Questão 85 - UECE 1 Fase 2026/2

Hamnet – Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley beguile and captivate in audacious Shakespearean tragedy

[1]    Chloé Zhao’s film version of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-
making novel powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a 
child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama. 
    ‘The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs 
[5] and fears…” This is Francis Bacon’s essay Of Parents and 
Children; maybe they were more secret in his day than 
ours. This kind of secrecy and revelation is part of Chloé 
Zhao’s deeply felt romantic fantasy about the origin of 
William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. It locates the play’s 
[10] beginning in the imagined anguish of Shakespeare and his 
wife Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway at the death of their son 
Hamnet at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the 
play’s first performance. 
    The nearness of the names is not supposed to be some 
[15] monumental Freudian slip; there is linguistic evidence that 
the two could be used interchangeably. The movie is 
inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same 
name – Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell – as 
well as the 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the 
[20] Making of Hamlet by literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt. 
This film succeeds, not because it solves the mystery, but 
because it deepens it still further. It is contrived and 
speculative, but ingenious and impassioned at the same 
time. 
[25]   On one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading, 
based on treating Shakespeare like you would a 
contemporary novelist with contemporary ideas about the 
speakability of this kind of bereavement; it relies heavily 
on a name coincidence which could be simply that, a 
[30] coincidence. Moreover, the Hamnetisation of tragic 
themes could as easily be applied to any of the plays. 
(Shakespeare’s horror at the death of Hamnet could have 
remained dormant for more years than this, and then 
surfaced in Macbeth at the murder of Macduff’s wife and 
[35] young son.) You can remain unconvinced. And yet there is 
such terrific daring in Zhao and O’Farrell’s stretch: a 
thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the 
centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human 
beings. 
[40]  Zhao takes her movie at walking pace at first, following 
Agnes as she wanders endlessly through a forest, a habit 
that has earned her a witch-like reputation like her late 
mother, dreamily registering the sky through the branches 
and a hawk that has swooped down to her hand. Agnes is 
[45] in a trance of rapture in the folk-horror woodland outside 
Stratford-upon-Avon, a premonition of creative inspiration 
from the depths of despair. It is an unselfconsciously 
beguiling performance from Jessie Buckley, who gives 
every look and smile a piercing significance. Her beauty 
[50] captivates young William Shakespeare, a would-be poet 
seething at having to follow his abusive father into the 
gloving business, and played with intelligent force by Paul 
Mescal. 
    They marry, to the deep unease of William’s mother 
[55] Mary (Emily Watson), and the film imagines Agnes having 
her first baby (Susanna) actually in the forest. But when 
she reaches the end of her second pregnancy, she is forced 
to give birth indoors, a bad augury; these are the twins 
Judith and Hamnet. And while William is away in London 
[60] following his dream of becoming a star of the London 
playhouse, illness and calamity strike. 
    The death of Hamnet could be compared to that of 
Thomas Cromwell’s wife and daughters from sickness early 
in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall; it is an inciting event, a 
[65] terrible event which in some sense explains everything 
that happens next. Cromwell had to cauterise his inner 
agony by throwing himself into his career, pursuing it 
ruthlessly and making it of overwhelming importance – but 
he did not dwell on those that he has lost as Shakespeare 
[70] is supposed to be doing here. Zhao and O’Farrell suggest 
that Shakespeare transformed and displaced his grief into 
every line of his play: the agony, the futility of carrying on, 
the dazed inability to decide on the point of anything. In a 
way, he, Shakespeare, is the ghost, the undead phantom 
[75] condemned to wander miserably through the world while 
Hamnet is left alive. The boy’s soul has not been murdered 
as the father’s has. 
    It could all be true – although it comes down to the 
name, and there is a line in Romeo and Juliet about what 
[80] there is in a name. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal is 
beautiful and pellucid and Max Richter’s score swarms all 

around the action. It is a film that moves because of the 
performances which are so absorbing. 
    Decades ago, Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and 
[85] Guildenstern Are Dead provided a whole new way into 
Hamlet. Perhaps Zhao and O’Farrell will do the same thing 
with this tender and moving new creation myth.. 

The inspiration for the film Hamnet was derived not only from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, but also from an essay by