There was, last fall, a lot pulling us to see the movie Hamnet—the Shakespearean subject matter, the caliber of the actors, the breathless reviews—but, as the parents of still-relatively newborn twins, we were dreading it. It’s hardly a spoiler to mention that the plot of Hamnet centers on the death of one of William Shakespeare’s twins. The scene was genuinely awful to watch, but the movie—a story of plague, passion, period costumes, and an unwashed man in a tunic skipping town to cure writer’s block—ended up thrilling us; the portrayal of two creative minds working together (and apart) was, oddly, familiar.Article continues after advertisement
For the past five years, we worked together on a shared project: we were co-writing a nonfiction book about Margaret of Anjou, a character who appears in four of Shakespeare’s plays. More a Gertrude than an Ophelia (but, in truth, unlike either), Margaret was the French-born queen of England during the Wars of the Roses, leading armies and stabbing rivals and cheating on her kingly husband. She speaks more lines than any other female character in Shakespeare (more than Macbeth or King Lear, in fact, though fewer of course than Hamlet) and is the only one of his characters whose entire life, from youth to old age, is depicted onstage.
