of art, written by another grieving father—who lost a child in an unspeakable way.
Part of what makes Hamnet so moving is that while it is the father’s art that helps the mother metabolize it, it is the arc of the mother’s grief that anchors the story.