The Rest Is Speculation: Hamnet and the Question of Historical Accuracy

The central premise of Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao’s acclaimed 2025 film adaptation of author Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated 2020 novel of the same name, is simple: William Shakespeare wrote the play Hamlet as a way to cope with his overwhelming grief in the wake of the death of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet, of bubonic plague. This hypothesis is rooted not only in the similarity of the names Hamnet and Hamlet—indeed, they would have been interchangeable in Elizabethan England—but also in the timing: Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, and Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601.

Hamnet has been praised for Zhao’s critically acclaimed filmmaking (she won the Academy Award for best director in 2021 for Nomadland) and for sensitive performances by Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Mescal is cast as Shakespeare (his name is spoken only toward the end of the film, and he is never referred to as Shakespeare in the book, only as “husband” or “father”) and Buckley as his wife, Agnes (the alternative name that Anne Hathaway, not to be confused with a certain Oscar-winning actress, was known by). But there is another important reason the film is so viscerally effective: It has the ring of truth. It requires no great leap in logic to believe the story that it is telling; if anything, the real-life parallels make it difficult not to believe. But how accurate is Hamnet, really?

The historical record is not entirely clear on this, just as it is not on the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets (the authorship has long been a subject of debate, but modern scholarship leans toward agreeing that Shakespeare did write the works). Less is known about Shakespeare’s life than one might expect, doubly so about his wife and children, but the basics of Hamnet are plausible based on what is known of the family. Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her husband, whom she outlived by seven years; her father’s will referred to her as Agnes. Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, believed to have been named after neighbors, were baptized in 1585, and records make it clear that one “Hamnet filius William Shakspere” was laid to rest on August 11, 1596.

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To paraphrase Hamlet, however, the rest is speculation. In fact, in an author’s note to the 2020 book, O’Farrell admits that much of it is “idle speculation.”

The subtitle of O’Farrell’s award-winning book is A Novel of the Plague, a reference to the bubonic plague that Judith suffers from and that ultimately claims Hamnet’s life in both the film and the book. In reality there is no evidence that Hamnet died of the plague, although scholars believe it entirely possible that he did. In a 2020 interview with Entertainment Weekly, O’Farrell said, “There’s no cause of death recorded for him, just his burial. But there was no shortage of anything that could kill you, unfortunately, in Elizabethan times.”

In a “Historical Note” accompanying the book, O’Farrell links Hamnet and Hamlet:

In the 1580s, a couple living in Henley Street, Stratford, had three children: Susanna, then Hamnet and Judith, who were twins. The boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet.

She is far from the first to suggest the Hamnet-Hamlet connection and is in good company. No less a literary titan than James Joyce believed the theory, going so far as to immortalize it in Ulysses (1922):

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His boyson’s death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare.

One of the movie’s cleverest tricks is to make the Hamnet-Hamlet connection implicit in the casting. Twelve-year-old newcomer Jacobi Jupe has been praised for his performance in the title role, which is fairly limited in terms of screen time, as the plot is not so much the story of Hamnet’s death as it is an examination of the profound effect it had on his parents. Jupe as Hamnet bears a striking resemblance to the actor playing his namesake, Hamlet, and there is a good reason for it: Noah Jupe, Jacobi’s real-life older brother, is cast as the Prince of Denmark in a play-within-a-film that serves as Hamnet’s deeply emotional climax. Even without that foreknowledge, the emotional resonance between the two characters is so strong that it becomes even easier to accept the idea that one was born of the other.

To be sure, historical accuracy has never been much of a stumbling block to critical and box office success. Ridley Scott, director of the Gladiator films (2000 and 2024), has scoffed at the very idea of it, often using colorful language. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network (2010) and is writing and directing a sequel, told New York magazine in 2010: “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Hamnet is similarly more fanciful than factual and is not to be regarded as a definitive historical account of Shakespeare’s life and times.

Hamnet became one of 2025’s most acclaimed films. It was named one of the 10 best movies of the year by the American Film Institute, and it was nominated for six Golden Globes, winning best picture (drama) and best performance by a female actor (drama). It also received eight Academy Award nominations, including for best picture and best director, and won in one category: best actress, for Buckley’s performance.