Hamnet and the 400-year-old mystery about Shakespeare’s wife and son

The new Oscar-winning film Hamnet depicts the home life of William and Agnes Shakespeare – and the “soul-crushing” loss of their child. It’s a powerful story that fills in many blanks.

In Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell’s pithy 2020 novel and the deeply moving new film based on it — Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, is an herbalist with a knowledge of medicinal potions and an almost supernatural ability to sense the future. But she cannot save her young son from the plague, a death that prompted the boy’s father to write one of the greatest plays in all of literature, Hamlet. Almost none of this is true in any verifiable way. On the page and on the screen, Hamnet is a work of inspired imagination, a rich exploration of the sadness born of the simplest truths. You can’t say that O’Farrell, who also wrote the film’s screenplay with its director Chloe Zhao, distorted the true story, because there He is No story is known, although historians have delved for centuries into Shakespeare’s past.

The scattered facts about Shakespeare’s family far outweigh the questions they raise. Records show that in 1582, William Shakespeare, then 18, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Three years later, twins were born, called Judith and Hamnet, a name that was at that time interchangeable with Hamlet. In 1596, when he was only 11 years old, Hamnet died. He was buried on 11 August, and Shakespeare, who was traveling with his theater company, almost certainly could not return to Stratford in time for the funeral. About four years later, he wrote Hamlet. Make of it whatever you want.

Scientific

No one knows if Shakespeare felt forced to marry the pregnant Anne or if they were deeply in love. No one knows how Hamnet died, but plague was widespread at the time and was the most likely cause of his death. More importantly for the book and film, no one knows much about Anne herself, including whether she could read and write. The fantasy gives her a strong-willed personality (as portrayed on screen by Jessie Buckley in her Oscar-winning performance) and a passionate romance with Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). Hamnet is really about Agnes.