If there is anything that years of experiments in the genre have taught us, it’s that it’s difficult to make a good film about a great man. The entrants in this genre, from A Beautiful Mind (2001) to A Complete Unknown (2024), vary widely. Some are excellent, many more are just OK, and a few are very bad. A film about someone who is already iconic presents a problem: Can a legend be humanized without losing their legendary quality or becoming a caricature of their most famous attributes?
Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet took on one of the greatest giants of all, William Shakespeare, and successfully reimmortalized the bard in a way he has never been seen before — through the eyes of his wife, known to history as Anne Hathaway. Though the historical Shakespeare is elusive, a few things are known for sure: He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon; he married Hathaway in the same town when he was 18 years old, and she was 26 years old (and pregnant with his child). He had three children: Susanna, Judith, and one son, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11 in 1596. Shakespeare wrote perhaps his most immortal play, Hamlet (the names, at the time, were interchangeable), around 1600.
Shakespeare always gives biographers and storytellers an itch to fill in the facts. Why did he spend so much time in London, despite his family still living in Stratford? Which characters did he play, and why? (We know a few, including Hamlet’s father’s ghost.) How many of the immortal words of his plays are autobiographical?
Most of these are unanswerable questions, and wisely, O’Farrell does not try to provide pat answers with her novel and subsequent film (she co-wrote the screenplay alongside director Chloé Zhao). To the contrary, both the novel and the movie draw the reader deeper into the mystery of Shakespeare’s life, and particularly Hathaway’s, who was remembered in her father’s will as Agnes (the name she takes on in O’Farrell’s telling). O’Farrell treats the character of Agnes with a deep reverence — similar to the reverence that Agnes has for the natural world, for the life that grows within her, and for her husband’s genius. Agnes, as a character, reminds us that a woman who could capture the heart of Shakespeare could be no ordinary woman.
At the same time, though, by taking the spotlight away from Shakespeare as the giant of history that he was — O’Farrell never refers to him by name in the book — a more complex history unfolds, and a compelling character comes into focus. The effect, for the film, is a more intimate portrait of Shakespeare’s marriage than one would think possible, and one that has the ring of truth.
Jessie Buckley carries the film with her luminous performance of Agnes, but Paul Mescal is also a believable, tortured, deeply loving Shakespeare. By refusing to force the Shakespeare marriage into one particular narrative — a distant one forced to a breaking point by grief or a happily-ever-after story where love conquers all — the film preserves what was undoubtedly an unusual union of two very unusual people.
There are scenes that are hard to watch, in particular one where Shakespeare physically restrains his wife, driven mad by grief; however, there are also moments of stunning beauty. Agnes’s understanding of her husband’s work develops throughout the film: At first, her love for him takes the form of a dogged insistence to naysayers that he needs time and space to write, and it develops into an experiential understanding of what her husband’s genius is, the truths about the human experience that he crystallizes in his work.
Buckley and Mescal are accompanied by some truly impressive talent in the form of the film’s younger actors, who render the whole story convincing. A particularly intelligent choice was to cast Noah Jupe, the brother of Jacobi Jupe (who plays Hamnet), as Hamlet at the Globe, where Agnes comes face-to-face with what seems to be an older version of her son, immortalized in his father’s play.
Only one note jars the symphony of Hamnet — the film omits the novel’s complex engagement with the religious atmosphere of Elizabethan England. In the novel, Shakespeare and Agnes are married in what seems to be a recusant Catholic liturgy, and many of her mysterious and unusual ways, especially her connection with nature, are inherited from a close priest friend.
The film flattens this complexity into a much more tired stereotype, where religion offers Agnes unhelpful platitudes, and she finds her place on the edge of society as a practitioner of some kind of vague witchcraft. Setting aside the fact that herbal remedies and a variety of rituals were frequently combined with the Christian faith in the culture of the time, the film misses a huge opportunity to engage with the complexity of Shakespeare’s relationship with religion, as attested to in his plays, at the pivotal moment of his son’s death.
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But despite this, the film’s pivotal scene, where Agnes watches Hamlet, undeniably has the quality of a spiritual encounter. “When I was on set of Hamnet, when Paul was delivering his speech, I only understand a third of it, technically,” Zhao told the New Yorker. “But Paul said to me, ‘Listen, if Shakespeare’s performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body.’”
The encounter between Agnes and her husband through his work builds to the film’s fundamental thesis: that understanding Shakespeare requires understanding those he loved.
Emily Starr Kwilinski, Ph.D., is the managing editor of Slant Books and writes Sigh No More on Substack.
