UC Berkeley Professor Oliver Arnold explores the 16th\u2011century playwright\u2019s enduring appeal and the way \u2018Hamnet\u2019 imagines a small\u2011town son of a glovemaker becoming a global icon.<\/p>\n
For centuries, scholars and artists alike have wondered: What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare? What gives his work its strange durability, its emotional force, its endless capacity for reinvention?<\/p>\n
We know some things about William Shakespeare. He was born in 1564 in a small market town in England, the son of a glovemaker. We know he married a woman who became an abiding figure in his life, and that he had a son who died young. And we know he went on to become one of the most influential playwrights in the world, the writer behind dozens of canonical stage works that span the breadth of the human condition, from the early, lighthearted comedies like\u00a0A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u00a0to the late-career tragedies and romances, such as\u00a0Hamlet\u00a0and\u00a0The Tempest.<\/p>\n
But the distance between those humble beginnings and his enduring appeal remains hard to explain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a question that\u00a0Hamnet\u00a0\u2014 a historical fiction novel by Maggie O\u2019Farrell that was adapted into a 2025 film by Chlo\u00e9 Zhao \u2014 attempts to answer. Not in a biographical, \u201cthis definitely happened\u201d sense, but in a way that blends history, imagination and emotional truth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI actually like the liberties the film took,\u201d says\u00a0Oliver Arnold<\/a>, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley and author of\u00a0The Third Citizen: Shakespeare\u2019s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons.<\/a>\u00a0\u201cThey seemed to me modest and all in service of exploring how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UC Berkeley Professor Oliver Arnold explores the 16th\u2011century playwright\u2019s enduring appeal and the way \u2018Hamnet\u2019 imagines a small\u2011town…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-291766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}