Sitting in a dark theater for a couple hours watching a movie that has nothing to do with our current troubles served as a welcome interlude this week, when Ron and I went to see the new Chloé Zhao film Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Hamnet is getting excellent reviews, deserved in many ways. Beautiful cinematography, excellent acting, quiet and intensely sad—you can plan on a couple Oscar nods for this one. As your resident Shakespeare professor, however, I will suggest—no surprise here—that the film is only tangentially related to the actual Shakespeare.
That’s OK. I get it. Not only are Shakespeare’s plays endlessly generative, so is the hiddenness of his life. Both the novel and the film join the busy category of “we know very little about Shakespeare, so let’s speculate and make stuff up!” I’m all for it; it’s fun. Shakespeare in Love falls into this category, for instance, as does the hilarious and saucy sit-com-style BBC-produced TV series Upstart Crow. We do know quite a bit about Shakespeare’s playwriting career, where he lodged in London, the account books of his company, but much less about his personal life. So we can hardly help imagining answers to all our questions. Was his marriage happy? How often did he travel back and forth between Stratford and London? What was he like as a person? We may never know, so we guess.[1]
Hamnet, with screenplay by O’Farrell and Zhao, broods speculatively on Shakespeare’s wife Anne, also called Agnes, and their home life in Stratford. The film’s weightiest emotional ballast comes from the couple’s contrasting responses to the loss of their son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in 1596. We know that the child died. Beyond that, we know nothing, not even for sure what he died of (it’s plague in the film, which is not improbable). The film borrows a few facts from Shakespeare’s life, but engages the what-really-happened problem, it seems, mostly as a platform for meditation on a particular kind of grief.
O’Farrell and Zhao depict Anne/Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, as a loner and skilled herbalist, with a kind of sixth sense about what’s “inside” other people. This leans, unfortunately, into a somewhat tired quasi-magical wild-woman trope—townspeople claim Agnes’s late mother was a “forest witch”—when the fact is, in this period, all women had to know herbal remedies. Herbs were the first-line and often only medical care of the day, pretty much. But a quiet, intense, forest-child Agnes at least gives us a cinematic excuse to hang out with her and her pet hawk in the lush forests around Stratford. We first see her from a crane-shot perspective, curled in fetal position in the curved root of a tree, near a womb-like cave that turns up throughout the film as a signifier, perhaps, of feminine mystery and interiority.
The film remains steadfastly, even suffocatingly, inside Agnes’s perspective, with a few key exceptions. Agnes is mildly estranged from her own family and her in-laws, except for her brother. Thus, her domestic world focuses fiercely on her three children—Susanna and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to the point where even the market town of Stratford seems an isolated, lonely place. I suppose this is O’Farrell’s way of explaining how Agnes would survive Will’s absence in London for most of their marriage. Maybe she was a loner anyway.
Hence, too, the quiet soundscape of the film. For the first maybe twenty minutes, we hear (besides the dialogue) only the sounds of wind, thunder—no music at all. The wild landscape seems a character in its own right, whispering ominously through wind and weather. However, there’s very little birdsong, no livestock noise, hardly any shuffling townspeople. Even when Max Richter’s eerie score emerges and subsides here and there, it feels understated and ambient, a pianissimo Arvo Pärt.
Nor does anyone have all that much to say, let alone anything artful. Dialogue is spare and mostly simple. Will (Paul Mescal) is depicted as a socially awkward fellow, cowed by his violent father, who seems to woo Agnes mostly by vibes and persistence.[2] He becomes a loving husband and father, though his tormented-writer issues convince Anne he has to go to London to deal with the stories in his head. I found this an interesting take on Shakespeare’s character, though I doubt that’s how Shakespeare really was. However, this awkward, tongue-tied, wounded Shakespeare, the anachronistically post-Romantic artistic genius, does fit O’Farrell’s approach to the couple’s grief response as, essentially, a divergence of interiorities.
In some ways, I love how the film depicts life in late sixteenth-century England. We are visually immersed in a less sanitized age—nothing is paved, there’s mud everywhere, people are occupied mostly with farming, trades, and domestic chores. Our brief moments in the London street with Will later in the film suggest the filthy, diseased reality of early modern cities. I appreciate how the film makes everyone look scruffy, insufficiently bathed, with unplucked eyebrows and dirty fingernail beds. Agnes seems to wear the same dress for about twelve years straight (clothes was expensive!).[3] On the other hand, everyone does have perfect teeth. I guess we viewers can only tolerate so much.
The best scenes in the film, to me, were the wonderfully tender moments between the two twins, beautifully portrayed by Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes. Zhao gives the sweet-souled young Hamnet his own burgeoning inner life, particularly before he dies, when we join him in an imagined ante-room of sorts, with a gray veil between us and his bewildered, frightened face.
After Hamnet’s death, the couple can’t quite find each other emotionally again—their mutual understanding diverges. Though Will arrives home from London the very next day after the death, Agnes is furious at him for not being there—which struck me as unfair and selfish. She ignores his grief for months, solipsistically obsessed with her own.
When Agnes eventually hears, a year later, that her husband has written a play called Hamlet, she convinces her brother to bring her to London to see it. These, too, are compelling scenes, as Agnes enters Will’s world for the first time. She has never been anywhere, and we feel with her the foreign dissonance of London.
When she and her brother enter the newly completed Globe theater to view the play, the soundtrack blasts us with drum booms and choral fortissimos, so that we share in Agnes’s overwhelm. As someone who teaches Shakespeare, I loved how the final section of the film portrays the intimacy and frisson of live theater in an age less saturated than our own with images, fiction, and false realities. Poor Agnes has never experienced anything remotely like it, and she hardly knows how to react.
For me, watching the play-within-the film was a little maddening, since of course we get a kind of ten-minute version of Hamlet with key speeches slashed down to a few lines. “That’s not how that goes!” I whispered more than once to the ever-patient Ron. I did enjoy the stage portrayal of Hamlet, played as a raw teen by none other than—fun fact here—Jacobi Jupe’s older brother Noah.[4] We see only a few moments from the play, moments meant to suggest resonance between the play and Will’s grief. I did appreciate that the stage Hamlet’s dying wish to his friend Horatio—to live on and tell Hamlet’s story—becomes Will’s instruction to himself, a subtlety that Agnes seems to perceive. It finally dawns on her that her husband has been suffering, too.
As the film audience, we had been allowed briefly into Will’s despair in a previous scene, where he speaks the “To be or not to be” speech (well, part of it) poised over the swirling Thames on the edge of the quay. When the stage Hamlet later performs the speech (well, part of it) directly to the audience, sitting at the very edge of the Globe stage, Agnes is standing right at his feet, her astonishment and dawning understanding evident on her face.[5] This is Buckley’s best moment, I think. We linger on her face for a long time, here and later at stage-Hamlet’s death, watching her put together, for the first time, that Will has dealt with his grief through his art, by creating this character as a reincarnation of their son who simultaneously expresses his father’s grief in eloquent words. Guess what, Agnes—people grieve differently.
What happens when stage-Hamlet dies felt a little cheesy to me—you’ll see. More importantly, I have to offer some caution about getting too tender about Hamlet as Shakespeare’s artistic coping mechanism and homage to his dead son. Sure, Shakespeare put real human feeling into this play, as with every play he wrote. Shakespeare clearly understood human nature with extraordinary depth. But Shakespeare was a canny operator, too. He knew what appealed to audiences, and he mastered the business of theater in ways his contemporaries rarely did. His company actually made money, and he retired with valuable real estate and some cash, unlike almost every other playwright in the period.
Moreover, Hamlet didn’t come out of nowhere. The original story goes back to a thirteenth-century Danish saga of Amleth with a very similar plot. There was another play called Hamlet on the English stage by at least 1594, probably before, possibly written by Thomas Kyd, author of the wildly successful The Spanish Tragedy. Meanwhile, a German play, probably based on a story brought to Germany by English actors about 1586, contains a lot of the same details as Shakespeare’s plot. In other words, ghost-infested revenge tragedies about some guy named Amleth/Hamlet were kind of a thing by 1599 or so, when Shakespeare wrote his version.
As I tell my students, the philosophy of art at the time was more or less “steal steal steal.” Using traditional sources was precisely what you were supposed to do. Originality was by no means the ultimate value. Instead, playing creatively on tradition was the name of the game. Which is exactly what Shakespeare did. As scholar David Bevington writes about Hamlet: “From the extensive similarities between Hamlet and [the] German play, we can see that Shakespeare inherited his narrative material almost intact, though in a jumble and so pitifully mangled that the modern reader can only laugh at the contrast. No source study in Shakespeare reveals so clearly the extent of Shakespeare’s wholesale borrowing of plot and the incredible transformation he achieved in reordering his materials.”[6]
As a story of a couple’s grief over the loss of a child and a vehicle for some excellent acting and cinematography, Hamnet succeeds. And yes, creating art has long afforded people ways to process the deepest sorrows of our days. In their own way, O’Farrell and Zhao are doing exactly what Shakespeare and his contemporaries did: taking creative liberties with inherited material. Even so, I wish the film hadn’t succumbed so readily to the post-Romantic tropes about art we too often apply retroactively to Shakespeare, rushing headlong into the silent spots of history.
[1] Yes, there was a real guy named Shakespeare who wrote his own plays. Sure, there was often some collaboration among playwrights and players, but attempts to claim that someone else secretly wrote his plays is just nonsense, often inflected with class snobbery. See Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare for one scholarly and thorough explanation of how the whole anti-Stratfordian arose and why it will not die.
[2] Will was 18 when he married Anne (Agnes) Hathaway, who was 26. Paul Mescal, lovely as he is, does not look anything near 18. Also, fun fact: like Anne, maybe a third of women in the period were pregnant at the altar.
[3] For an interesting article on the costumes in the film, go here.
[4] Sorry, folks, but Hamlet was originally played by Richard Burbage, an older, mature actor, not a teenager.
[5] In today’s productions, the to-be speech is sometimes played as a private, anguished moment for Hamlet and sometimes as a more performative act. As this article suggests, the film cleverly offers both approaches.
[6] David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th edition, Longman, 1997, p. A-45.
Hamnet is getting excellent reviews, deserved in many ways. Beautiful cinematography, excellent acting, quiet and intensely sad—you can plan on a couple Oscar nods for this one. As your resident Shakespeare professor, however, I will suggest—no surprise here—that the film is only tangentially related to the actual Shakespeare.
In a world threatened by drought, fire, and soil erosion both literal and metaphorical, we are working together here to create a healthier ecosystem of thought and reflection.
Our final episode of Season 4! This week, we travel to Hawaii with a whole troop of good people to visit some remarkable refugia spaces near Kaneohe Bay on Oahu. This episode, produced by Colin Hoogerwerf and Jim Stump, first aired on the Language of God podcast in April of 2025.
Hamnet: Quiet Grief, Sentimental Speculation
Sitting in a dark theater for a couple hours watching a movie that has nothing to do with our current troubles served as a welcome interlude this week, when Ron and I went to see the new Chloé Zhao film Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Hamnet is getting excellent reviews, deserved in many ways. Beautiful cinematography, excellent acting, quiet and intensely sad—you can plan on a couple Oscar nods for this one. As your resident Shakespeare professor, however, I will suggest—no surprise here—that the film is only tangentially related to the actual Shakespeare.
That’s OK. I get it. Not only are Shakespeare’s plays endlessly generative, so is the hiddenness of his life. Both the novel and the film join the busy category of “we know very little about Shakespeare, so let’s speculate and make stuff up!” I’m all for it; it’s fun. Shakespeare in Love falls into this category, for instance, as does the hilarious and saucy sit-com-style BBC-produced TV series Upstart Crow. We do know quite a bit about Shakespeare’s playwriting career, where he lodged in London, the account books of his company, but much less about his personal life. So we can hardly help imagining answers to all our questions. Was his marriage happy? How often did he travel back and forth between Stratford and London? What was he like as a person? We may never know, so we guess.[1]
Hamnet, with screenplay by O’Farrell and Zhao, broods speculatively on Shakespeare’s wife Anne, also called Agnes, and their home life in Stratford. The film’s weightiest emotional ballast comes from the couple’s contrasting responses to the loss of their son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in 1596. We know that the child died. Beyond that, we know nothing, not even for sure what he died of (it’s plague in the film, which is not improbable). The film borrows a few facts from Shakespeare’s life, but engages the what-really-happened problem, it seems, mostly as a platform for meditation on a particular kind of grief.
O’Farrell and Zhao depict Anne/Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, as a loner and skilled herbalist, with a kind of sixth sense about what’s “inside” other people. This leans, unfortunately, into a somewhat tired quasi-magical wild-woman trope—townspeople claim Agnes’s late mother was a “forest witch”—when the fact is, in this period, all women had to know herbal remedies. Herbs were the first-line and often only medical care of the day, pretty much. But a quiet, intense, forest-child Agnes at least gives us a cinematic excuse to hang out with her and her pet hawk in the lush forests around Stratford. We first see her from a crane-shot perspective, curled in fetal position in the curved root of a tree, near a womb-like cave that turns up throughout the film as a signifier, perhaps, of feminine mystery and interiority.
The film remains steadfastly, even suffocatingly, inside Agnes’s perspective, with a few key exceptions. Agnes is mildly estranged from her own family and her in-laws, except for her brother. Thus, her domestic world focuses fiercely on her three children—Susanna and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to the point where even the market town of Stratford seems an isolated, lonely place. I suppose this is O’Farrell’s way of explaining how Agnes would survive Will’s absence in London for most of their marriage. Maybe she was a loner anyway.
Hence, too, the quiet soundscape of the film. For the first maybe twenty minutes, we hear (besides the dialogue) only the sounds of wind, thunder—no music at all. The wild landscape seems a character in its own right, whispering ominously through wind and weather. However, there’s very little birdsong, no livestock noise, hardly any shuffling townspeople. Even when Max Richter’s eerie score emerges and subsides here and there, it feels understated and ambient, a pianissimo Arvo Pärt.
Nor does anyone have all that much to say, let alone anything artful. Dialogue is spare and mostly simple. Will (Paul Mescal) is depicted as a socially awkward fellow, cowed by his violent father, who seems to woo Agnes mostly by vibes and persistence.[2] He becomes a loving husband and father, though his tormented-writer issues convince Anne he has to go to London to deal with the stories in his head. I found this an interesting take on Shakespeare’s character, though I doubt that’s how Shakespeare really was. However, this awkward, tongue-tied, wounded Shakespeare, the anachronistically post-Romantic artistic genius, does fit O’Farrell’s approach to the couple’s grief response as, essentially, a divergence of interiorities.
In some ways, I love how the film depicts life in late sixteenth-century England. We are visually immersed in a less sanitized age—nothing is paved, there’s mud everywhere, people are occupied mostly with farming, trades, and domestic chores. Our brief moments in the London street with Will later in the film suggest the filthy, diseased reality of early modern cities. I appreciate how the film makes everyone look scruffy, insufficiently bathed, with unplucked eyebrows and dirty fingernail beds. Agnes seems to wear the same dress for about twelve years straight (clothes was expensive!).[3] On the other hand, everyone does have perfect teeth. I guess we viewers can only tolerate so much.
The best scenes in the film, to me, were the wonderfully tender moments between the two twins, beautifully portrayed by Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes. Zhao gives the sweet-souled young Hamnet his own burgeoning inner life, particularly before he dies, when we join him in an imagined ante-room of sorts, with a gray veil between us and his bewildered, frightened face.
After Hamnet’s death, the couple can’t quite find each other emotionally again—their mutual understanding diverges. Though Will arrives home from London the very next day after the death, Agnes is furious at him for not being there—which struck me as unfair and selfish. She ignores his grief for months, solipsistically obsessed with her own.
When Agnes eventually hears, a year later, that her husband has written a play called Hamlet, she convinces her brother to bring her to London to see it. These, too, are compelling scenes, as Agnes enters Will’s world for the first time. She has never been anywhere, and we feel with her the foreign dissonance of London.
When she and her brother enter the newly completed Globe theater to view the play, the soundtrack blasts us with drum booms and choral fortissimos, so that we share in Agnes’s overwhelm. As someone who teaches Shakespeare, I loved how the final section of the film portrays the intimacy and frisson of live theater in an age less saturated than our own with images, fiction, and false realities. Poor Agnes has never experienced anything remotely like it, and she hardly knows how to react.
For me, watching the play-within-the film was a little maddening, since of course we get a kind of ten-minute version of Hamlet with key speeches slashed down to a few lines. “That’s not how that goes!” I whispered more than once to the ever-patient Ron. I did enjoy the stage portrayal of Hamlet, played as a raw teen by none other than—fun fact here—Jacobi Jupe’s older brother Noah.[4] We see only a few moments from the play, moments meant to suggest resonance between the play and Will’s grief. I did appreciate that the stage Hamlet’s dying wish to his friend Horatio—to live on and tell Hamlet’s story—becomes Will’s instruction to himself, a subtlety that Agnes seems to perceive. It finally dawns on her that her husband has been suffering, too.
As the film audience, we had been allowed briefly into Will’s despair in a previous scene, where he speaks the “To be or not to be” speech (well, part of it) poised over the swirling Thames on the edge of the quay. When the stage Hamlet later performs the speech (well, part of it) directly to the audience, sitting at the very edge of the Globe stage, Agnes is standing right at his feet, her astonishment and dawning understanding evident on her face.[5] This is Buckley’s best moment, I think. We linger on her face for a long time, here and later at stage-Hamlet’s death, watching her put together, for the first time, that Will has dealt with his grief through his art, by creating this character as a reincarnation of their son who simultaneously expresses his father’s grief in eloquent words. Guess what, Agnes—people grieve differently.
What happens when stage-Hamlet dies felt a little cheesy to me—you’ll see. More importantly, I have to offer some caution about getting too tender about Hamlet as Shakespeare’s artistic coping mechanism and homage to his dead son. Sure, Shakespeare put real human feeling into this play, as with every play he wrote. Shakespeare clearly understood human nature with extraordinary depth. But Shakespeare was a canny operator, too. He knew what appealed to audiences, and he mastered the business of theater in ways his contemporaries rarely did. His company actually made money, and he retired with valuable real estate and some cash, unlike almost every other playwright in the period.
Moreover, Hamlet didn’t come out of nowhere. The original story goes back to a thirteenth-century Danish saga of Amleth with a very similar plot. There was another play called Hamlet on the English stage by at least 1594, probably before, possibly written by Thomas Kyd, author of the wildly successful The Spanish Tragedy. Meanwhile, a German play, probably based on a story brought to Germany by English actors about 1586, contains a lot of the same details as Shakespeare’s plot. In other words, ghost-infested revenge tragedies about some guy named Amleth/Hamlet were kind of a thing by 1599 or so, when Shakespeare wrote his version.
As I tell my students, the philosophy of art at the time was more or less “steal steal steal.” Using traditional sources was precisely what you were supposed to do. Originality was by no means the ultimate value. Instead, playing creatively on tradition was the name of the game. Which is exactly what Shakespeare did. As scholar David Bevington writes about Hamlet: “From the extensive similarities between Hamlet and [the] German play, we can see that Shakespeare inherited his narrative material almost intact, though in a jumble and so pitifully mangled that the modern reader can only laugh at the contrast. No source study in Shakespeare reveals so clearly the extent of Shakespeare’s wholesale borrowing of plot and the incredible transformation he achieved in reordering his materials.”[6]
As a story of a couple’s grief over the loss of a child and a vehicle for some excellent acting and cinematography, Hamnet succeeds. And yes, creating art has long afforded people ways to process the deepest sorrows of our days. In their own way, O’Farrell and Zhao are doing exactly what Shakespeare and his contemporaries did: taking creative liberties with inherited material. Even so, I wish the film hadn’t succumbed so readily to the post-Romantic tropes about art we too often apply retroactively to Shakespeare, rushing headlong into the silent spots of history.
[1] Yes, there was a real guy named Shakespeare who wrote his own plays. Sure, there was often some collaboration among playwrights and players, but attempts to claim that someone else secretly wrote his plays is just nonsense, often inflected with class snobbery. See Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare for one scholarly and thorough explanation of how the whole anti-Stratfordian arose and why it will not die.
[2] Will was 18 when he married Anne (Agnes) Hathaway, who was 26. Paul Mescal, lovely as he is, does not look anything near 18. Also, fun fact: like Anne, maybe a third of women in the period were pregnant at the altar.
[3] For an interesting article on the costumes in the film, go here.
[4] Sorry, folks, but Hamlet was originally played by Richard Burbage, an older, mature actor, not a teenager.
[5] In today’s productions, the to-be speech is sometimes played as a private, anguished moment for Hamlet and sometimes as a more performative act. As this article suggests, the film cleverly offers both approaches.
[6] David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th edition, Longman, 1997, p. A-45.
Hamnet: Quiet Grief, Sentimental Speculation
Hamnet is getting excellent reviews, deserved in many ways. Beautiful cinematography, excellent acting, quiet and intensely sad—you can plan on a couple Oscar nods for this one. As your resident Shakespeare professor, however, I will suggest—no surprise here—that the film is only tangentially related to the actual Shakespeare.
Beavering Our Way, Reformed Style
In a world threatened by drought, fire, and soil erosion both literal and metaphorical, we are working together here to create a healthier ecosystem of thought and reflection.
Angels At Large
“Ha ha. Anyway, I’m OK. Actually, I’m in a better place now, you know? Having ‘Angel At Large’ status for a while isn’t so bad.”
Refugia Podcast Episode 40 Kipuka to Kipuka: Islands of Life, Faith, and Restoration
Our final episode of Season 4! This week, we travel to Hawaii with a whole troop of good people to visit some remarkable refugia spaces near Kaneohe Bay on Oahu. This episode, produced by Colin Hoogerwerf and Jim Stump, first aired on the Language of God podcast in April of 2025.