watching hamnet like. wow. did you know that your art can express emotions unnameable to your audience? did you know that your audience's reaction to that same art can transform transmute elevate those emotions into something beyond your imagination?
I love how the film visualizes the interpretation of Hamlet used in the novel, which is pulling from the scene in the play where Hamlet asks the First Play to deliver part of Aeneas' speech to Dido about the death of Priam and the grief of Hecuba.
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?
--Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
Within the play, Shakespeare muses on the power of theatre that it can make an audience grieve for someone they've never known. Hamnet proposes that this is exactly what the play Hamlet is doing, and that's visualized beautifully in the film, with the entire audience weeping for and reaching out to the dying character Hamlet, Agnes in the midst of them, while backstage her husband weeps alone--you get a visual of grief so powerful that it can only be felt by a thousand people at once.
And four hundred years later, it's got me sobbing for the death of a child I never met, who would have died long before I was born anyway. Good job, Will, you brilliant bastard, we're still feeling your grief for you.
