Hamnet Review: Shakespeare’s Greatest Tragedy Might Be the Family He Left Behind

It is an obscure piece of trivia to know that before William Shakespeare wrote what is often argued to be the greatest play in the English language, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, that he also had a son named Hamnet. It is therefore an even more esoteric fact that to this day, scholars debate whether there might be a connection between the four-hour masterpiece in which the playwright grapples with the subjects of death, loss, and the afterlife, and the bitter memory of a son who died of plague three years prior to its production.

Maggie O’Farrell remembers though. Chloé Zhao as well. And the most provocative thing about their new film, Hamnet, is that it excavates this domestic tragedy not from the perspective of the so-called great man who was absent when his son succumbed to pestilence, but that of the family he left behind. Most pointedly, and poignantly, that of the wife he never brought to London, Anne Hathaway.

Played with melancholic acuity, Jessie Buckley’s Anne—or Agnes as her family calls her (and pronounced “Anyers”)—is a woman both of her time and lost outside of it. She has a vivid understanding of what is expected of her as a woman living in the early modern period of 16th century England. But this does not mean she has to like it. She is thus gossiped to be the daughter of a witch in the town of Stratford where she lives with her father and stepmother, whose household she escapes regularly for the earthiness of nature. It is there she also rendezvouses with her younger brothers’ tutor, a poet (Paul Mescal), whose soon-to-be famous name is not uttered aloud until near the very end of the movie. Neither this writer nor Agnes have much use for society’s expectations, but dutifully fall into line with them after Agnes becomes pregnant.

Duty, however, turns out to be a primarily one-way street in their rushed and eventually troubled marriage. It is Agnes who encourages her husband to try his writing craft in London and away from the provincial expectations of a horrid father (David Wilmot) and an exasperated mother (Emily Watson). But it is in Stratford, too, where Agnes stays in the house of her mother-in-law and daughter Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and soon enough twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes). All the while, the children’s father visits frequently during his off-seasons from the Globe Theatre, and daydreams of moving his family to London. It’s just that he and Agnes always have a reason to explain why this is not the year to do it. The seasons and rationalizations pass, and their station in the community rises until, one day, the bubonic plague comes to Stratford. And Will is too late on his return to bid farewell to a child that’s taken. The anguish cultivates lifelong recriminations… and bequeaths the world a classic.

I have not read the historical novel that Hamnet is based on, however author O’Farrell makes apparently bold changes to her own material alongside her co-writer for this screenplay, director Zhao. Whereas the book jumps throughout Agnes’ lifetime in a nonlinear fashion, Hamnet the film makes for a quiet, brittle character piece told from the chronological beginning of Agnes and Will’s courtship, marriage, and estrangement.

At a glance, a speculative fictionalization about the origins of one of the Bard’s most revered tragedies would seem to overlap with Miramax’s fabled awards-chaser, Shakespeare in Love. That 1998 romantic comedy creates out of near whole-cloth an imagined romance between Shakespeare and a woman in Elizabeth I’s court with 20th century ideals. It also proved to be catnip for Oscar voters back in the day. However, other than both films culminating on the fateful premiere of a classic, I find Hamnet and Miramax’s Shakespeare fan fiction to be starkly different experiences.

While Hamnet is also a love story, this is one focused on the real biography of an author’s life. It is also largely defined by his absence. The movie is Agnes’ story, and Buckley gives it a more tactile and rough-hewn sense of loss and longing than what we usually associate with the Bard’s fictions. Buckley imbues the protagonist in her earliest scenes with a sprightly otherworldliness, appearing more at home in wooded alcoves than her loathed stepmother’s abode. But as her world narrows to three children at home, and mouths to feed, her life and Zhao’s mise-en-scène finds little room for the poetic license and grandeur of the myths that Shakespeare’s pen spilled into the English mind. It is, in fact, only when the plague comes to Stratford, and Agnes has time to entertain which of her children it might take that Zhao entertains the narrative grandiloquence of the stage. In one bitter flourish, sweet Hamnet would seem to make a deal with whatever gods or devils the plague obeys in order to take his life instead of that of his sister’s.

Mostly though, the picture follows in the footsteps of Zhao’s most successful works, including Nomadland and The Rider, by favoring the direct verisimilitude of daily slights and triumphs to slowly tease out its substantial dramatic heft. In a manner that seems to counter how history can so easily absolve men of their marital or paternal failings—or omit them entirely—Zhao and Buckley make the unstated indignities of domestic life monumental.

Buckley’s balance of the intimate with the most operatic of emotions proves mesmeric, paving the way for a third act that finally transcends after Agnes is invited inside of her husband’s head. It is there that his artifice collides head-on with her reality.

In the role of the master playwright, Mescal also finds a humility and self-loathing that might be foreign to some of the most devoted scholars, or at least fans of Joseph Fiennes’ more dashing riff on the character. But the fading light in his boyish smile giving way to wintry discontent that rings true for a man who turned suicidal musings into the most famous soliloquy in the English language. And it is when it comes to mounting that speech for the stage that Hamnet gets its most Hollywood, crafting its thesis about Hamlet’s origins rather conclusively, right down to Shakespeare casting someone who looks remarkably like his lost son (Noah Jupe, brother of younger actor Jacobi Jupe) in the role of the vacillating Dane. Nonetheless, it is how those details are processed through a mother’s eye, and a woman’s own sense of ownership over the freely adapted source material, which allows Buckley and Hamnet to climb their emotional crescendo. A quiet character piece at last becomes deafening.

Hamnet opens on Nov. 27 in the U.S. and Jan. 9 in the UK.