Hamnet Review: Goodnight, Sweet Prince

The how and why behind the death of William Shakespeare’s only son at age 11 is lost to history. But novelist Maggie O’Farrell plausibly imagined plague as the cause, a narrative choice that had unanticipated resonance when her novel Hamnet was first published in March of 2020. The novel – and now the feature film adaptation of it, written by O’Farrell with director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) – capitalize on how little is known about Shakespeare’s domestic life. Fertile ground, then, to imagine a drama far from London’s Globe Theatre, unfurling in Shakespeare’s own family home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Drifting slightly from its source text, the film begins before William (Paul Mescal) has met future wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley). He’s a lowly tutor, teaching her stepbrothers Latin, who spies her out the window with her hawk; well-versed in herbal tinctures and prone to omens, she’s giving off witchy vibes. (“The women in my family see things that others don’t” is how she puts it.) They fall in love fast, over the protestations of pretty much everyone in both their families, a problem they solve by getting pregnant and forcing a marriage. 

What follows from that marriage are three births and a death, each of them excruciating to watch but also intensely rewarding. Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth. That’s a literal connection: When she goes into labor with her first, William finds her curled in the fetal position under her favorite tree in the woods. For the next birth, her mother-in-law (Emily Watson) puts her foot down and forces Agnes to deliver indoors. (It’s a dynamo scene for Watson, who starts as a scold but unlocks her heart during the traumatic birth.) When twins arrive unexpectedly, Agnes is devastated: She’s had a vision of two children attending her deathbed, which means she must lose one along the way. In a terrible irony, she spends their childhood anticipating the wrong child’s demise – it’s not sickly Judith but sturdy, chubby-cheeked Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe, sweetly expressive) with the reaper at his back. 

You can know the awful thing is coming and still not really be prepared for it. Another contradiction: You can watch somebody howl in unimaginable grief and still marvel at the restraint. Zhao mostly uses the already-spare score by Max Richter in sparing fashion, save an overused needle drop; as I recall, there’s no music when plague arrives in their house, and there are stretches of silence so profound I was bowled over by the softest exhalation from Mescal – a kind of “ohhhh” that says more than a whole soliloquy. 

Yes, but: There will be soliloquy, too. Just as earthy Agnes knows intuitively that London, where William now works full-time on his plays, is not for her, the film never wears its town scenes comfortably. A scene of William rehearsing the first production of Hamlet – in O’Farrell’s imagination, a play borne explicitly from his grief over Hamnet – effectively uses the actors wrestling with his dialogue to speak to the author’s inner turmoil. Yet the very next scene undoes its impact, by having William cheesily recite his own “to be or not to be” speech while contemplating an everlasting dunk in the River Thames.  

You could wave it away as Zhao drawing a line between town and country – artifice and earthiness – and the same excuse could explain the fatal misdirection of Buckley when Agnes arrives in London, too. She doesn’t belong in the big city, but she goes there to see Hamlet, a project her husband has never mentioned to her. Still, she’s framed like a gibbering idiot who doesn’t understand how a play even works – this is a stage, where actors say lines; also, authors tend to write what they know – ignoring the provable biographical fact that her husband at this point had written about 20 plays and had surely explained the gist of what he did, even if she’d never taken in a show herself. More damningly, it defies the film’s own inner logic; in happier times, we see her children put on a little production for her at home, delivering lines that will eventually appear in Macbeth. 

It didn’t ruin Hamnet for me, or Buckley’s otherwise transcendent performance, not by a long shot. It only made me long, like her grief-stricken Agnes, for the natural world and the way things were, before everything went so wrong.

This article appears in December 5 • 2025.