Hamnet

The World of Stratford-upon-Avon in the Late Sixteenth Century

The story takes place in Elizabethan England in the 1580s, set primarily in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Agnes — also known historically as Anne Hathaway, though the film reclaims her original name — is a woman of singular nature, raised among medicinal herbs and possessed of a sensibility her neighbours perceive as strange, almost supernatural. She has a deep knowledge of plants, remedies and the rhythms of the earth, and this connection to the natural world defines her character from the story's opening moments. Agnes does not quite conform to the social expectations of her era: she is older than her husband, independent in her thinking and gifted with an intuition that often unsettles those around her.

William Shakespeare — referred to for much of the film simply as the husband or the father, a deliberate narrative choice that foregrounds his domestic role rather than his status as a literary genius — is a young man from a family facing financial difficulties. His father, John Shakespeare, is going through a period of debt and diminished social standing, which places William under constant family pressure. The marriage between Agnes and William unfolds quickly and with an intensity the film presents as magnetic and inevitable: she perceives something in him that no one else sees, and he finds in Agnes a figure who anchors him to the sensory and emotional world.

The couple have three children: Susanna, the eldest, and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Family life unfolds in the Shakespeare household, where Agnes serves as the gravitational centre of the home while William spends increasingly long periods in London, where his career as a playwright is beginning to take off. This geographical and emotional distance between the spouses constitutes a latent tension that permeates the domestic atmosphere from the outset.

The Inciting Incident: Illness and the Death of Hamnet

The event that shatters the family's equilibrium is the illness of Judith, the twin girl, who contracts bubonic plague. The infection arrives via a flea carried on an exotic parrot, in a chain of contagion the film traces in detail: the animal travels from Africa to Italy, then to England, and finally reaches the Shakespeare household. Judith's illness is severe, and her twin brother Hamnet, profoundly bonded to her, tends to his twin with absolute devotion.

However, in one of the narrative's most wrenching turns, it is Hamnet who ultimately dies, not Judith. The eleven-year-old boy succumbs to the same plague that had threatened his sister. Hamnet's death in 1596 is the historical fact upon which the entire film is built, and its impact on the family — and on Agnes in particular — forms the emotional and dramatic core of the story.

Agnes does not accept the loss with resignation. Her grief is active, almost violent in its intensity: she searches her knowledge of plants and her intuition for some explanation or relief, but none of her wisdom can restore her son. Guilt, rage and pain intertwine within her alongside a sense of abandonment, for William is in London when the death occurs, and his absence at that critical moment opens a deep wound between them.

William, for his part, channels his own grief in a way Agnes takes time to understand: he writes. In the years following his son's death, he composes a play he titles Hamlet, whose protagonist bears the name of his dead son with a single letter changed. The film presents this act of artistic creation as a working-through of grief, but also as a means of immortalising Hamnet — of restoring his presence in the world through words.

The film's central conflict is therefore articulated around two axes. The first is the different grief lived by Agnes and William: she, rooted in the physical and the immediate, finds literary sublimation as a response to loss unbearable; he, an inhabitant of a world of language and imagination, knows no other way to work through pain. The second axis is the implicit question of what it means to preserve someone's memory: whether art can be a form of posthumous love, or whether, on the contrary, it transforms a family's real suffering into material for others to consume.

The film structures this story by alternating two timelines: the past, which depicts the courtship and early years of Agnes and William's marriage, and the narrative present of Hamnet's illness and death, through to the resolution in which Agnes attends a performance of Hamlet in London.