How True Is Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet? The Real History Revealed

Chloe Zhao has a new contender in the awards-season scrum with Hamnet, led by Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. It plays like a love story, a family tragedy, and a riff on how personal loss might have bled into Shakespeare’s work. It’s also deliberately not a straight biography, which is exactly why people are debating it.

What the movie is (and isn’t)

Hamnet adapts Maggie O'Farrell’s bestselling novel about Shakespeare’s early life, focusing on his marriage to Agnes (often called Anne Hathaway in the scholarship) and their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. The film treats that family’s grief as the emotional lens for the creation of Hamlet. Historically speaking, that connection is not provable, and the story leans into imagination by design.

• Solid facts: William Shakespeare married a woman recorded as Anne Hathaway (O'Farrell uses the name Agnes), and they had a son named Hamnet who died at 11. Hamlet was written a few years after Hamnet’s death, and the names Hamnet/Hamlet were often used interchangeably at the time.
• Informed speculation: The exact circumstances of Hamnet’s death are unclear, though plague is a reasonable guess for the era. Whether that loss directly inspired Hamlet has never been definitively proven. O'Farrell’s story builds a fuller, strong-willed portrait of Agnes and a passionate marriage—choices meant to counter how thinly she’s been treated by history, not to offer a vetted record.
• Current reception: At the moment, Hamnet sits at 8.2 on IMDb with an 88% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes.

Agnes, not the footnote

O'Farrell has been explicit about pushing back on the way Shakespeare’s wife has been flattened into a convenient stereotype. She told the BBC she kept seeing the same dismissive narrative repeated: that Anne/Agnes was uneducated, trapped Shakespeare into marriage, and drove him to flee to London. The book—and now the film—tries to give her interiority and agency rather than leaving her as a historical shrug.

"I got slightly sidetracked by how badly history and scholarship has treated his wife... We’ve only ever really been given one narrative about her... that she was an illiterate peasant who trapped him into marriage, that he hated her, that he ran away to London to get away from her."

Whether you buy O'Farrell’s take or not, it’s reacting to a real gap: Agnes is one of the most elusive figures linked to the most famous playwright on Earth. There’s plenty of room for interpretation because the record is that thin.

Hamnet vs. Hamlet: the connective tissue

The timing, the name overlap, and the grief are all compelling dots to connect. But there is no hard evidence that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as a direct elegy for his son. That doesn’t stop the story from feeling emotionally true, and it’s the emotional truth Zhao leans on. She’s said the novel reframed Hamlet for her completely.

"I never really understood [Hamlet]."

She describes the play as dense and dark, and says reading O'Farrell’s book let her see it through a parent’s grief—suddenly, the turmoil made sense in a new way. That’s the movie’s bet: if you view the text through that lens, a speculative story can still land like a gut punch.

Where to see it

Hamnet is currently playing in select theaters in the U.S.