RSC’s ‘Hamnet’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company: Quintessence of Dust

Aristotle imagined quintessence as a fifth element beyond earth, air, fire, and water. It is that which does not decay. That which persists, even as all other things change. And frankly, it is difficult to write about quintessence without disintegrating into abstraction. But theatre, at its best, puts quintessence on stage for an audience to behold.

Director Erica Whyman does just that in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamnet, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Hamnet tells the story of Agnes (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) and William Shakespeare (Rory Alexander) in the years surrounding the life and death of their son Hamnet (Ajani Cabey). In Whyman’s telling, we discover Hamnet’s quintessence: no matter how the boy is encountered — as premonition, as living child, as corpse, as the Prince of Denmark — he remains unchanged.

Saffron Dey and Ajani Cabey in “Hamnet” at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo by Kyle Flubacker.

The production establishes this before the narrative properly begins. We meet Hamnet before we meet his parents, and before they meet each other. His voice echoes out of the dark along with his twin sister’s. Then they tumble onto stage, moving in stylized pantomime. They exist before they are conceived, set apart from the world by a veil of linen fabric — a visual motif that recurs throughout the production.

At the transition from premonition to physical presence, Hamnet and his twin sister Judith (Saffron Dey) transmute into human form. The theatrical language for this is communicated by the same linen cloth: As each preborn child approaches the moment of their birth, they move toward Agnes, a trail of cloth behind them as a tether to another world. When they pass out of Agnes and into the world, the tether releases and furls away. But the children do not appear to us as anything different. Their quintessence persists, and through these theatrical gestures, Whyman shows us that their form is something new.

The linen fabric returns again the next time Hamnet changes form. When Judith falls ill with the plague, Hamnet crawls next to his sister in bed to soothe her, pulling the linen bed covering over them as he holds her close. In the morning, Judith recovers, and Hamnet is found dead beside her. His body is wrapped tightly in the bed covering and carried away. The same fabric holds him before birth, releases him into life, and carries his body back to the earth in death.

Another material repetition emerges through the labor of the household. Hamnet’s parents, Agnes and Will, first meet each other across a wooden table covered with freshly-picked apples. When Will playfully bumps the table, several apples drop to the ground — the lost fruit a foreshadowing of the loss that will eventually befall them. Agnes picks the fruit back up and sets it back on the table: what was lost is restored upon that surface. These large wooden tables, stored on the sides of the stage and dragged into scenes to create various settings, become another visual motif. They are the surfaces upon which human labor occurs — cooking, glove-making, mixing remedies — and they are also the surfaces upon which what seems lost or discarded can be restored.

Whyman’s production evidences a careful kind of attention to these patterns of form and transmutation. Set and costume designer Tom Piper uses subtle reorientations of ladders and tables to reconfigure spaces for different scenes and locations. The apex of the A-frame home in which Agnes and Will raise their children separates to become the side walls of their later home closer to the city, shifting the “A” into what looks like an “H.” Lighting designer Prema Mehta uses warm light to illuminate interior spaces and cooler light to mark the natural world. All of these elements coalesce to depict a story that fluidly moves between the crafted world of Will and the natural world of Agnes.

Agnes is at home in nature, where she summons her falcon, gathers herbs, and gives birth to new life. Meanwhile, Will, a Latin tutor, is drawn toward the theatre, toward language and performance, toward the progeny of storytelling. Whyman’s production places these seemingly opposed forms of labor in relation to one another as two necessary and legitimate forms of creation.

At the end of the production, the wooden tables that have been present throughout the story converge and conjoin to become the thrust stage of the Globe Theatre. These surfaces that once held apples, tools, and remedies now hold another form of human labor and craftsmanship: theatre.

The logic of Whyman’s production culminates upon this new stage. Agnes, having learned that Will has written a play titled Hamlet, travels to London to see it. She watches from the edge of the new stage as her husband portrays the ghost of Hamlet’s father while the same actor we have known as Hamnet now appears within the world of the play as the tragic Prince of Denmark Hamlet. In his father’s play, Hamnet changes form again.

By the time Agnes stands at the edge of the Globe and watches Will’s story unfold, the production has already shown us what persists as form changes. And so, when Hamlet speaks from this stage-upon-a-stage, the famous soliloquy answers its own question:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how

express and admirable! in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the

world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,

what is this quintessence of dust?

In Whyman’s staging, the quintessence of dust is what remains when a soul changes form and does not entirely disappear. Hamnet is the boy before he is born, the child in the bed, the body wrapped in linen, and the figure who stands again upon the stage.

Hamnet runs through April 12 at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, before transferring to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater from April 12 through May 24. Tickets can be purchased online.