The Father, Son and Hamlet’s Ghost

JOURNEY #21: TO THE OTHER SIDE

"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

               — James Joyce, Ulysses 

Patrick Swayze reaches back from the other side in Ghost

I’ve always liked a good ghost story. Not the haunted-house kind, but the emotional one you find in the movie Ghost, where Patrick Swayze reaches across from the other side to find a connection with a loved one.  

So when I went to see Hamnet, I thought I’d be spending the night focusing on the life of William Shakespeare. But, to my surprise, I found myself thinking about James Joyce, who first proposed a remarkable theory about the relationship between Shakespeare, his son and a ghost.

For centuries, many readers have assumed that Shakespeare was, in a sense, speaking through Prince Hamlet, and the character functioned as a kind of stand-in for the playwright himself.  

In Ulysses, Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus challenges that assumption, and offers a different take. 

Stephen argues that Shakespeare expressed his grief for his dead eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, not through Prince Hamlet, but through the Ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Stephen presents his theory to a group of scholars in the Irish National Library, building up the argument brick by brick, like a courtroom lawyer making his closing arguments.

He points out that when Hamlet first premiered at the Globe Theatre in London, Shakespeare was the actor who portrayed the role of the Ghost on stage.

He explains how the names Hamlet and Hamnet are almost interchangeable, and he proposes that Shakespeare could only have chosen the name of the play to keep the memory of his son alive forever.

Stephen goes on to imagine the emotions that Shakespeare must have felt, as a grief stricken father, dressing up like a ghost at every performance of Hamlet, crying out the name of his dead son. 

Stephen argues that when Shakespeare said “Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit” he was speaking to two separate sons:

• "To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet…”

• … and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live forever."

Yet there’s a rub…as a living person on stage, Shakespeare calls out to his dead son, Hamnet  — while as a character in the play Hamlet, the dead father speaks to his living son from the other side.

Wow, talk about emotional resonance! I get chills just thinking about it.

It reminds me of that line from the movie Ghost: “The love inside, you take it with you.”  In Shakespeare’s case, he didn’t just take it with him, he put it on the stage so it could live forever. 

A brief note for readers who plan to see the film, Hamnet: the following reflects on the film’s emotional and thematic shape rather than its plot.

Chloé Zhao — who directed the movie Hamnet and co-wrote the screenplay with Maggie O’Farrell, based on her 2020 book of the same name — takes Stephen’s theory and breathes life into it.  

The movie arrives at this same emotional truth without ever naming it. It doesn’t mention Joyce. It doesn’t pursue theory. It simply shows a family marked by loss, and then lets Hamlet form in the background as the natural artistic shape that sorrow naturally takes. The shift in the play makes emotional sense when you hear the grieving father speaking to his son from beyond.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the film, Hamnet, wins a few Oscars. It’s that strong a film.

In a recent interview, O'Farrell confirmed the special link between Stephen Dedalus and Hamnet and Hamlet. What’s more, O’Farrell said that even before Zhao was involved, she always envisioned Paul Mescal as the ideal actor to play Shakespeare. Tellingly, this insight came to her while watching Mescal portray Stephen Dedalus in a play based on Ulysses at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. 

In retrospect, it makes sense that Joyce’s theory on Hamlet was well known to O’Farrell. After all, she was born in Northern Ireland, studied English literature, and once said that if she were to be washed up on a desert island, the book she’d want with her is Ulysses. 

So this journey comes full circle. Joyce’s quote at the top of this post suggests we walk through our days only to meet ghosts, old men, young women and ourselves. Decades ago O’Farrell read Ulysses which likely sparked an idea for her book about Shakespeare. Years ago O’Farrell went to a play based on Ulysses and ran into the actor playing Stephen who would later play her Shakespeare. More recently I went to a movie based on O’Farrell’s book, and I ran into the ghost of James Joyce. 

You never know who you’ll run into and how they’ll impact your life. It turns out that Stephen wasn’t just talking to a group of scholars in 1904, he was setting the stage for a film a century later.