Hamnet was playing on the bedroom TV last night. It’s a fictionalized semi-autobiographical representation of Shakespeare and his immediate family life.
The first scene opens with Agnes (Shakespeare’s love interest) asleep below an enormous tree next to a mysterious cave. She wakes up, slips on a hawker’s gauntlet, and summons a hawk to hand. The hawk is out of time and place, as it’s a Harris Hawk, native to the American Southwest, Mexico, and South America, and unused in falconry until the early 1970s.
Another common movie irritant: the hawk’s vocalization is also out of time and place, as it’s the cry of a Red-tail Hawk — another American bird unused in Elizabethan falconry.
Agnes is said to be the daughter of a forest witch who knows herbal lore, a plot device which helps weave together a story board rooted in nature, mysticism, illness and grief.
Hamnet is a very good film; forgive it its small (and all too common) avian trespasses.
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