Hamnet is subjectively female

I went to see Hamnet during the matinée last Sunday with a cherished female friend … We had no idea what we were in for!

This film is a complete concentric work of art, fiction based on a few facts (as far as I know). Agnes is William Shakespeare’s wife, and the film is focused on her experience rather than being much about William - although I was most intrigued by the case study of how the masculine and feminine process grief differently and where they might optimally intersect in the visible world. This also made me much more curious about William Shakespeare as a magician in his own right.

This film made visible so much of what it means to be female, particularly prior to the modernization of the female persona, during a time of utter suppression of the Wild Feminine, when anything rooted and powerful about being female was considered witch-craft and subject to attack.

This film made visible for me, on the silver screen, the nuances of becoming a mother, the kind of bravery with which I want to be capable of mothering myself and my children.

Through the sacredness of theater, externalizing this branch of despair gave me an opportunity to connect with bravery in communion with humanity - the ancestors, the colleagues and the descendants. For no matter what clothes we wear, we all must grapple with the mysterious presence of death. This film made Shakespeare real for me, as well as the power of theater to move our placement on the spiral a little further along … To make meaning of what happens between birth & death.

If you choose to immerse yourself in this film, be warned it is really real.