The last 20 minutes of Hamnet take place at the Globe Theater during the initial performance of Hamlet. Agnes and her brother push their way to the front, so close she leans on the stage. Hamlet looks like an older version of her dead son, Hamnet. Shakespeare, her husband, plays the Ghost, as he was supposed to have done in real life. I will not go beyond this except to tell you that the premise of this scene is that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as a way to expiate his grief. No one knows if his wife, Hamnet’s mother, saw the play or what Shakespeare’s reasons were for giving the play this title.
What gave me a breathless 20 minutes was the intensity of the players, especially Shakespeare, and the emotional power of the lines as performed by them. That, and one moment when the groundlings become a part of the play, a spontaneous response, a moment when the play becomes a kind of rapture.
It’s been 15 years since I’ve taught and reread Hamlet. I taught it 5 times every year for at least 20 years, more so by far than any other piece of literature. Yet, I knew at the end of the movie, that If I were to teach it again, I would choose to center my instruction on the Ghost’s meeting with Hamlet as the key to the action in the rest of the play.
The range of emotions in that scene is enormous — the Ghost, his father, mourning the loss of his life and the betrayals of his brother and wife; his desire for vengeance, his suffering in the afterlife, his hot demands of his son to take his revenge for him; his continued love of his wife. Then Hamlet’s fear and awe of the Ghost; his shock and grief; his fury at the betrayals, his hot oath to take revenge. What underlies all of this turbulence is the sense of overwhelming loss on both their parts. That loss would be the connective tissue I would now use to bring students into the guts of the play.
I know how I would do it. It is right there in front of me. But that is another country and one I may no longer enter.
