Does “Hamlet” Need a Backstory?

0:28Can anyone do the speech? And by opposing in them to die to sleep. Go, Vincent. Perchance to dream? Not yet. No more.

0:41This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How you guys doing? Turkey Day, how was it? It was good. It was really nice, actually. It was nice. I saw my family. I ate. There's still stuffing in my fridge. Yeah. Which for me is a mark of success. I thought you were going to say there's still stuffing in my belly. I'm stuffed like a Christmas goose. Like a prized turkey. Yeah. I did have a lot of stuffing. It was my favorite food on Thanksgiving by far.

1:18Anyway, that done, it's December. And that means we're officially in Oscar movie season. So, you know, just get ready for some real cinema on this podcast. So recently, the three of us saw Hamlet, which I'm sure will feature in a lot of these Oscar races. It's a fictionalized story about the writing of, of course, Hamlet, the beloved Shakespeare play. Directed by Chloe Zhao, the movie stars Paul Meskel as William Shakespeare and Jesse Buckley as his wife, Anya's. He's got more inside of him than any man I've ever met. Who are you looking for? William Shakespeare. I have no talent awaiting. But women and my family see things.

2:06What do you see? It's a really interesting, complicated movie, I think. On the one hand, there's this really loose biographical element about Shakespeare's perhaps most famous play. But on the other hand, it's a story about intense grief and, I guess, how to move through it. Of course, we're going to hear everything about how you guys thought about it in the course of the show. But first impressions? Do you want to know my first impressions? First impressions. Okay, I have a sense what else is going to say. A couple words, yeah. Hated it. Hated it. Oh, God, I can't wait to talk about this. Okay.

2:42Know me. So, shockingly, did not hate it. Good. I'm making progress. I was sure I was going to hate it, but enjoyed it and thought it had a bunch of things going for it. Cool. We got the whole gamut because over here, loved it. Wow. So today we're going to talk about Hamlet and about Hamlet, of course, the play itself. Hamlet has never not been popular, right? It's been in production almost constantly since it was written over 400 years ago. And in that time, it's undergone all manner of revisions, updates, adaptations, reimaginings. Hamlet, to me, is all about how the common difficulties of life, grief, betrayal, loneliness, indecision, strike each of us with a unique and particular pain.

3:33It's also about how all of this lands specifically on a troubled young man. In 2025, we hear a lot about the plight of young men, economic, interpersonal, on and on. their propensity to shoot people, all that stuff. And I want to know, what is Hamlet's hold on us now? And does this contemporary narrative about men have anything to do with it? So that's today on Critics at Large. Who is Hamlet today?

4:06All right. All right. Let's start with Hamlet. The film came out in select theaters during Thanksgiving week. It's going into wide release later this month. I saw it in the great big cavernous Theater 3 at BAM, which I love. It's directed by Chloe Zhao, adapted from a novel of the same name by Maggie O 'Farrell, who was sort of the co-screenwriter with Chloe Zhao. Can somebody lay out the premise before we jump upon it? I can try. Please. Okay, so we're seeing William Will Shakespeare behind the scenes as a man rather than a playwright. And he meets a girl, a woman, who is said to be the daughter of a witch, kind of like a wild girl, a girl of the woods.

5:01They live on the edge of a forest and the movie opens, you know, with this vista, this beautiful vista where she's kind of like she's seen from above kind of curled up in the roots of an old oak tree or something. I don't know if it's oak actually, but, you know. And Shakespeare, whose name isn't mentioned for almost the entirety of the movie, we're meant to know, of course, that it is Shakespeare. But he's just kind of like a hot guy with like facial hair who sort of skulks around. is very taken with this woman, Agnes, and they kind of have this almost wordless courtship. Agnes, wait!

5:48I know who you are. Who am I? Well, I don't know you, but I've heard... I'm the daughter of a forest witch. Yes, people say that, but that's why I don't... I am my mother's daughter. I've learned many things from her.

6:05What are you looking at? You. Why?

6:12They make love and she... They do. They do. They make love on a table that is laden with fruits. With significantly apples. With apples. And she gets pregnant. They get married. She has first a girl and then a little bit later gets pregnant again and has twins. Meanwhile, it suddenly emerges that Will, Shakespeare, is Shakespeare. That is, it emerges suddenly about mid-movie that he's a writer and that he is kind of stagnating in the countryside and must go to London. Anya stays home with the kids. But then the plague comes. What ends up happening is that one of the twins, named Hamnet, dies. And then grief comes, horrible grief.

7:11And Agnes sort of, you know, almost loses her mind from this grief. Towards the end of the movie, we, for the first time, are in London with Shakespeare, who, it emerges, has written a play. The play is Hamlet. And the implication is that he was deeply affected by the death of Hamnet, his son, and in response to it has written this play about Prince Hamlet in Denmark, the play that we know as Hamlet. I will say that what I liked about this movie and surprised me is there's no volubility in it right it's it's it's quite wordless there's a long stretches of silence and a lot of focus on nature and kind of the the lived environment that these characters are in and this is before again it is revealed that Shakespeare is Shakespeare I really enjoyed that I thought it was beautiful I and And as I get older, I'm kind of like, I find myself more in touch with a pastoral.

8:19I'm like, oh, I'm like enjoying these wooded scenes of like whatever mushrooms being dug from the earth. I was like, this is like some Scandinavian movie from the 80s. Like, I really like this, you know. This is all before the whole like Hamlet, Hamnet, playwriting thing happened. And later, I liked it less. Although I didn't hate it, but I also didn't think it totally worked. Okay, now I'll shut up. Alex, I mean, I know we know what you thought. We know what you thought, but we're eager to hear. And I bet I'll also agree with you. No, here's what I want to say to start. If you love this movie, I'm really glad you love this movie.

9:04And I don't mean to say that in a condescending way. I wanted to love this movie. It sounds like such an asshole thing to say, right? Yeah, I'm sorry. Maybe I just made it all worse. I'm happy for you. I rub salt in the mood. No, I understand there's this, Hamnet is sweeping the nation. All I hear is not a dry eye is to be seen. I did cry like a baby. Good, you know, and that's great. I wish I had cried. I wish I had had— Your heart is made of stone, Alex. Well, no, but I wish I had felt. I wish I had had these feelings that's been moved by this grief. And instead, I have quibbles and I have bigger problems with the movie Hamnet.

9:44So I have read the novel Hamnet, on which the movie is based, Maggie O 'Farrell's novel. The stuff you love, Nomi, is stuff I really didn't like in this movie. To me, this movie felt romanticcy adjacent. We have the strong, noble heroine who is, of course, iconoclastic. God forbid she's an ordinary woman. No, she has to be singular. She's got to be someone who modern women look at and think, if I had lived in 1595, I wouldn't have been an ordinary housefrau. I would have been her. I would have been Agnes, barefoot, wandering into the forest with my kestrel above me because I'm cool and free. I would have had my hair down.

10:24Once my mother died in front of me in childbirth, I too would have renounced the church because I'm a free thinker. Can I just say something? Yes, of course. I think we found my romanticcy. We found your romanticcy. This is it. Yes. This is it. We found it. I think we found at least that aspect of it. You know how I was like romanticizing it. The hot Latin tutor with a single earring arrives to teach Latin. And by the way, the movie doesn't make this totally clear, but both in life, in the real, we know very, very little about Shakespeare's life and the life of Anne Hathaway, his wife. But one thing we do know is that he was 18 when they got married.

10:54She was 26 and she was pregnant. So something had gone down. Vincent, defend this movie. Well, here's the thing. And Nomi's point about the pastoral, I think, first of all, I deeply relate to about sort of as life goes on being more attracted to sort of nature as an object of observation and study. I guess I've always had that part of me, but I do feel that it has grown. In this movie, though, I think it is important. And I don't think it's just about the affect of the character being sort of she's a woodsy woman against the people of or, you know, she's a witchy person against the church and et cetera.

11:34But I think much more importantly, the work with landscape is so good. I think there are so many beautiful images of, you know, the huge tree and this little cave under the root system and bodies being very small against the sort of grandeur of the landscape. There's a scene where a childbirth scene, actually. There's a big storm and the river water is seeping into the room where Amias is giving birth. And she can sort of she connects this to, you know, Williams on his way somewhere. He's on a boat. Like the panic of that. All of that to me makes the first half of the movie very clearly like about nature.

12:15About all of our frailty, our sort of how subject we are to forces outside of ourselves, how much we are out of control, etc., etc. There's a moment where Annis' mother-in-law, William's mother, has an almost direct-to-camera monologue. It's the only real monologue in the movie. And she's saying, like, you have to know that things can go wrong. It's in the middle of the sort of plague scene. And she's like, you can't take it for granted that your child lives and breathes and the heart is beating in their chest. I think she says you have to always keep your guard up. Yeah, it's basically that. Like, it can go away any moment.

12:53And therefore, and it's like a disquisition on maybe the connection between love and nature. That we are not in control over those items which we love. and therefore, you know, we have to sort of surrender. The second half of the film, which, you know, there's a huge shot of the globe, all of its sort of, first of all, its exterior, and then inside all of its ropes and pulleys and the background sort of scene painting, which is a painting of a forest, not unlike the real forest, the real forest that we've been looking at sort of cinematically. It's really a two-act system, this movie. Nature on the one hand, artifice on the other, and how our lives as people who are human animals but also making things, people that are attracted to art creators and people who receive creations, deal with artifice mostly to negotiate our relationships to nature.

13:52So that all I found really intellectually stimulating. Yes, I did cry in the middle of the movie. And I also just thought the performances were incredible. Yeah. Jesse Buckley was amazing. Paul Mezcal is just like fucking batting a thousand in the thing. There's one moment when it doesn't work. When he's like looking over the Thames and like says the to be or not to be speech. I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, stop. Thank you. So that was like flawed. That moment, it did not work. But he could have just stood there looking at us with his eyes. And I'm like, God, they're both to me just out of control in this movie.

14:29Jesse Buckley is very good. You know, this movie, I think we should raise the issue here that one critique of this movie that's going around is that Hamnet is that it pulls at the heartstrings. The movie, I think what that critique is supposed to mean is that it really delves into the particulars of the way that this child dies. You see a very horrible death of a kid. It's not glossed over. It's you're with Agnes as she screams in the room as her son dies. and it's a little bit like the critique that art is manipulative. I've also seen this movie called Manipulative. Well, art, it's supposed to manipulate.

15:09So that's okay, but what I, but I mean, guys, it didn't get me, this movie didn't get me at all. Like the grief parts of it didn't, I felt, yes, I felt that much like Hamlet, you know, that Chloe Zhao would like to play upon me as upon a pipe, you know, which is what Hamlet says to Rosencrantz. She tried to play you like a fiddle. She tried to play upon me, and I did not feel played upon. And I think a big part of why is that I could not connect. Because I love Hamlet, the much bigger issue I have with all of this, with Hamlet as a book and also as a film, is that I don't find it illuminates anything about Hamlet the play.

15:51In fact, I don't understand it as a reading of Hamlet, period. The raison d 'etre for this whole thing is to say this is the origin of this work of art. This work of art came around so that as a way for Shakespeare to deal with his own feelings of grief and sorrow and also to address, literally address his wife, who communication completely cracks between them after the death of their son and it's repaired. It's a very modern, like, therapeutic process. It's art therapy. Hamlet is art therapy is what this movie says. And, of course, what can be presented on stage in the film is very, very little of the play because it makes no sense with the actual play Hamlet.

16:30Like, I'm watching this thinking, oh, I wonder what Agnes, who's standing in the theater, thinks about Hamlet's absolute hatred for his mother and his fury at his mother. I'm wondering about that. I'm wondering what she thinks about the character of Ophelia, who in turn is set up and betrayed by Hamlet and driven mad and driven to death by what Hamlet does. And so the complexity and the intensity and all the many hundreds of meanings that are in the play Hamlet boil down to this. It just breaks the illusion to me. And I don't understand what is concretely being said. Anyway, go ahead. Charge at me.

17:05No, I just don't. No, no, no. I just don't. Maybe the movie purports to do that, but I don't think the movie is trying to explain Hamlet at all. I think it's trying to show. So it's almost like Hamlet, and maybe, and I could see this as a critique of the movie. And I like what you said about like, if you are going to invoke Hamlet, all of a sudden all of Hamlet comes to someone who has read the play. That is like, I think that's a really good critique. But to me, what is good about the movie is that Hamlet is almost just like capital A artwork in this movie. It's a kind of theorem about the place of art in our otherwise unartful lives.

17:46like if it were trying to be a one-to-one, here's Hamlet, here's this autobiographical thing, I wouldn't like it either. But I just like didn't read it that way at all. Well, I'm happy for you because it's pretty hard when a text precedes a movie saying that Hamlet and Hamlet are the same name and the whole thing is hammered on your head as hard as possible that this is why Hamlet came to be to ignore it.

18:11Didn't the scenery totally remind you of the background home screen for macOS Sequoia. We're all looking at it, baby. Minimize your browser windows and you'll be in Hamlet. Oh, that's so funny. That tree is so much more gnarly than that. It looks like, that looks like the scenery in the play. Nothing wrong with that.

18:36In a minute, it's our favorite Hamlets on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

18:52I'm Rebecca Ford, Senior Awards Correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

19:32Do you guys remember the first Hamlet that you ever saw? or the first time you read it, whatever, and did that, like, make a deep impression on you? I love this question because I was going to say, for me, it wasn't seeing, it was reading. Same deal. Absolutely, reading. And not only do I remember it, I have my first original copy of Hamlet that I read in high school. I have my little Alex Schwartz, you know, grade 12 thing in there with the Roman numeral for 12 and all of my notes. Just to give you a sense of how advanced my thinking about this was. So when Hamlet first appears, The king, the new king Claudius, who is, of course, brother to Hamlet's father, Old King Hamlet, has married Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, two months after, nary two months after Hamlet's father was buried.

20:19The body not yet warm. Cold. The body not yet cold. Yep. The king says, but now my cousin Hamlet and my son. And Hamlet says, a little more than kin and less than kind. And I just wrote, brilliant. Which you were right about. Brilliant. Got to just hand it to that Shakespeare. He can do it. No, yeah. To me, Hamlet was hugely important. I did also encounter it in school. Reading Hamlet was the way I learned a lot else. So, you know, I was taught iambic pentameter and how to scan poetry via Hamlet. Like the study of literary devices, alliteration, anaphora, the beginning of a line in the same way over and over.

21:07And so, yeah, it couldn't be more formative. How about you, Nomi? I never studied it. I mean, I remember the Kenneth Branagh adaptation from the mid-90s, from 1996, I believe. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the same. I remember it in the context more of Kenneth Branagh than of Hamlet. That's fair. You know, that period where he was like he was doing Shakespeare and everybody was like he is the second coming of, you know, whatever, like the genius of Kenneth Branagh, you know, his his coupled them with Emma Thompson before they separated. That is my context for Hamlet because I'm an idiot.

21:56And it's like four hours long. And it's I remember I'm sorry. I'm such a Philistine. Like I remember Nod being extremely – I remember like dragging my feet through it because I was like this is important. You know what I'm saying. Of course I know what you're saying. And I think to insult yourself as a Philistine is just – it's wrongheaded. Wow. I think it's Kenneth Branagh who's to blame. It might be Kenneth Branagh. Let's just blame him. And so I am looking forward to our discussion today because we each brought a little bit of Hamlet to the table, right? Little versions. We each have our little thing that we're going to talk about, right?

22:36Yeah. I will happily start the sort of show and tell portion. Yes, please do. Because I'm looking forward to what you're going to share with us. I will just say that I watched the trailer for it. I've never watched it. And I was like, God, I have to watch it. You do. This is Hamlet, or as it is sometimes known, Hamlet 2000. My father. I see my father. The king, your father. In my mind's eye. Directed and adapted by the filmmaker Michael Almereda. It stars Ethan Hawke as Hamlet, who is a film student who's back from college because of the death of his father, who was the CEO of the Denmark Corporation.

23:25Played by Sam Shepard. Sam Shepard is the ghost. His first time appearing to Hamlet is through a CCTV camera. Kyle McLaughlin is Uncle Claudius, which I love. Kyle McLaughlin is like the most sinister looking. We've talked about him on our David Lynch episode. He's the perfect guy to be Uncle Claudius. Diane Venora as Gertrude. Liev Schreiber as Laertes. Very good. Julia Stiles, beautiful as Ophelia. and it's got so much going on. First of all, the choice of Hamlet as a film student corresponds a little bit to what I was saying about Chloe Zhao, which is that it really takes seriously cinema as medium and Hamlet is always looking at screens, whether it is the information from the ghost, the way he finds out certain key plot points is all through this sort of like mechanisms of surveillance.

24:17So it's very contemporary in this way. his to be or not to be occurs in a blockbuster video. He's walking down the aisles, and the funniest thing is that every single one of the little genre markers says action on it. Here's the rub. For in the sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause. And he's just going through the aisles, sort of, sometimes it's in voiceover, sometimes he's sort of muttering to himself. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time? He's wearing a little snow cap with flaps over the ears. It's one of those Guatemalan hats.

24:56Yeah. Woolen Guatemalan, like, ear flaps. Big ear flaps with the strings coming down from each flap. And he just has that wounded, angry indecision. He's a perfect Hamlet. And Almereta, at every step, is kind of choreographing these wonderful set pieces, whether it's in a fancy Manhattan apartment or sort of walking down a glass hallway. Everything is just so downbeat, evocative. It is easily, easily. And I really like Hamlet. It is easily my favorite Hamlet. Michael Almereta, you will always be famous to me. I saw it. I just haven't seen it in many, many years. But I remember being very into it.

25:38There's a scene in the Guggenheim. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a favorite? I do. Well, so I was wondering which version of Hamlet I should rewatch. And then Tom Stoppard died. My husband said, why don't you watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead? It's some version of Hamlet. The, you know, play written by Stoppard and first staged in 1966. But then, of course, was made by Stoppard as well, directed by Stoppard as a movie in 1990. Now, the Stoppard play, which I've never seen it staged, but I rewatched the movie, is a classic postmodern gambit, right? It's kind of switching the focus, kind of like turning the dial on Hamlet to these side characters, right?

26:31Rosencrantz and Guilderstrom are the friends of Hamlet who are used by King Claudius to help conspire against Hamlet and take him off to England to be killed. Minor characters. And so it's turning the dial on them from minor to major. And it's also turning the dial from tragedy to comedy. and I remember watching this movie when it came out again the 90s being like oh this is this is smart you know this is like I want to be smart this is like oh it's post-modernism it's like they're it's quoting the play but it's actually about you know it's kind of like shifting the stakes of it etc etc and then I like was like okay I guess I'll watch it it'll probably be annoying and I was like okay I love this beautiful there's nothing better than that yes first of all Tim Roth We love to love, as we say frequently.