WRITING PARTNERS? CHOOSE CAREFULLY

Two nights ago I watch Hamnet from the blue velvet couch with July 4th coming around the bend.

It’s about Shakespeare, which isn’t a spoiler.

One of the more helpful movie openings, it explained early that Hamnet and Hamet are the same name. The same.

So I was set. Hamnet it is.

 

That was Hamlet, this is Hamnet:

 

The True Story Behind Hamnet: Hamnet is historical fiction rooted in a few scarce biographical facts about William Shakespeare.

While history confirms that Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at age 11 in 1596, there is no surviving evidence of how his parents felt or what caused his death.

The acclaimed novel by Maggie O’Farrell and the subsequent 2025 film directed by Chloé Zhao fill in these historical gaps, creatively reimagining the family’s grief and proposing that the boy’s death later inspired the play Hamlet

 

Is Chloe Zhao the new Shakespeare?

My writing partner Bill and I figured it out.

These are Amazon Hamnet reviews for Maggie O’Farrell:

 

“O’Farrell moves through the family’s pain like a master of signs and signals. . . . In Hamnet, art imitates life not to co-opt reality, but to help us bear it.”
—Los Angeles Times

 

“Magnificent and searing. . . . A family saga so bursting with life, touched by magic, and anchored in affection. . . . Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life, about whether he even wrote his own plays, here is a novel that matches him with a woman overwhelmingly more than worthy.”
—The Boston Globe

 

“Heartstopping. Hamnet does for the Shakespeare story what Jean Rhys did for Jane Eyre, inhabiting it, enlarging it and enriching it in ways that will alter the readers view for ever”
–Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter

 

Creatively Reimagining Writing Partners

Taking work from 425 years ago and showing it anew? Yes.

The backdrop for Hamnet is the miserable living conditions.

Chloe Zhao showed the dirt and stink of the times with a cameo from Black Death.

Fall back another 800 years to this script, the Magna Carta, and how it shined a light forward.

My writing partner says the influencing impact of the story reverberates more than ever.

Google AI says:

 

 

We want a Maggie O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao working on the evolution of foundational principles we all live by.

The hero, like Shakespeare in Hamnet, would be the struggle to bring justice to their work.

The work? Due Process.

Co-starring the Constitution, with a cameo by the Bill of Rights.

I think the ladies could spin a powerful story with a sense of place with the dirt, the stink, and the feel.

 

PS:

This felt bad in Franco’s Spain.

 

PSS:

It feels bad anywhere, according to historical evidence and my writing partner