Hamnet (2025)
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Hamnet Shakespeare
1 min read
The film centers on Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who died at age 11 in 1596. The Wikipedia article provides historical context about his short life, the circumstances of his death, and scholarly debates about how this loss influenced Shakespeare's writing of Hamlet.
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Anne Hathaway (wife of Shakespeare)
13 min read
The film's Agnes is based on Shakespeare's real wife Anne Hathaway (Agnes was a variant of the name). The article explores what little is known about her life, their courtship, marriage, and the historical speculation about their relationship during Shakespeare's London years.
Hamnet (2025)
In theaters
If we allow an artist to do whatever he wants, it’s only fair to let anyone who portrays an artist do just as they like – assuming they’ll at least reckon with the known biographical facts about the artist’s life.
Four centuries of performance and scholarship have teased out meanings from every word of Shakespeare’s.
Yet very little is known about this master dramatist. Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet was praised as a bold imagining of how events in Will’s life might have impinged on his playwriting.
I haven’t read the novel, but since O’Farrell co-wrote this movie’s screenplay with its director, Chloé Zhao, I assume the book’s vision is honored.
Given the enormity of Shakespeare’s body of work, O’Farrell shows some moxie by zeroing in on a fact – the death in 1596 of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet at age 11 – and linking that heartbreaking loss to the playwright’s greatest work, Hamlet, written between 1599 and 1601.
That three-to-five-year time gap isn’t specified here, and I don’t think it needed to be. How does anyone process grief? An artist can drop a quarrel from last week or a memory from decades ago into his work and make it feel essential.
What’s more compelling is this script’s centering the action around Shakespeare’s deeply loving yet profoundly fierce wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley).
She’s most at ease in the forest, steeped in knowledge of herbs and plant life, and roams the woods with a hawk on her gloved arm, her insight into human motives matching the bird’s baleful eye.
She’s not much taken at first with Will (Paul Mescal), a glovemaker’s son who also works as a Latin tutor to pay off his ungrateful father’s debts. As we all know, father and son will take on a greater meaning for Shakespeare once he becomes a parent.
Yet the young unknown writer – he haltingly puts down words at night under candlelight – wins Agnes’ love and allegiance, and when she becomes pregnant, their bond needs to be fought for, since both families think the match a poor one.
He’s a penniless workman with no prospects and in the surrounding community she’s thought to be the unnatural offspring of a woodland witch, taken in by a local family.
Over both families’ objections, they marry. She determinedly disappears into the woods to give birth alone to their
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