Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name,
interchangeable in stratford records in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
- The Death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet
Art imitates life—and perhaps art has always begun in the shadow of tragedy.
I did not know that when I began watching Hamnet.
I knew William Shakespeare as a name attached to famous lines and plays I had never properly read. When I saw the film’s title, I assumed Hamnet might be a modern variation on Hamlet—perhaps a slightly altered name for a new interpretation of the familiar tragedy.
Only later did I understand.
This was that story.
Not the story of Prince Hamlet, but the imagined story of the silence that came before him.
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, begins with a small collection of historical facts. William Shakespeare and his wife had a son named Hamnet. He had a twin sister, Judith. Hamnet died in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1596 at the age of eleven. A few years later, Shakespeare wrote the play that became Hamlet. Beyond those facts, the emotional connection between the child’s death and the play remains unknown. O’Farrell’s novel and Zhao’s film enter that empty space with fiction.
The result is not a conventional biography of the world’s most famous playwright.
It is the story of a father who was absent, a mother who was left behind, and a dead child whose name eventually returned from the stage.
This review contains spoilers and reflects my personal interpretation of the film.
Do Not Look Back
Early in the film, Will tells Agnes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Orpheus is a musician whose art can move animals, trees, stones, and even the gods of the underworld. When his wife Eurydice dies, he travels into the land of the dead to bring her home. He is permitted to lead her back under one condition: he must not turn around to look at her before they reach the living world.
Near the end of the journey, he can no longer hear her footsteps.
He listens.
Then listens again.
All he can hear is his own heartbeat.
Unable to endure the uncertainty, he turns around—and loses her forever.
Inside Hamnet, this myth works as more than a romantic story Will uses to attract Agnes. It becomes a map for their marriage.
Agnes repeatedly asks Will to look at her. She senses that he is always partly elsewhere—inside language, imagination, London, or the private theater of his mind. He turns toward her, but never completely leaves that other world.
After Hamnet dies, the Orpheus parallel becomes even stronger.
Will is an artist trying to reach the dead through art.
But art cannot bring his son back into the living world.
It can only let him turn around and look.
A Woman Who Reads the Living World
Although history remembers William Shakespeare, Hamnet places Agnes at its emotional center.
She is portrayed as a woman deeply connected to animals, plants, touch, and intuition. Rumors surround her family, suggesting that the women in her bloodline possess unusual knowledge. She reads people through the body and understands the natural world in ways that formal education cannot explain.
When Agnes touches Will’s hand, she sees landscapes, caves, tunnels, oceans, and a deep unexplored darkness.
These images function like a vision of the life ahead of them.
Will contains beauty and distance, creation and absence. He offers Agnes a world larger than Stratford, but part of him will always belong to an undiscovered country she cannot enter.
The film’s herbal language strengthens this connection between Agnes and endurance. Her words about mugwort and waybread draw on the tradition of the Old English Nine Herbs Charm, a medicinal text preserved in a tenth-century manuscript. The charm praises plants that resist poison, illness, and forces that crush them underfoot. The film adapts that older language into Agnes’s intimate understanding of survival.
But survival in Hamnet does not mean defeating suffering.
A plant survives not because it is never trampled, but because it continues growing after being trampled.
Agnes and Will do not overcome grief.
They learn, slowly and painfully, how to continue breathing inside it.
The Brave Child
Hamnet and Judith are twins.
They play at exchanging identities, confusing their parents and turning resemblance into a private game. Their closeness makes the scene of illness almost unbearable.
When Judith becomes gravely sick, Hamnet imagines death as a presence watching them. He believes that if he lies beside his sister and makes them difficult to distinguish, death may take him by mistake.
He offers his life so she can live.
“I’ll be brave,” he promises his absent father.
The scene is devastating because Hamnet is trying to obey an adult lesson with a child’s literal faith. He was told to be brave and protect the family. In his mind, bravery means becoming the sacrifice.
He takes the place his father cannot occupy.
Will is away in London when his son dies. Agnes must face the illness, the body, the surviving children, and the silence of the house without him.
When Will later tells her that she did everything she could, Agnes answers with the only truth that matters:
“You weren’t here.”
Her anger is not simply an accusation that Will did not love his son. The pain is more complicated. He loved Hamnet, yet he had built a life in which his work repeatedly carried him away from the people he loved.
Agnes grieves through the body. She held the child, felt the fever, and remained beside him as life left the room.
Will grieves through distance, language, and imagination.
They have lost the same child, but they are trapped in different versions of the loss.
The Place in His Head
Agnes tells Will that he is caught inside a place in his mind—a place that has become more real to him than the world around him.
Not even the death of their child can pull him out of it.
This is one of the film’s cruelest observations about art.
The artistic mind can look like abandonment to the people waiting outside it.
Will’s return to London appears selfish because Agnes is still standing in the physical ruins of their family. Yet writing is also the only place where he knows how to remain with what happened.
His departure is both an escape from grief and a journey deeper into it.
That contradiction prevents him from becoming merely an irresponsible husband. He cannot offer Agnes the kind of presence she needs, but his absence is not proof that he feels nothing.
His grief is hidden inside form.
Inside rhythm.
Inside borrowed characters.
Inside a play about a son grieving for his father.
When Hamnet Becomes Hamlet
When Agnes learns that Will has written a play called Hamlet, she initially experiences the title as another betrayal.
Their son’s name has been taken from the private world of family and placed on a public stage.
But when she enters the theater, she begins to understand what Will has made.
The play is not a monument explaining Hamnet’s death. Nor is it evidence that one child had to die so a masterpiece could exist.
It is a place where the dead and the living can briefly occupy the same room.
Will was not present to say farewell to his son. Through the theater, he creates a farewell after the fact. Words such as “Remember me,” “to die, to sleep,” and “the rest is silence” become more than famous Shakespearean lines. In the film’s imagined history, they become fragments of a father trying to speak across death.
The roles are reversed in a beautiful way.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a dead father asks his living son to remember him.
In Zhao’s Hamnet, a living father appears to ask his dead son for the same mercy.
Remember me.
Remember that I loved you.
Remember that my absence was not the absence of grief.
The stage cannot resurrect Hamnet. The actor is not her son, and Agnes knows it.
Yet the performance gives her something reality has denied her: a visible form for grief.
She can watch someone carrying her son’s name struggle with death. She can reach toward him. She can remain beside the story until its final breath.
Art does not erase the loss.
It allows the loss to be witnessed.
Art Is Not a Cure
It would be easy to reduce Hamnet to the idea that suffering creates great art.
The historical record does not prove that Hamnet’s death directly caused Shakespeare to write Hamlet. Shakespeare’s son died in 1596; Hamlet appeared several years later, with its earliest surviving printed edition dated 1603. The connection remains an artistic and scholarly question rather than an established biographical fact.
The film is more moving when read not as an explanation of genius, but as an exploration of what art can do when grief has no adequate language.
Art does not compensate for the death of a child.
No play, however great, makes that exchange fair.
It does not cure Agnes or absolve Will. It cannot restore the years they lost to distance and anger.
What it can do is create a shape.
A room.
A stage.
A place where grief can be approached without being solved.
That may be why the film feels less like it is showing sorrow than asking us to live inside sorrow for a while.
William could not bring his son home.
He could not return to the day of Hamnet’s death or fill the empty place beside Agnes.
All he could do was place a name on a stage.
Hamnet did not return.
But Hamlet began to speak.
Hamnet died in silence. Hamlet gave that silence a voice.
But awards are not the best measure of what she achieves.
Buckley makes grief feel physical before it becomes verbal. It appears in breath, movement, silence, resistance, and finally in a cry that seems too large to belong to a performance.
The film’s greatest achievement is similar.
It does not explain grief from a safe distance.
It gives grief a body and asks us to sit beside it.
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