Moviegoers packed West Newton Cinema to watch Hamnet, a reimagining of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes as they confront the love and loss that inspired Hamlet. Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim sat down with historian, writer, and Newton native Stephen Greenblatt to unpack the film and its place within modern Shakespeare storytelling.
Newton resident Julie Sweet sat near the back of the crowded theater, drawn by her admiration for Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, on which the film is based. Sweet told Fig City News that she was eager to see how the story would unfold on screen. “It was a very moving book,” Sweet said.
‘Tell me a story’
As the lights dimmed, Max Richter’s score settled the room into a meditative hush.
Hamnet transports viewers into the sixteenth-century, and the rural countryside setting grounds the story. The film relied on natural imagery such as holes and voids, towering trees, and a hawk circling the sky.
The performances throughout the film are uniformly strong, but Jessie Buckley is the standout. The story is anchored through her perspective, and while Shakespeare – played with quiet intensity by Paul Mescal – remains essential to the narrative, it is Buckley who carries most of the emotional weight. Her Agnes is a woman deeply attuned to the natural world, guided by instincts and intuitions that others in her community label as witch-like.
Shakespeare is immediately taken with her. Though their families initially balk at the idea of their marriage, resistance eventually gives way, and the pair begin their life together.
Agnes delivers her first child alone in the woods. Shakespeare is ecstatic about their family, yet he remains restless, driven by the urge to write and to travel to London, “where the world gathers.” Agnes supports his ambition, encouraging him to pursue the life he imagines.
When she later becomes pregnant with twins, Agnes again craves the solitude of the woods for the birth but is forced to remain at home. The first twin Judith, a girl, is born limp and pale, seemingly lifeless. The boy Hamnet follows, healthy, while Agnes clings to Judith until she suddenly takes a breath and revives.
Years later, when Hamnet dies as result of the bubonic plague – after vowing to give his life so his twin sister might live – the film descends into a somber period. In a dreamlike sequence, Hamnet appears on the empty stage of a theatre, walking toward a dark opening on a mural of a wooded landscape.
In the aftermath, resentment grows between Shakespeare and Agnes, each grieving alone and unable to bridge the widening distance between them. Eventually, Agnes decides to travel to London with her brother Bartholomew.
In London, she makes her way to the theatre, where she arrives just as a performance of Hamlet is beginning. At first, she resists the experience. She has never encountered theatre of this kind, and she even calls out to the actors, much like an impatient moviegoer talking back to the screen. When the young actor playing Hamlet steps onto the stage, dressed in clothing identical to her son’s and with the same blonde hair, Agnes recognizes what Shakespeare has created.
Onstage, the young Hamlet reaches toward the audience and they reach back, a gesture that uncannily echoes the packed house at West Newton Cinema. In that moment, Agnes seems to grasp the full extent of Shakespeare’s grief: how he has poured his sorrow into this play so that Hamnet’s memory, and what he meant to their family, might live on within its tragedy.
The film opens with an epitaph from one of Stephen Greenblatt’s books that explains how Hamnet and Hamlet are “the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” – a passage also included in O’Farrell’s novel.
‘Keep your heart open’
After the credits rolled, Greenblatt joined Ephraim, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, for a conversation tracing the film’s emotional and historical underpinnings.
Greenblatt reflected on the challenge of reconstructing Shakespeare’s life for his book, Will in the World.
“I made it all up, of course,” he joked, before noting that the real task is working with the few traces Shakespeare left behind. Even without diaries or letters, he said, audiences still feel the human presence behind the plays. “We feel that there is a person there, and we long to be in touch with that person,” Greenblatt said.
Ephraim highlighted the role of informed speculation in Greenblatt’s work, noting that Will in the World begins with an invitation to the reader: “Let us imagine.”
For her, both the film and the novel Hamnet follow that same method – using imagination responsibly to fill in the gaps left by the historical record.
“To understand why Shakespeare used his imagination to transform his life into art,” she said, “it is important for us to use our own imagination.”
Beyond the opening epitaph, Ephraim noted that Greenblatt’s scholarship indirectly helped pave the way for Hamnet, shaping some of the ideas that inform both the novel and the film. Greenblatt humbly denied this notion. He also pointed out how his book is more concerned with Shakespeare, while Hamnet takes a closer look at his wife. Greenblatt also noted Buckley’s “astonishing performance” as Agnes.
Grief
Greenblatt described how, in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation abolished the Catholic belief in purgatory, shattering long-held rituals for tending to the dead.
“It is a traumatic experience for a culture to try to rethink its relationship between the living and the dead,” Greenblatt said.
He quoted an expression of parental grief from Shakespeare’s King John, which is believed to have been written in the year Hamnet died:
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me…Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form…”
At the time, it was rare to see people address the grief of losing a child.
Ephraim said the final scene – hands reaching toward the actor playing Hamlet – captures “a vision of being alone in your grief to being in a community that can sadly share your grief.”
Prologue
Sweet said the strength of Hamnet lies in its immersive sense of time and place.
“I just think you felt like you were really there in the period,” she said after the screening. “Visually, it really was magnificent to watch.”
Sweet praised the film’s commitment to historical realism – the coarse fabrics, the unadorned interiors, even the fact that Agnes appears to own only “maybe two dresses.” Those choices, she said, captured “a harsher, simpler environment” that felt true to the era. Sweet said the film stayed close to the book even as it omitted several complex family dynamics.
The novel delves deeply into Agnes’s fraught relationship with her stepmother and the complicated household she and Shakespeare shared with his parents – elements Sweet acknowledged would have been difficult to translate to screen without distracting from the central narrative.
As the audience left the theater, attendees stopped at a table where Greenblatt signed copies of his books Will in the World and Dark Renaissance.
Greenblatt told Fig City News that it was refreshing to see a large crowd collectively enjoy the film and stay for the discussion afterward.
“I expected half the people would file out after the movie,” he said. “But in fact, people stayed because they want to talk about what they’ve seen. They want to share the experience.”
Greenblatt, 82, also spoke about the joy of meeting readers of his work, and those who were discovering it for the first time.
“It’s wonderful,” Greenblatt said. “One of the whole pleasures of writing anything is to put it out into the world and then the magic of people that you know, but mostly people you don’t know just finding it and sharing their experience with you.”
David Slatery, executive director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, spoke to the crowd before the screening, expressing how vital places like West Newton Cinema are for communities to encounter films together.
Slatery said Hamnet is a fitting example of how imagination and alchemy can transform personal loss into art as well as a story that reveals the unseen lives shaping creative genius.
“It reminds us somehow that profound art is never created in isolation,” he said. “It is fed by the families, communities, people, and places that surround the creator.”
