A Gen Z Reviews the Classics: How Hamnet made me embrace Shakespeare's Hamlet

Shakespeare turns 462 on 23 April, and in Stratford-upon-Avon, the medieval English market town where the playwright was born, there will be a parade. Critics will publish their tributes. People who have spent careers inside the plays will write with the confidence of long ownership, and most of it will be for readers who already agree — who come to the anniversary with their reverence intact and their relationship with the work long settled.

I am not one of those readers. Or I wasn't, until recently.

Shakespeare has always been around, in the way that certain enormous things are just always around. Every time I found myself in London, there was a play being performed somewhere — at the Globe, at the National, on some rain-damp outdoor stage in a park. Romeo and Juliet has been referenced in so many books I've loved, in Taylor Swift songs, in Gilmore Girls, folded so deeply into the texture of everything that the original started to feel almost beside the point.

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I knew of Shakespeare the way you're aware of the weather — constantly, passively, without ever quite deciding to. And each time I passed a poster or a programme or someone quoting a sonnet at a dinner party, I would feel a faint and guilty twinge of I really should, and then move on.

Hamlet, in particular, felt like a wall. I knew it was a fabulous play about a deranged man and a ghost and a lot of people dying, and I was never quite curious enough to climb it.

The play I avoided

I bought Hamnet recently in Bangalore while visiting friends, after a fairly tiresome but fun day. I started it on the flight back, and somewhere over the Deccan plateau, I had to put it down and just sit with it for a while — not because it was difficult, but because it was so unexpectedly beautiful that reading too fast felt like a waste. Maggie O'Farrell writes like she means every word, like she has decided in advance that you are worth the full version of the story. I kept wanting to slow my breathing to match the prose.

My friends had watched the film. But the book did something different, which was to make me genuinely curious about Shakespeare the person. Not the legend. The man who loved his family and left them anyway, who was apparently boisterous and funny and capable of enormous tenderness, who lost his only son at eleven and then, four years later, sat down and wrote the longest play of his career about a prince who cannot recover from loss. I wanted to know him before I knew his work. O'Farrell let me.

Before I got to Hamlet the play, though, I had already met it once — sideways, without recognising it. Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider released in 2014, and I remember my parents watching it a few months later in the living room. I was in and out because I've always been scared of films that make me feel too much — I have a habit of retreating to my bedroom when the emotional weather gets too heavy on screen, then drifting back, then retreating again.

I remember the bloodiness in the valleys, the gorgeous and terrible landscape of Kashmir turned into a stage for grief and political fury, and a lump in my throat when it ended. It was only later that I understood I had been watching Hamlet all along, transplanted to a conflict zone, made urgent and visceral in a way the original, encountered cold, never quite manages for those of us who come to it without a way in.

(Watched the trailer again recently. Film looks like a banger)

O'Farrell gave me that way in. She gave me Agnes — furious and psychic, keeping bees, giving birth alone under trees because she cannot bear to do it any other way — and she gave me a William who is soft and absent and guilty and cannot express any of it except on stage, in front of strangers, in other people's words. By the time I read at the actual play, I already knew what it had cost him to write it. I already knew whose name he was writing, over and over, every time he wrote the title.

Hamnet. Hamlet. One letter's difference between a dead son and a fictional prince. Between a father's private grief and the most performed play in the history of the English language.

What the grief is for in Hamnet

Hamnet is a book about grief. I am at the cusp of twenty-five, and I consider myself lucky, that I haven't yet experienced that one great tragedy or heartbreak that everyone around me seems to have gone through. (I am also terrified that the day is bound to come soon). Of course I've been gigantically sad about things. But I haven't been truly unravelled. And this book, with its slow lyrical prose and its total refusal to flinch from loss, both deepened that fear and somehow eased it.

O'Farrell understands that there are a thousand different ways to grieve, each ugly and beautiful in equal measure. Agnes is consumed to the point of becoming unrecognisable to her own daughters. William leaves and makes art. 

Even the scholars who have studied Shakespeare's life are divided: some argue that he processed Hamnet's death through his sunniest comedies — Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor — escaping into levity; others see the grief seeping through anyway, in a bereaved mother's lines in King John, probably written the year Hamnet died: grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me. Perhaps both are true. Perhaps he did both, and neither, and everything in between.

What I took from this is that grief may paralyse some people and make artists of others, but all are hurting. And to resent someone for the shape their grief takes — which is partly what Agnes does, and which I have done, at smaller scales, to people I love — is to demand that their insides match yours.

Agnes, at the end of the novel, goes to London to see the play. She arrives furious — her husband used their son's name as material, didn't even warn her, and she had to hear about it from her mean stepmother. And then she watches an actor walking the stage with her dead son's mannerisms, and she entirely forgives him. He grieved. Just differently. The little boy on stage is the closest she will ever come to having her son back.

What clicks

And so, finally, I read Hamlet.

The play I had spent years treating as a wall turned out to be a door. Some things I expected: the soliloquies, the ghosts, the famous lines worn smooth by centuries of repetition. What I did not expect was the humour. Nobody had ever told me that Hamlet is funny — dark and wounded and impossible to be around, yes, but funny in the way very intelligent, very sad people can be, with the timing of someone who has stopped caring what impression they make. 

There is warmth in him too, underneath everything, in the way he loves Horatio, in the way he lights up around the travelling actors, in the brief moments where you see who he might have been before the ghost arrived.

I had heard the "to be or not to be" speech enough times for it to become meaningless. In context, the words cracked open. It is a person asking, with complete seriousness, why anyone keeps going — and answering not with hope or faith or love but with plain fear of the unknown. He stays alive because he doesn't know what comes after death. That's it. That is what keeps him here. Freud reached for Hamlet when he was trying to explain the unconscious, too.

And yet what struck me most was the paralysis. Hamlet knows exactly what is wrong — the ghost has told him everything, his uncle murdered his father, took the throne, married his mother. Hamlet believes it. And he just cannot move.

I recognise this. We live in an age of total information and somehow that has made everything worse, not better. Climate science has been rattling the world for decades. We all know the problem, but we don’t know what to do about it (or we do know, but then action seems unfathomable). That Shakespeare wrote this in 1600 and it still hugely relevant (well, hats off to the human condition) is hugely funny and rather bleak.

Shakespeare turns 462 today. I came to him late, and through a lot of persuasion — through Agnes, through a father's private grief, through a name that was a boy's before it was a prince's.

Shakespeare wrote it in about 1600. We are still writing variants of it now, in every language, in every century, with different names for the ghost and the same paralysis underneath. He turns 462 today and nothing has aged. That is either the most hopeful thing about literature or the most damning thing about us.