“I suppose,” said my friend with the faint air of disdain which is so much a feature of my interactions with others that I should probably attend to it at some point, “you won’t want to come and see Hamnet with me, will you?”

“Correctamundo, dude!” I said, beaming (either element of which response, it occurs to me, may not be wholly unconnected with the faint but pervasive disdain noted above). She sighed and shook her head. “This can’t go on, you know.”

“Ah,” I said, still beaming. “But it can! And it will!”

Hamnet, you see, is a sad film. An absolute sobfest, by all accounts, as you might expect from a story about the death of Shakespeare’s son at the age of 11 and its effects on his mother and father. And I do not watch, read or attend plays about sad things. No, thank you! Not since 2004. That was the year three people I loved died in quick succession and I have felt myself to be quite schooled enough in the........

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