By Brad Miner
Hamnet, the movie from 2025 that has already won a large number of awards and is a favorite to take home several “Best” Oscars, including Picture, Director (Chloé Zhao), and Actress (Jessie Buckley), deserves its accolades. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, it reimagines the origin of the world’s most famous play. (Spoiler alert, although it appears at the end.)
Hamnet begins with the meeting and union of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, called Agnes in the book and the movie, because her father’s will refers to her by that name. O’Farrell, who found Richard Hathaway’s will, sees “Agnes” as a kind of revelation about the way in which, historically, the fame of fathers, sons, and husbands has subsumed female identities.
There is some truth to that, although probably not in this case. In O’Farrell’s novel, the playwright’s last name never appears. He is simply “Will.” Thus, in a fair exchange for history’s marginalization of Anne Hathaway, O’Farrell and Zhao place William Shakespeare on the margins of the book and the movie.
And, although it seems a bit affected to me, that does not diminish the power of the movie. Besides, we know perfectly well who is courting Agnes.
Hamnet moves slowly through their courtship: a kind of dream of a midsummer night full of wonder in what is probably the Forest of Arden. Agnes is an almost pagan figure, gathering medicinal plants and frolicking with her falcon. Is she a witch? Will, whose father is a glover, gives her a falconry glove. He tells her the story of the ill-fated love between Orpheus and Eurydice. Will and Agnes have sexual relations. They marry and have three children. Over time, Will leaves for London.
At the heart of Hamnet, of course, is the child, Hamnet, the Shakespeares’ only son, born along with his twin sister, Judith, in 1585. (Their eldest daughter, Susanna, had been born two years earlier.) The real Hamnet would die of bubonic plague at age 11 and is buried (as are his father and mother) in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The loss of a child is devastating. It was even in the 16th century, when infant and child deaths were common. The movie does not explicitly suggest that Will took refuge in London because of the grief, but it seems that way, especially since we are given no indication that this grieving young father will go on to dominate English-language literature as no one had before or has since.
Perhaps his success, his fortune, and his work do not justify an “abandonment.” But perhaps there was no abandonment.
After all, Agnes was no helpless girl. When they married, Will was 18 and she 26. We don’t know when Shakespeare left Warwickshire for London, but it was certainly after the birth of the twins and possibly even after Hamnet’s death. Anne would have been just over thirty then.
Coincidentally, Hamnet has appeared just months after the publication of an academic work by Professor Matthew Steggle that refutes the premise of Hamnet, according to which Shakespeare abandoned his family for London and fame. Steggle has discovered (and not only he) that Mrs. Shakespeare probably visited and even lived with Will in London, and that their bond was strong.
Of course, that is history, not drama, and moreover recent history. And in a way, it doesn’t matter, since O’Farrell and Zhao work not with facts but with fiction, set in a historical context. That said, the premise that Hamlet was inspired by Hamnet’s death is also rejected by scholars. And it doesn’t matter that they don’t address issues of “authorship” or “recusant Catholicism.”
But in a brilliant casting choice, perfectly aligned with the movie’s premise, the Prince of Denmark is played by Noah Jupe, the real-life older brother of Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet. Thus, when Agnes travels to London with her brother and joins the groundlings to see a performance of Hamlet, she is doubly shocked to hear a name and see a face so similar to those of her dead son.
I’ll say more about Jessie Buckley’s performance in a moment, but first I pause to praise Jacobi Jupe’s portrayal of Hamnet.
He resembles no one so much as a ten-year-old Orson Welles. (I can only hope he has as successful a career as Welles’s, though without the successive wives and lovers or the frequent and scandalous falsehoods.) I have never seen a better performance from an actor so young: charming, intelligent, and emotionally perfect.
I could say the same of Jessie Buckley, except that Agnes’s emotions, raw and roaring in her grief, in two moments border on histrionic. Whether it was Buckley’s decision or that of the otherwise restrained Chloé Zhao, I don’t know.
The 1998 Best Picture Oscar winner, Shakespeare in Love, suggested that the playwright shook the provincial dust from his boots and threw himself into successive romantic adventures in sophisticated London. It was a comedy of errors worthy of the Bard. Twenty years later, Kenneth Branagh starred in and directed All Is True, the story of Shakespeare’s return from London to Stratford-upon-Avon, a rather somber tale of sublimated homosexuality and family bitterness, with the scandalous suggestion that Hamnet committed suicide.
Oh, what fools these mortals be!
Of the three, Hamnet is the best movie. Because just when one thinks one is witnessing a neofeminist attack on Shakespeare, and that Agnes is going to burst into the premiere of Hamlet with angry accusations of Will’s desertion, she beholds the play and is captivated by it.
It is very similar to the climactic scenes of Shakespeare in Love, when all the picaresque madness of the movie’s convoluted plot dissolves into the spell of Romeo and Juliet.
Hamnet ends with one of the most moving scenes I have seen in years. The prince Hamlet, dying from the prick of the poisoned sword, collapses on the proscenium, arm outstretched: “The rest is silence.” The groundlings come forward, as they surely would have done at the Globe in 1601, reaching out their hands toward the actor. Agnes/Anne is among them. Will, backstage, weeps.
So perhaps not abandonment but redemption, because, unlike Orpheus, Will never looked back.
Brad Miner, husband and father, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and senior fellow of the Faith & Reason Institute. He was literary editor of National Review and had a long career in the publishing industry. His most recent book is Sons of St. Patrick, written with George J. Marlin. His successful The Compleat Gentleman is now available in a third revised edition and also as an audiobook on Audible (read by Bob Souer). Mr. Miner has served as a member of the board of Aid to the Church in Need USA and also on the Selective Service System draft board in Westchester County, New York.