As an English professor, I'm supposed to be firmly in the "book was better" camp. And usually, I am. I even preferred Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List to Spielberg's Oscar-winning film. But this awards season, Hamnet has me packing away my "book was better" t-shirt.
I loved Maggie O'Farrell's novel when it came out. As a Shakespeare scholar, I appreciated how she brought Anne Hathaway—called Agnes in the book—to life. The prose was breathtaking.
But I couldn't connect with her Will Shakespeare. He was unnamed, distant, and humorless. For a guy who wrote so much comedy, this felt wrong. I just couldn't recognize him.
Then Paul Mescal played him on screen. His wry smile, easy laugh, those knowing glances—suddenly, Shakespeare had the charm I'd been missing. When I reread the book after seeing the film, with Jesse Buckley's fierce Agnes and Jacobi Jupe's heartbreaking Hamnet now in my imagination, O'Farrell's gorgeous writing came alive in new ways.
In the novel, Agnes, who is grieving the loss of her son, Hamnet, travels to London to see her husband's meditation on grief, Hamlet. On the last page, O’Farrell describes Agnes watching her husband as the Ghost of Hamlet and the actor playing a reflection of her own dead son. She "stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play."
In the film, the entire audience standing before the Globe stage reaches forward with Agnes to touch the actor playing Hamlet as he dies. All those hands grasping forward in shared grief, the broken faces of the older women on either side of Agnes—they aren't in the novel.But now, those indelible, haunting images live in my mind as I read O'Farrell's words. The movie made the book better.
Or maybe it's more accurate to say that the magical mixture of book and performance inspires the imagination. I realized: maybe I've always loved The Great Gatsby because Robert Redford was already Jay Gatsby in my mind. Maybe Wuthering Heights worked for me because Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon were already Heathcliff and Cathy. With a new Wuthering Heights in theatres now, will Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi replace those images for me?
This conversation between storytelling forms is nothing new. Nearly 50 percent of Best Picture Oscar winners, from 1927 to last year, came from novels, short stories, or plays—from Mario Puzo's The Godfather to JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to William Shakespeare's own Hamlet in 1948. This year, half the nominated films are book adaptations: Hamnet, Frankenstein, Train Dreams, Bugonia, and One Battle After Another.
We endlessly debate whether the book or the movie was better. But what about when the chemistry is just right—when the movie and the book illuminate each other, and together become something richer than either alone? I am casting my vote this year for Hamnet to win Best Picture. And rather than “the book was better” my t-shirt should read, “the movie made the book better.” But you probably won’t catch me wearing it around the English department.
Emily Bryan is a Professor of English at Sacred Heart University.