Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley-led Hamnet is a tragically beautiful tale of historical trickery

As we learn in a title card at the opening of Chloé Zhao’s new film, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were functionally interchangeable during Shakespeare’s life.

As your English teacher may have told you, Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died tragically at age 11. And as we know from the bits and bobs of documentation that survived the centuries since, Hamnet’s death likely occurred about four years before Shakespeare put pen to page for Hamlet.

Putting those pieces of information together, a not-insignificant number of literary historians have argued Hamlet — about a grief-mad prince, torching his life and kingdom after seeing the ghost of his late father — was actually inspired by Hamnet’s death. 

Understandably, this is the subject of Zhao’s 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). 

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.

Instead, Zhao’s Hamnet just recreates a disaster, while treating it like a biblical event. There is a time before the death of their son — joyful and simple, though Agnes's dreadful premonitions threaten to disrupt their happiness, mirrored by the audience’s knowledge of what’s coming. And there is a time after — an unbearable stillness that, like Hamlet’s final line in the play, speaks to the deceptively simple truth of death and dealing with it: "the rest is silence."

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’s grief and inability to move past it — which ultimately leads to his death, the death of his love Ophelia and the end of his family line and kingdom — may have been torn right from Shakespeare’s life.

You might even assume one of the people to hold that belief is Maggie O’Farrell, the Irish novelist who wrote the book Hamnet is based on. 

But there’s a bit more going on there. To start with, as O’Farrell 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’s family (Wife Anne, eldest daughter Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith) was often relegated to a footnote. 

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 — like the 2018 film All Is True — reimagine it as an accidental drowning. Others, like Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, simply ascribe it to an undefined illness or ailment, given that’s what usually killed children at the time.

What has been more or less universal, though, is scholars putting more value on Shakespeare’s writing and less on his personal life. When they weren’t arguing that Shakespeare travelled from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to London because he didn’t care about his family — or theorizing that the death of a child didn’t matter to parents in the 16th century — those scholars were often ignoring his family outright. 

O’Farrell’s Hamnet — and by extension, Zhao’s interpretation of it — 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.

“I refuse to believe that [at] any point in time, anywhere in the world, it's anything less than cataclysmic to lose a child,” O’Farrell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zhao, told CBC’s Q in an interview.

“The whole impetus behind me writing a book was to get more people to understand that this boy had lived, and also that he was grieved and that he was loved.”