How Much of Hamnet Is Pulled From the True Story of William Shakespeare’s Son?
Spoilers below.
Chloe Zhao’s stupendous film Hamnet does not purport to be a true story. It is not even necessarily based on a true story. The Oscar contender, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is as much a work of fiction as the book it is based upon: Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, which collects a few known facts about the life of William Shakespeare’s wife and their son, Hamnet, and uses them to shape a devastating narrative about grief, love, and storytelling.
In Zhao’s film as well as in O’Farrell’s novel, a young Latin tutor named William Shakespeare (Mescal) meets Agnes Hathaway (Buckley) in the late 1500s, and they fall in love. They are handfasted, then married, and eventually Agnes gives birth to three children: first Susanna, then twins Hamnet and Judith. When Hamnet and Judith are 11 years old, and William has become a successful playwright in London, Judith falls ill with the “pestilence,” or what is now known as the bubonic plague. Through a sort of unexplained magic, Hamnet coaxes the plague from Judith and into his own body, and he later dies of the sickness. The Shakespeare household explodes with grief, and Agnes can barely bring herself to look at her husband until she travels to London to see his new play, called “Hamlet.” At first, she is furious at William for daring to evoke their son’s name. But as she watches what would become one of Shakespeare’s most acclaimed plays, she begins to see her husband, to connect with him in his grief, and to understand the ways in which their beloved boy lives on.
So which are the parts of this story that are true, or are at least formed from nuggets of truth? Hamnet did live, as, of course, did his parents and siblings. As O’Farrell writes in the author’s note for Hamnet, “This is a work of fiction, inspired by the short life of a boy who died in Stratford, Warwickshire, in the summer of 1596. I have tried, where possible, to stick to the scant historical facts known about the real Hamnet and his family.”
She concludes, “It is not known why Hamnet Shakespeare died: his burial is listed but not the cause of his death. The Black Death or ‘pestilence,’ as it would have been known in the late sixteenth century, is not mentioned once by Shakespeare in any of his plays or poetry. I have always wondered about this absence and its possible significance; this novel is the result of my idle speculation.”
Below, let’s explore what O’Farrell calls “the tension between myth and reality” that gives Hamnet such emotional heft.
First, did William Shakespeare really have a wife named Agnes?
Yes, though most Shakespeare fans will know her as “Anne Hathaway.” As O’Farrell explains in her author’s note, she referred to Anne as “Agnes,” thanks to her father’s will: “Most people will know [Hamnet’s] mother as ‘Anne,’ but she was named by her father, Richard Hathaway, in his will, as ‘Agnes,’ and I decided to follow his example.”
The eldest of seven surviving children, the real Anne/Agnes Hathaway was the daughter of a yeoman farmer, and she married William Shakespeare in 1582, when William was 18 years old and she was around 26. She was three months pregnant at the time of their marriage, as Hamnet depicts.
In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, O’Farrell explained part of why she felt so called to tell Hamnet’s story from the perspective of Agnes rather than William: “From scholarly texts to popular culture, we’re told Shakespeare’s wife was an older woman, a peasant. We’re told he did not want to be with her, that she trapped him into marriage. We’re drip-fed this image. I started to feel anger about how domestic life is diminished: people want to believe Shakespeare appeared in London fully formed, that he did not have a domestic life…People think of Agnes as a cradle-snatching yokel who married a younger man, but her family was wealthy; they had a successful sheep farm. I kept thinking: why would a 26-year-old woman, with a good dowry and a secure home want to marry this fellow?” Hamnet was, in part, her attempt to answer that question.
Did Agnes and William really have a son named Hamnet?
Yes. Hamnet was the only son of Agnes and William, and the twin brother of their second daughter, Judith. He died at the age of 11, buried at the Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon on Aug. 11, 1596, as official parish records reveal to us. However, these same records do not reveal the cause of his death.
“The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been overlooked and underwritten by history,” O’Farell told the New York Times in 2021. “I think he’s been consigned to a literary footnote. And I believe, quite strongly, that without him—without his tragically short life—we wouldn’t have the play Hamlet. We probably wouldn’t have Twelfth Night. As an audience, we are enormously in debt to him.”
Did the real Hamnet die of the bubonic plague?
No one really knows. Although it is a known fact that Hamnet died when he was 11, there is no surefire way to determine the cause of his death. As O’Farrell willingly admits, she fictionalized his death for Hamnet, using a few other known facts to strengthen her premise. As she told Entertainment Weekly in 2020, “There was no shortage of anything that could kill you, unfortunately, in Elizabethan times…Hamnet did die in high summer, and he did die in a plague year. And something that’s always intrigued me [is] the fact that Shakespeare never, ever mentions about what we now think of as the Black Death.” This omission is, in part, what led O’Farrell to imagine that Hamnet might have died of the bubonic plague. But there’s no definitive proof that this is what happened.
Did Shakespeare name the play Hamlet after his son, Hamnet?
In the epigraph to Hamnet, O’Farrell quotes from a 2004 New York Review of Books article by Steven Greenblatt, called “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet”: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same time, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”
Thus, O’Farrell posits, it seems impossible to consider that Hamlet might not be an homage to Shakespeare’s son. Although there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare named the play after Hamnet, several scholars (including Greenblatt) have speculated on the clear connection between the two, and have further hypothesized that the writing of Hamlet itself was a means for Shakespeare to process his grief.
“It’s not nothing to call a play and a tragic hero after your son–it speaks volumes,” O’Farrell told The Guardian. “We may not quite know what the volumes are–but it’s a huge act.”
In her ELLE Women in Hollywood cover interview, actress Buckley further elaborated on this idea: “Hamnet, even though he dies, lives on. Shakespeare has made something immortal in some way and created a way for this story, this son, this thing that happened in his life to be bigger than the moment. Maybe we have to live like that.”
Did that moment in the Globe really take place?
Near the conclusion of Zhao’s Hamnet, as well as O’Farrell’s book, Agnes travels to London with her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), to see her husband’s new play—the one that bears the name of her son. As she watches Hamlet from the front row of the Globe theater, she is initially disgusted, offended that anyone would dare imitate her son or use his death for a performance. But then she watches as William himself enters the stage, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and a man who bears a striking resemblance to her son plays the young Hamlet.
In the final pages of her novel, O’Farrell writes, “Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.” In the film, Buckley’s Agnes sees the young actor Jacobi Jupe’s Hamnet, just as she sees and acknowledges Mescal’s William, and they share in their grief—and in the promise that Hamnet will be remembered.
This moment is, of course, entirely fictionalized. There’s no way of knowing for certain if Anne/Agnes was present for the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe. As Zhao told Vanity Fair, “Did Hamlet actually have this moment in the original production? Maybe, maybe not—we don’t know….But by the time we got there, the veil between past and future, real life and fiction, was very, very thin.”