Written by Lucas Cadman
Will(iam) fears the power of his pain. His father was a pitiful man who channelled anger and failure into paternal violence against his sons. This inheritance looms over Will. He cannot convince himself that he is untainted — that expressing his negative emotions will not lead to violence. Will is not alone in this fear; Agnes’ (Will’s wife, portrayed by Jessie Buckley) brother preemptively tells her that, if Will ever strikes her, he will protect her. Tellingly, she brushes his concerns off: “He is a good man,” she says.
Paul Mescal’s underrated performance brings out the unhinged, undiluted energy of the character; Mescal portrays Will’s certainty in the immense, fumbling intensity of his love with passion. His acting demonstrates the fullness of Will’s heart during otherwise insignificant scenes of young infatuation with Agnes, and paternal delight with his children — especially with his son, Hamnet. During these times, he vibrates with the energy of an unstable atom. Mescal’s acting shows that Will cannot help but be incongruously joyful when he returns home after a long season in London and raises the veil over Hamnet’s face, although only a bubonic cadaver stares back.
As the loss of the beloved Hamnet plunges the family into mourning, Will has to work through the dark emotions he fears. Agnes is different. She has no inhibitions against vividly and outwardly venting her grief. However, her deep fear is a lack of closure; Agnes is haunted by having been denied a parting moment with her dying mother, a trauma revitalised by the fact that she believed it would be her daughter— not her son— that would die prematurely. The sudden death of Hamnet denied her the chance to prepare and so intensified her grief. Will, fearful of what it would mean to give his body over to the depths of his pain, appears to Agnes to be apathetic, especially when he says that he will return to his players in London. For the first time, their relationship splinters, as Agnes cannot comprehend how Will can be so detached. In a brilliant and, shockingly, improvised moment, Agnes strikes Will.
Yet, while Will is unwilling to release his pain in the way Agnes can, he uses it to give power to his writing. Even though the creative and emotional passion fuelling Will borders on violence, he knows that his plays cannot inflict the kind of pain his father could. In the core conceit of the film, the result is Hamlet (apparently, Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable names). When Agnes comes to London to see this eponymous play, she is initially sceptical. Is it not gauche to publicly perform a play about their loss? Yet, the eponymous play cannot help but enrapture the whole audience with its resonant beauty. Agnes, being at the front of the yard, faces the most intense exposure to her husband’s passion, the power of which quickly overcomes her qualms. During those five acts, she understands that Will feels the same as her: that his grief is immeasurable because his love, like hers, is unrestrainable.
