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Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Susanna in director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Hamnet. (Agata Grzybowska\/Focus Features)<\/p>\nAs we learn in a title card at the opening of Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s new film, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were functionally interchangeable during Shakespeare\u2019s life. <\/p>\n
As your English teacher may have told you, Shakespeare\u2019s son Hamnet died tragically at age 11. And as we know from the bits and bobs of documentation that survived the centuries since, Hamnet\u2019s death likely occurred about four years before Shakespeare put pen to page for Hamlet. <\/p>\n
Putting those pieces of information together, a not-insignificant number of literary historians have argued Hamlet \u2014 about a grief-mad prince, torching his life and kingdom after seeing the ghost of his late father \u2014 was actually inspired by Hamnet\u2019s death.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Understandably, this is the subject of Zhao\u2019s heartrending, chest-clawing tale of woe: a somewhat intentionally static examination of Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) meeting and marrying wife Anne Hathaway (often called Agnes, the name of the character as played here by Jessie Buckley), followed by a brief, happy time with his children. And then, of course, the sudden loss of their only son (played with impressive maturity by Jacobi Jupe).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The almost Earth-shattering damage this wreaks on the tender world Zhao carefully reconstructs feels apocalyptic in scope, while almost completely ignoring the traditional story conceit of character development.<\/p>\n
Instead, Zhao\u2019s Hamnet just recreates a disaster, while treating it like a biblical event. There is a time before the death of their son \u2014 joyful and simple, though Agnes’s dreadful premonitions threaten to disrupt their happiness, mirrored by the audience\u2019s knowledge of what\u2019s coming. And there is a time after \u2014 an unbearable stillness that, like Hamlet\u2019s final line in the play, speaks to the deceptively simple truth of death and dealing with it: “the rest is silence.”<\/p>\n
WATCH | Hamnet trailer:<\/p>\n
Given the appetizing parallels between Hamlet and Hamnet’s grief, you may be able to tell why so many have spent so long theorizing that Hamlet\u2019s grief and inability to move past it \u2014 which ultimately leads to his death, the death of his love Ophelia and the end of his family line and kingdom \u2014 may have been torn right from Shakespeare\u2019s life. <\/p>\n
You might even assume one of the people to hold that belief is Maggie O\u2019Farrell, the Irish novelist who wrote the book Hamnet is based on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a bit more going on there. To start with, as O\u2019Farrell is the first to admit, the record is far too sketchy to make a positive judgement. Going back to the earliest days of Shakespearean biographies, the writer\u2019s family (Wife Anne, eldest daughter Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith) was often relegated to a footnote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There’s also a general lack of information about how Hamnet died. His death is often attributed to the bubonic plague, as in this version of the story, but other sources \u2014 like the 2018 film All Is True \u2014 reimagine it as an accidental drowning. Others, like Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, simply ascribe it to an undefined illness or ailment, given that\u2019s what usually killed children at the time.<\/p>\n
Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Susanna in director Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Hamnet. (Agata Grzybowska\/Focus Features)<\/p>\n
What has been more or less universal, though, is scholars putting more value on Shakespeare\u2019s writing and less on his personal life. When they weren\u2019t arguing that Shakespeare travelled from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to London because he didn\u2019t care about his family \u2014 or theorizing that the death of a child didn\u2019t matter to parents in the 16th century \u2014 those scholars were often ignoring his family outright.\u00a0<\/p>\n
O\u2019Farrell\u2019s Hamnet \u2014 and by extension, Zhao\u2019s interpretation of it \u2014 does not intend to reveal the objective historical truth of what happened that summer. Instead, it aims for something that is far more tragic and universal that has also, somehow, become a defining trend of this year’s cinematic triumphs.<\/p>\n
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A long-neglected part of the playwright’s story, Hamnet focuses on William Shakespeare’s family. (Agata Grzybowska\/Hamnet)<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765537810_28_default.jpg\")
Noah Jupe, bottom, stars as Hamlet in the play-within-a-movie staged at the Globe Theatre while the audience \u2014 including Jessie Buckley as Agnes, in red \u2014 watches. (Focus Features)<\/p>\n