Hamnet’s Shakespeare Problem
by Emer McHugh
I am following the release of Hamnet – Chloé Zhao’s recent adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel that follows Anne Hathaway (here known as Agnes) in the wake of the death of her young son Hamnet and supposedly out of the shadow of her more famous husband, William Shakespeare – with great interest. I am a Shakespeare scholar, and I research the long histories of performing, adapting, and appropriating Shakespeare’s plays and cultural persona. I also specialise in such performance, adaptation, and appropriation in an Irish context, so the casting of Irish actors Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and “Will” is research catnip. Indeed, nearly all of the Google Alerts I’ve received in relation to Shakespeare and Ireland over the last few months have been Hamnet-related. Zhao has commented on the movie’s so-called “Irish energy”, not really defining what that energy might actually be other than observing more generally that in Ireland, “the land and the culture and the desire to try to remember what might have been forgotten and passed away from that culture is really, really strong”.[1] I can’t argue with Zhao on Irish memory culture (I direct the reader to Emilie Pine’s The Politics of Irish Memory for that), but Hamnet’s release and awards campaigning has seen a resurgence of the curious phenomenon that I call the “pervasive need to demonstrate that Shakespeare has close proximities to Irishness… to prove that Shakespeare does ‘belong’ to the Irish”.[2] And so, in the months since I first watched Hamnet - well, I have watched it twice now - I have wondered if I was the right audience for it. Because the film has been so overwhelmingly popular at the Irish box office (it played for several weeks at my local independent cinema), I found myself warning friends not to watch it with me for fear I’d ruin the experience for them. My own desire to not deny anyone’s emotional experience of the film, I hope, co-exists with my critique of its reliance on Shakespeare’s iconicity as well as the already-cited clamour for affinity between Shakespeare and Ireland.
When I first watched Hamnet at a London Film Festival screening in Belfast, I was not prepared for the much-maligned scene in which Mescal’s Will, in total despair following Hamnet’s death and his strained relationship with Agnes, stands perilously close to the Thames edge and recites the first few lines from Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be”. It is a moment that clunkily crowbars some of the most famous lines of Shakespeare’s writing, and some of the most famous lines in all of Western literature, into a personal moment of despair and suicidal ideation, which ultimately undermines Mescal’s emotional performance with its sheer obviousness. At this stage I have to remind myself that Hamnet, and the novel that it is based on, is a type of Shakespeare biofiction - or, specifically, is supposed to be biofiction based on Shakespeare and his social circle, including Anne Hathaway. Ostensively, as Edel Semple has observed with respect to O’Farrell’s original novel and its Royal Shakespeare Company theatrical adaptation in 2023, “Shakespeare is a useful selling point that grabs an audience, a market and media attention, but that attention is then directed to an adjacent subject.”[3] But the film is at pains to show how its events inspire Shakespeare’s own work. Will’s blossoming romance with Agnes spurs him on to write Romeo and Juliet. Another scene shows Will and the couple’s three children (Judith and Susanna as well as Hamnet) surprising Agnes with a home-made pageant where the kids play the three witches from Macbeth. There’s a parallel here with Kenneth Branagh’s 2018 film All is True, a film that also uses the Hamnet story as its engine that also has several characters – including his own family - casually quote Shakespeare’s work, as well as having a random person go up to Branagh’s Shakespeare to ask just why he is so great. (I am not exaggerating.) There is an understanding in the world of both films that Shakespeare is simply just a Great Writer above all else. I’m struck remembering that O’Farrell’s novel never actually names Shakespeare at all: but here in the film, Joe Alwyn’s Bartholomew, escorting his sister Agnes to the Globe to see Hamlet, loudly yells up at a window: “CAN YOU TELL US WHERE WE CAN FIND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE?” I also can’t get past the film’s reliance on the long-held assumption that Shakespeare was an absent husband and father: as Peter Kirwan observes,
“what’s particularly frustrating here is the lazy return to the old trope of art vs family, of a Shakespeare sitting up late at night in Stratford writing for no purpose but simply because he has to, and doing so in a way that puts him in direct conflict with the needs of his wife and kids.”[4]
It’s all the more frustrating given that Matthew Steggle’s detective work has cast aspersions on that myth with an astounding discovery: the fact that Anne Hathaway may have had a house with Shakespeare in Trinity Lane, and thus may have actually lived in London as well as in Stratford.[5] The importance of discoveries like Steggle’s is that they nuance and complicate these myths and narratives about Shakespeare and his social circle. Yet, watching Hamnet we as audience members are never allowed to forget that the film is really about how Shakespeare wrote Hamlet - rather than a recentring of a cultural icon and a cultural myth onto Agnes’ agency, and onto her pain and grief.
This notion of Shakespeare Is a Great Writer and Everybody Knows It is actually undermined in Hamnet by the fact that Agnes is seemingly so disinterested in her husband’s work to the point where she has no idea that he’s written a new play called Hamlet, and where she seemingly has no idea how to behave at a play. Connected to that, the film seems to be under the impression that ‘groundlings’ at the early modern theatre were quiet and respectful audience members, who are annoyed by Agnes’ loud interruptions and heckling. (Any Shakespeare scholar could tell you that early modern audiences were reportedly very vocal and responsive to the events on stage, which makes Agnes’ response to Hamlet less of an outlier than the film would have you believe.) The fact that the film ends with Will, Agnes, and the Globe audience achieving catharsis through an extremely truncated version of Hamlet - I know I shouldn’t quibble about editing, but why does the Ghost appear on stage during Hamlet’s first soliloquy and before Horatio even has a chance to tell him he saw his father the night before? It doesn’t make sense! - is a gesture towards the emotional release that art can produce, which is no bad thing. But I don’t think, where Shakespeare and his cultural iconicity are concerned, that this climactic moment exists in a vacuum.[6]
I do not wish to be the scholar who harps on about historical accuracy: most of the time it is frankly a very boring and reductive position to take. But when it comes to Shakespeare, the political stakes of historical accuracy are just that bit higher. I have spent most of my teaching career encouraging my students to avoid seeing Shakespeare as “universal”, and banning them from referring to him as “the Bard”. I have spent most of my professional career assuaging the concerns of so many people who worry that they “haven’t read enough Shakespeare” (to which I always say that I haven’t read all of them either). I have good reason to. As Nora J. Williams articulates so succinctly,
“Shakespeare’s spread across the world, and his continued, insistent presence in classrooms and on stages is not merely an accident of history, but rather part of a deliberate and sustained campaign of imperial mastery: historically speaking, to ‘master’ Shakespeare is to hold power relative to the imperial force of Great Britain.”[7]
Hamnet is a film that ends up reifying the cultural myths about Shakespeare, and reifying his so-called “universality” as a writer. These cultural myths and this “universality” cannot be so easily divorced from the use of Shakespeare as a tool for reinforcing British cultural hegemony. But, of course, that would be a more difficult pill for Hollywood to swallow than a sea of groundlings experiencing mawkish catharsis at a production of Hamlet.
Notes
Carla Feric, “Hamnet director Chloe Zhao says the hit film has ‘some energy’ from Ireland”, BreakingNews.ie, 23 February 2026, https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/hamnet-director-chloe-zhao-says-the-hit-film-has-some-energy-from-ireland-1867799.html.
Emer McHugh, Irish Shakespeares: Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in the Twenty-First Century (London and New York, 2026, forthcoming).
Edel Semple, “Shakespeare and his social circle on the stage and screen, 1998-2023”, in Edel Semple and Ronan Hatfull (eds.), Shakespearean Biofiction on the Contemporary Stage and Screen (London, 2023), pp. 1-16.
Peter Kirwan, “Hamnet (film)”, The Bardathon, 27 December 2025, https://drpeterkirwan.com/2025/12/27/hamnet-film/.
Matthew Steggle, “The Shakspaires of Trinity Lane: A Possible Shakespeare Life-Record”, Shakespeare, vol. 21, no. 2 (2025), pp. 450-494.
At this juncture I would like to point out that the use of Max Richter’s “On The Nature of Daylight” as a concluding, “cathartic” musical cue is literally stolen from Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 masterpiece Arrival. If you’re reading this, you should go watch Arrival.
Nora J. Williams, Canonical Misogyny: Shakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence (Edinburgh, 2024).
Emer McHugh is an Irish writer and academic who lives in Belfast, and is the author of the forthcoming Irish Shakespeares: Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2026). She researches and publishes on Shakespeare and Ireland studies, theatre and celebrity culture, gender and sexuality studies, and contemporary Irish and British performance.