Hamnet is Affecting, but not History

HAMNET (2025)

Directed by Chloé Zhao

Focus Features, 126 minutes, PG-13 (adult situations, hint of nudity)

★★★★

 

You’ve no doubt heard that actress Jesse Buckley won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Agnes Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare and the mother of his three children: Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet. If you don’t  know, Hamnet was an alternative spelling of Hamlet.

 

Hamnet the film is that is not a biographical study.  It’s a play within a play within a play, though director and Mount Holyoke graduate Chloé Zhao disguises it so well you might assume it’s a historical look at the Shakespeare family. William Shakespeare may be the most famous Westerner of all time about whom we know so little. He is presumed to have written the greatest plays in the English language, but the key word is “presumed.” Anti-Stratfordians do not believe that a man from such a humble background could have written such words and put forth as the real author such properly educated gentlemen as Earl of Oxford Edmund de Vere, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, King James I, Sir Walter Raleigh, or Christopher Marlowe. Some even claim that Shakespeare was a woman (Countess of Pembroke Mary Sidney, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Agnes Shakespeare); or perhaps a group of people ranging from known writers to Jesuits or Rosicrucians. Some 88 people have been fingered for what would be the greatest literary fraud in Western history.

 

I’ve no desire to open such debates, though the Anti-Stratfordians could easily be accused of  arrogantly assuming that no one not to the manor born could be a genius. Again, though, we know very little of the historical William Shakespeare beyond his birth in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 1564 and his death there in 1616. The movie Hamnet, though, focuses on the Bard’s wife, who we used to call “Anne” Hathaway but now believe was named Agnes. When she married in 1582, Agnes was 26 and "Will" (Paul Mescal) was barely 18. Age differences were usually the other way around, but Will’s relative youth would have been unusual at the time.  

 

Hamnet is beautifully acted, with Buckley’s grief one of the rawest and most convincing depictions of abject sorrow I’ve seen in quite a while. Mescal gives us a tortured look at writer’s block, but he and Buckley generate considerable heat of a couple who began married life as passionate lovers. Of the two, Buckley’s character is more complex. Her late mother was rumored to be a forest witch and Agnes didn’t all far from the creepy tree that factors into the story. Agnes is literally a child of nature, with gifts of herbalism, taming hawks, and prognostication though the latter power isn’t always on the money. Her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) is her greatest champion and becomes a good friend to Will. (If Alwyn’s name sounds familiar, any female under the age of 30 can tell you he was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend for six years!) David Wilmot and Emily Watson turn in solid performances as Will’s parents, but the children are the anchor of the family tragedy. Susannah (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), the eldest, is her mother’s helpmate and pupil when Will is in London, and the twins (Jacobi Jupe and Olivia Lynes) are so simpatico that when Judith is thought to be dying of bubonic plague, Hamnet sees Death coming, offers his life for hers, and dies in her place. Hamnet’s experience as a shadow portends Hamlet’s in his father’s play, which we see acted out at the Globe Theatre. To add the third level of fiction, though we can assume that Hamnet’s death gutted his parents, the film’s drama comes from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, not historical accounts.

 

Nor do we have any records of Agnes witnessing a staging of Hamlet. If you want to find other inaccuracies, they can be unearthed. It is quite unlikely that Agnes could read or write, let alone each of the children. Hamnet died at age 11, but probably not of the plague as no outbreak was rampant at the time. Screen wipes show the passage of time but the time frames don’t always make sense. Speaking of not making sense, the film doesn’t show Will or Agnes ageing–or Agnes having ever changed her red dress–though a dozen years would have passed before the very affecting emotional climax, which would not have gone down the way it was filmed.

 

All this said, Hamnet is a very good movie. But call it a romantic drama, not history.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

What Will Kill Americans in 2026

 

 

Newest Health Warnings

 

Various health specialists–including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Doctors Without Borders, Doctors With Shiny Silver Discs Around Their Necks, and the three people not yet fired at the National Institutes of Health–have issued their annual Report on American health. Here are the top things that will kill Americans in 2026.

 

1. Topping the list is being shot while attempting any sort of conversation with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. President Donald Tramp has issued a blanket immunity for all I.C.E. officers who have responded with lethal force. Threats include unfriendly stares in supermarkets, signs at places of worship, mothers sitting in their personal vehicles, and homes devoid of MAGA regalia. The presumption is that all I.C.E. personnel are protecting national security and the dead had it coming.

 

2. Measles: Health and Human Experiments Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. is adamant that vaccinations have killed 9 billion Americans in the past week and he’s doing his best to protect the 11 toothless idiots who think vaccinations are dangerous.

 

3. Classroom Slayings: Insisting that people not guns, kill people, President Tramp has ordered mandatory firearms training for all students and school employees. Doctors warn that young kids love bang-bang sounds, that grade schoolers are notoriously poor shots, and by Friday most teachers are ready to murder someone. They further warn that support and janitorial staff are very likely to frag principals, supervisors, payroll managers, and kids that walk over freshly washed floors.

 

4. Mumps: See Two above.

 

5. Combat Deaths: President Tramp is furious he didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize and has announced plans to declare a Fourth Reich to foist “peace” on the rest of the world. This will involve forced conscription, as an anonymous Tramp D.O.D. official reported that he was “furious” that the U.S. military’s 1.3 million armed personnel were unable to subdue and attack force of four kayakers and a dozen spear fishermen during America’s aborted assault on Greenland. Tramp also announced plans to invade Malta, Gibraltar, Lichtenstein, Andora, and Kiribati as phase one of building the Reich. Some of those countries are alleged to be supplied with robust sticks and “big honking rocks.”

 

6. Hair Dye Poisoning: President Tramp has decreed that all American women will be required to be blonde. Given that Tramp has already dismantled “needless regulations,” doctors warn that several million MAGA women won’t be smart enough to figure out that they are not supposed to drink the hair dye.

 

7. Pogroms: Tramp has proposed a “culling of the herd” hunting season against all Leftists. Details are still being formulated but leaks to the “failing New York Times”  (circulation 11.8 million) claim that the following U.S. citizens are “hiding behind the failing U.S. Constitution” and hence subject to culling: people of color, children born in the U.S. to non-citizens, naturalized citizens who break any law (including littering), non-beef eaters, abortionists, women not wearing government-issued red cloaks, non-Christians, and “radical insurrectionists.” The last group will include: anyone to the left of Stephan Miller, Muslims, non-Republican Jews, anyone wearing Birkenstocks, Californians, Greenpeace supporters, New Englanders, “Save the Whales” communists, and non-heterosexuals. 

 

8. Being pressed to death: In his zealous quest to sleep with more women than Bill Clinton, President Tramp intends to classify any women having intercourse (consensual or forced) with him and complaining about it as a “lying b……s” and subject to the death penalty. Execution will involve Tramp lying atop their naked bodies until they suffocate.

 

9. Death by right-wing shooters, car drivers, and tactical bombers who are in the act of standing their ground and/or protecting the president from “leftists” (see 7 above). Subsections protect patriotic vigilantes who are: engaging in target practice along U.S. borders, are forced to self-protect during “peaceful demonstrations” inside the U.S. Capitol, are being harassed by Black trick-or-treaters, heathens holding placards asserting that Charlie Kirk was a fraud, and leftists whose heckling hurts their feelings.

 

10. Whopping cough, polio, COVID, and 5,000 other preventable diseases such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Bubonic plague, TB, diphtheria, RSV, monkey pox, chickenpox, flu, or failing to own a gun.  (See Two and Nine above.)