Oscar-tipped new film Hamnet imagines the home life of William and Agnes Shakespeare – and the “soul-crushing” loss of their child. It’s a powerful story that fills in many blanks.
In Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell’s eloquent 2020 novel and the deeply moving new film based on it – Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, is a herbalist who has a knowledge of medical potions and an almost supernatural ability to sense the future. But she cannot save her young son from the plague, a death that leads the boy’s father to write one of the greatest plays in all of literature, Hamlet. And almost none of that is true in any verifiable way. On the page and on screen, Hamnet is a work of inspired imagination, a rich exploration of grief spun out of the barest of facts. You can’t say that O’Farrell, who also wrote the film’s screenplay with its director, Chloé Zhao, distorted the real story, because there is no known story, despite centuries of historians digging around in Shakespeare’s past.
The sparse facts about Shakespeare’s family are far outnumbered by the questions they raise. Records show that in 1582 William Shakespeare, then 18, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Three years later, their twins were born, called Judith and Hamnet, a name that at the time was interchangeable with Hamlet. In 1596, when he was just 11, Hamnet died. He was buried on 11 August and it is almost certain that Shakespeare, who was traveling with his theatre troupe, could not have made it back to Stratford in time for the funeral. About four years later, he wrote Hamlet. Make of that what you will.
AlamyPaul Mescal and Jessie Buckley star in the film Hamnet as William and Agnes Shakespeare (Credit: Alamy)
No one knows whether Shakespeare felt forced to marry the pregnant Anne or if they were wildly in love. No one knows how Hamnet died, but the plague was then rampant and the most likely cause of his death. Most crucially for the book and film, no one knows much about Anne herself, including whether she could read and write. The fiction gives her a strong-willed personality (as depicted by Jessie Buckley on screen in her Oscar-tipped performance) and a passionate romance with Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). Hamnet is really about Agnes.
