The Myth of Hamnet: Between Affect and Fabulation

Abstract

This article examines the Hamnet myth – the myth surrounding Hamnet, the son of William Shakespeare – as a case of fabulation in scholarly biographical discourse (S. Greenblatt, J. Shapiro, G. Greer, L. Cowen Orlin) and in contemporary biofiction and biopic (M. O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet and its screen adaptation by Chloé Zhao). Drawing on a range of scholarly and biographical sources, the article demonstrates that documentary evidence concerning Shakespeare’s life gives rise to prolific fabulation, and that the conviction that Hamlet serves as a memorial to the playwright’s deceased son functions as one of the most persistent myths of the Bard. The narrative strategies of O’Farrell’s novel are analyzed – the “dramatic present,” immersive engagement with quotidian life and corporeality, focalization on trauma and the female experience of loss. It is argued that, unlike the epistemic modality of scholarly biography, these strategies are oriented not toward the probability of an event but toward the production of affect. The biographical novel Hamnet (and the eponymous film adaptation by Chloé Zhao) is examined as a phenomenon of metamodernism with all its inherent features: its affective dominant (the themes of alterity, trauma and mourning, shared experience; a marked emphasis on the material and the corporeal; narrative strategies of dramatization and immersivity; an appeal to the affective experience and empathic engagement of the reader/viewer). The article concludes that in contemporary culture the very fact of biographical intellectual play gives way to affective experience and empathy, and that the Hamnet myth becomes a space for the performative enactment of loss, mourning, and trauma through art.