Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” Gives Shakespeare’s Wife Her Turn in the Light

Not much is known about the playwright William Shakespeare. Still, that does not stop people from wondering. The latest entry in the Shakespearean Cinematic Universe (so to speak) is  “Hamnet,” based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Directed and co-written by Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao, the screen adaptation chooses to focus on a particular period of Shakespeare’s life and surprisingly not even on Shakespeare himself.

Following the plot of the book, “Hamnet” follows Agnes, the wife of Shakespeare, who lives in the countryside, as she falls in love and has children with the man who will become the famous bard. She is known to have moved into the largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, and did not live in London where Shakespearean plays were produced and performed, yet like her husband, not much is known about her. 

For Zhao, illuminating O’Farrell’s version of Agnes is important because she is not just a woman who waits for her husband. She is a force to be reckoned with, running to the forest to pass the time and even giving birth in the middle of a storm. “She is the bridge, the connection to the forest,” Zhao shared. “It’s not just the forest outside, but all of us have an inner forest that contains something very old, very shadowy, but very powerful of who we are.

“That’s why a woman like her [was] not allowed to live at that period in history. Or we’re told it was dangerous because they had been trying to cut our connection with our inner forest off, and there is definitely, right now, a yearning and desire to bring forth a character like her, and that is because we’re yearning for our inner forest.”

Among the Shakespeare offspring, their only son Hamnet, in the novel and in real life, dies at the age of 11. The fact that Shakespeare’s famous play “Hamlet” is named so similarly to his son serves as inspiration for the novel, which proposes that this is not coincidence but, in fact, intentional.  

Translating a book from over 300 pages to the screen for just over two hours is quite a task. Zhao, who worked closely with O’Farrell, described the process as an hourglass. “We tried to distill it together down to the essentials and then allow the process of the making of the film to expand it again,” she told Mochi. 

From that expansion, there are definitely differences that fans of the book will notice. One being that William Shakespeare has more of a presence in the film, making use of Paul Mescal’s talents. Secondly, Zhao recalled that writing the ending of the film was difficult because the book ends with a line from the middle of “Hamlet” that goes “Remember me,” leaving more for the reader to think about. 

“The written language is so much older than the cinematic language. When you have a simple phrase like that, and then the pages goes to blank, what it conjures in the right readers is not the same as just having Paul saying into the camera and cut to black — it’s not the same,” Zhao explained. “So we ended up writing 25 minutes/pages longer, just to capture how powerful the line ‘Remember me’ is.”

In the end, Zhao’s film asks us to look beyond the playwright and toward the woman whose presence lingers beneath Shakespeare — the man and the myth — urging us, too, to remember her.