Alas, poor Hamnet — it’s a beautiful film but the storyline is utter tosh

The real Anne Hathaway was eight years older than Shakespeare, but Jessie Buckley, who plays her in the film, is everlastingly young, brimming with sexuality and so in love with herself that you can’t quite bear to watch. She is the perfect mother, of course, and the childbirths are all natural — the first one being in the woods, the twins coming along indoors. Unlike all her stuffy relatives, she is at ease in her beautiful body, and too in love with all the fungi, flowers, roots and herbs in the forest to want to go up to London and find out what it is which makes her apparently dim-witted hunk of a husband so interested in all this theatre malarkey.