Key Highlights
- Related Stories Festivals ‘Hamnet’ Review: Jessie Buckley And Paul Mescal Magnificent In Chloé Zhao’s Stunning Emotional Story Of Love, Death, Shakespeare And Art – Telluride Film Festival News ‘Hamnet’s Chloé Zhao, Jessie Buckley And Paul Mescal Reveal The Kismet That Led To An “Acting Olympic Moment” Having won a shelf full of Oscars in 2021 for her disciplined, almost austere movie Nomadland, Zhao turned to a popular novel by Maggie O’Farrell for a glimpse of Renaissance England — one that is at once bursting with cultural rebirth and haunted by the Black Death.
- The Shakespeare family in Hamnet consists of young Latin tutor Will (played by Paul Mescal), and his vivacious wife, Agnes (a superb Jessie Buckley).
- She covets her pastoral life with her 11-year-old son, Hamnet, and two daughters, but seems confounded by the scattered, stumbling genius of her young husband.
- Watch on Deadline Will seems to be perpetually scribbling one play after another by candlelight, then drifting off to London to pitch his shows to an emerging disarray of theatrical producers — aspiring manipulators who have money and titles as well as risky political entanglements.
- Filmgoers might wish that Zhao, in addition to reading Hamnet the novel, also had a chance to study a book titled Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt, which delivers a riveting account of a chaotic society mis-ruled by Elizabeth I and torn by atheism, atomism and a potential resurgence of Catholicism.
