Giselle Lipsky

Director Chloé Zhao begins her 2025 film Hamnet with picturesque shots of an English forest and a young woman asleep. The wind whistles through the trees and a bird flies overhead. Soon, when she emerges from the woods, she will be observed by an absent-minded Latin tutor who quickly takes interest in her. This is a natural opening to their story: the meeting and almost immediate descent into romance between Agnes and the tutor (whose name, later, we will learn is Will). But we already know that. We already know what he will become, that he will write perhaps the most famous play of all time, and that he will ask the famous question, “to be or not to be.” Zhao doesn’t need this to be a surprise for the film’s emotional centerpiece to land. The identity of one young William Shakespeare is not the emotional core of Hamnet, nor is it his journey from Latin tutor to literary icon. Instead, Hamnet, both Zhao’s film and the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell of the same name upon which the film is based, is a much quieter meditation on grief, reliant on the construction of Hamlet to do so.

While Zhao’s film presents a chronological and straightforward account of Agnes and the tutor’s love story, growing family, and the tragedy that ultimately strikes them, O’Farrell’s novel works quite differently. She refocuses the narrative to center the titular Hamnet, Shakespeare’s real-life son who died from the Black Plague in 1596. The novel begins with an extended sequence featuring young Hamnet as he wanders through his house and Stratford-upon-Avon alone; this opening works to instantly connect him to readers, making his inevitable death more impactful due to our close relationship to him. Alternatively, the film centers and prioritizes a connection between the audience and Hamnet’s parents. The film focuses much more on the love story and the centrality of Agnes’ experience of motherhood, which the novel is able to maintain alongside a closer connection to Hamnet himself. The novel also features a galloping, pointed third-person present tense that keeps the story pushing forward, even in quiet contemplative moments, reiterating the inevitability of the narrative. It is history, after all.

But both O’Farrell’s and Zhao’s loyalty to pure history is shaky at best. Hamnet (both novel and film) is historical fiction and proud of it. It has no qualms about its creative re-configuration of Shakespeare’s real wife, Anne Hathaway, into the mystical Agnes. While little is known about Hathaway, other than Shakespeare’s famous bequest in his will, giving her his “second-best bed,” O’Farrell does away with any attempt to keep her historically accurate, given the lack of information. Her Agnes possesses the superhuman ability to know people’s futures by touching their hands, a gift which reverberates through the film and acts as the impetus for the Latin tutor’s journey to London. She spends her days tending to herbs and bees, wandering the woods, and creating draughts and potions for every Elizabethan ailment. She resembles Hamlet’s Ophelia in her relationship with flowers and nature, and in the film she even teaches her daughters that rosemary is “for remembrance,” as Ophelia declares in her madness.

More than this allusion to Ophelia, Hamnet is full of references to Hamlet as well as the rest of Shakespeare’s catalog. In the film, after his first kiss with Agnes, the Latin tutor quietly pens, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” from the candlelight in his attic room. Conversations that “all shall be well” and “what if we fail?” flood the narrative, acting as shadowy reminders of who the Latin tutor will become, even when O’Farrell refuses to ever name him (O’Farrell, 178-179). The brief call to Will is an invention of the film. Both the film and novel directly confront us with these references and more while simultaneously asking us to see Shakespeare merely as a quiet Latin tutor, and later, as a burgeoning glove-maker-turned-playwright who ventures off to London to escape his abusive father. How can we grapple with these famous lines and the man who has not yet written them? In her novel, it seems O’Farrell is asking her readers to participate in a thought experiment: to shed everything we know about the Bard in order to watch him built from the ground up.

Are we to take Hamnet’s body of references as self-referential, winking to all us Shakespeare fans, or is it that these are lines the Latin tutor pulled from his real life to fill his work? I don’t believe Hamnet provides us with an answer. What it does do, and does splendidly, is ask us to examine the construction of art. How art can be pulled out of overwhelming feelings, in this case grief, and shaped to hold some of that weight. That, ultimately, is the role Hamlet plays in Hamnet. It is not a shadow waiting to be written, but one we as viewers hope will never have to be; a hope we also know is ultimately futile. Hamlet is necessitated by Hamnet’s death and the Latin tutor’s grief, and yet, situated between them is Agnes herself, whose grief overwhelms and takes over the narrative completely, allowing O’Farrell and Zhao to bring about Hamnet’s wonderful, extended final sequence in which Agnes watches Hamlet. 

When Agnes arrives in London to see the play at the Globe Theatre, she is at first confused by her son’s name on the poster and the name referenced in the early scenes of the play. But what she comes to understand, as she watches Hamlet and the ghost reunite, is that her husband’s grief was transformed in a way hers never could be. While hers was visceral and emphatic, her husband’s was quiet and dull, unable to exist within him in that form. Neither form of grief is given preference. Instead, Hamnet allows us to take part in this experience of mourning in our own ways, given the different ways we see Agnes and the Latin tutor express theirs. Both O’Farrell and Zhao’s depiction of the genesis of Hamlet is the crux of Hamnet, and yet the way we come to understand it is much smaller in scale and much more emotionally driven than a play with Hamlet’s fame and legacy could be. 

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