By chance, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s only son dying from the plague, aged 11, in 1596, was published in March 2020, just as pandemic panic arrived.
It was well received. John Mullan in these pages found its final revelation of how the play Hamlet is connected to the death of the boy Hamnet “painful and satisfying at once, like this remarkable novel as a whole”.
The theory was nothing new. Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses proclaims that “Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare”. But it had never been so fully worked through as a romantic story – in such rhapsodic prose, in the present tense, full of lyrical triplets – concentrating so entirely on Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, or Anne, Hathaway and the family that Shakespeare himself is pushed to one side and never actually named.
Hamnet, which won multiple prizes, has since sold more than two million copies and been translated into 40 languages. A diverse Royal Shakespeare Company production opened in 2023. Now, it is filmed with total conviction by Chloé Zhao, the Chinese-born director who won an Oscar in 2021 for her drama about itinerant life in the US, Nomadland. It’s a major production, backed by Steven Spielberg, that will not disappoint fans of the book or anyone who likes a really good sob.
It’s skilfully co-scripted by O’Farrell and Zhao together, abandoning the complex time structure of the book (in which the story of Hamnet’s illness is alternated with the backstory) for a straightforwardly chronological approach; bringing Shakespeare the man more to the fore, but making him inarticulate in person.
The casting is tremendous. As Agnes, Jessie Buckley is a marvel, so striking and wide-eyed, so immediately touching, no less when silent than when gasping in childbirth or screaming in horror – scenes that will propel her Oscar-wards, for sure. Her crooked grin is irresistible. It needs to be, because the character she plays, “this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite”, as she is called in the novel, is quite preposterous. She’s a native creature of the woods, expert in herbal remedies, gifted with supernatural insight into the future of anyone whose hand she presses, a super-hippy, dressed in red.
When Agnes finally arrives in London for the first time, to see her first play, the premiere of Hamlet, she evidently doesn’t understand at all what theatre even is. Buckley not only makes that work, she makes it heart-rending. The film’s worth seeing just for her.
As Shakespeare, though, heart-throb Paul Mescal matches her appeal, as a loving, wounded dad, too little present in person what with working away, but ultimately showing how much he cares through his art. It was perhaps a bit on the nose to have him declaim, “To be or not to be”, as if each word were occurring to him there and then, on the banks of the Thames, as he considers pitching himself in, but his rehearsal scene with the players is superb. Emily Watson is a rock as Shakespeare’s mother, Mary. Jacobi Jupe is hugely affecting as Hamnet – his death scene the most grievous in literature since Little Nell’s in 1841 – and it was a masterstroke to cast his older brother Noah Jupe to play Hamlet, the young man Hamnet didn’t live to be.The poetry of O’Farrell’s prose is more than matched by the Malickian cinematography of Łukasz Żal (Ida, The Zone of Interest), and the relentlessly poignant score by Max Richter.
Hamnet is Zhao’s first film set in the past but she doesn’t treat it like that (she caused a stir when she said “when Paul was delivering his speech, I only understood a third of it, technically, because I don’t understand what those words mean”). All the feeling here is contemporary, from Agnes accusing her husband of absence (“You weren’t here!”) to, perhaps, her overwhelming grief (at this time, a third of children died before the age of ten).
Zhao’s earlier films hewed closely to documentary reality. Here, anachronisms abound (the garden at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon abounds in Verbena bonariensis, introduced to the UK in 1732; Agnes’s spirit animal is not a kestrel but a more biddable Harris hawk, introduced here in the 1960s) but no matter. It’s all “alchemy” and “metamorphosis”, Zhao claims in her bizarre director’s statement.
Shakespeare of all writers is the least susceptible to such reduction to biographical explanation – others abide our question – but then Hamnet is not to be judged as a proposition about Shakespeare, so much as a fantasy attached to a previously existing imaginary world. Fan fiction, in fact.
[Further reading: The best film & TV to watch in 2026]
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This article appears in the 14 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Battle for power
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