‘Hamnet’ Vs ‘Shakespeare In Love’: Are They About The Bard?

Let me say up front: neither Hamnet nor Shakespeare in Love is actually about William Shakespeare.

Both films are about women, both films turn on the existence of Shakespeare’s wife, and both are about the writing process (not necessarily both in that order).

My Impressions of Both Films

I vastly prefer Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 Best Picture winner, have watched it many times and would watch it again.

As for the 2025 Hamnet, nominated for Best Picture (and other things) I liked the beginning, and I did get teary at the end. But, to be honest, I was shopping on my phone in the middle (before you yell, I was completely alone in the mezzanine of a near-empty theater).

Suffice to say, for me, it sagged a bit in the second act.

In both films, it was great to see depictions of Shakespeare’s England, both in its homely rural and crowded but glitzy urban characterizations.

And, while Shakespeare in Love may have played fast and loose with Shakespeare’s actual life, it did capture the inherent poetry and quicksilver nature of his talent.

Also, it gives a window into the hurlyburly, improvisational and often hazardous nature of the London theater world of the time (not all that different from Hollywood).

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Here’s a peek at each.

We start with the fields, forests and candlelit interiors of Hamnet, which takes place outside of London, in rural England in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

And now on to the gloriously costumed and raucous Shakespeare in Love, set in 1593.

(BTW, if you want to dig into the complicated and lengthy history of the making of the film, I highly recommend writer/producer/director Ed Zwick’s fantastic autobigraphy Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood).

Each has issues of its own, but as a Shakespeare fan and nerd (I’ve read three books about him and his era just in the last 12 months), a woman, a Catholic, and a writer, I have some thoughts.

Shakespeare the Man

We actually know very little about William Shakespeare, outside of basic biographical details and some often-snarky comments from his contemporaries.

The only words ever recorded as coming directly from his mouth were part of a lawsuit for which he was a witness.

He truly was a writer who left it all on the page.

Shakespeare married Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway in 1582, when she was 26, and he was 18, and she was very likely already pregnant with their daughter, Susanna.

She came from a longstanding family in Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire. So did Shakespeare, whose father, John, had an up-and-down career in public life.

The Shakespeares did later have fraternal twins, Hamnet and Judith, and Hamnet did die from an illness at the age of 11 in August 1596. Shakespeare never, either explicitly or implicitly, wrote about this, or, indeed, any episode from his personal life.

Shakespeare was not only a writer, but an actor, a pioneering theatrical entrepreneur, and a savvy real-estate investor.

He eventually retired from the stage somewhere between 1610 and 1613 and returned to Stratford-upon-Avon, where his wife and family had always lived.

There he resumed the life of a respectable man-about-town until his untimely death in April 1616, at the age of 52. Unlike many English literary lions, he is not buried in London, but in his hometown.

Shakespeare in the Two Movies

Hamnet

In the rather dour, downbeat Hamnet, Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is sensitive, brooding, and a bit stumbling and inarticulate, although his contemporaries usually described him as convivial and good company.

He’s unable to express his grief over Hamnet’s death except in the writing of Hamlet, which, aside from the similarity of name, bears no resemblance to Shakespeare’s life.

The Hamnet screenplay (and I assume, the book) cherrypicks bits from the play to support the idea that Shakespeare was actually writing about the loss of his son. It makes for a very affecting final scene, when Agnes (as she’s called in this movie), comes to see Hamlet, but the play, taken as a whole, doesn’t support the notion.

But, mostly, it’s not about him. It’s about Agnes (Oscar-nominated Jessie Buckley), or at least author Maggie O’Farrell and filmmaker Chloe Zhao’s version of her.

Shakespeare in Love

In Shakespeare in Love, the playwright (Joe Fiennes) is a handsome and quick-witted but perpetually penurious libertine, dashing about London with his fellow actors and writers, dodging government censors, desperate theater owners, and his creditors.

Neither seems to bear much resemblance to what we know about the actual man, but the fact that we know so little does leave a lot of room for invention.

Shoehorning Modern Women Into Historical Stories

Hamnet

In Hamnet, the central female figure is based on the biographical sketch of an actual female but takes a lot of liberties.

In the film, Agnes is an herbalist and seems to have a near-pagan, mystical connection with the woods. She rejects the Anglican faith of her country and seems to not believe in an afterlife for her child.

The notion that all women who deal in herbal cures are “witches” of some sort is centuries old, and caused the deaths of many women who were actually professing Christians.

It makes sense that women would have been the repositories of herbal medicine, since they participated in childbirth, raised and cared for children and the elderly, and grew the home gardens.

Historically, a lot of herbal knowledge has come to us from Catholic convents, including the Middle Ages wisdom of St. Hildegard of Bingen.

And, it’s likely that, in all-male monasteries, the monks and friars knew just as as much as the women.

And, the idea that knowledge of herbal medicine requires involvement in pagan religion or white magic, and a rejection of Christianity, is also an old one — and it cost many women their lives. Today, it’s become fashionable and is part of modern feminist thought.

Hamnet comes from a strongly feminist viewpoint, with Agnes portrayed as a rebel against all the patriarchal systems (and biology) that are holding her back.

We don’t know much about the real Anne/Agnes, but we do know that she kept the home fires burning while Will was at work in London. By all accounts, she was an able and competent manager of the family home and property, and Will did return to her upon his retirement.

One assumes she knew as much about herbs as the next woman, but that’s only a guess.

Shakespeare in Love

As for Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), the heroine of Shakespeare in Love, she’s an entirely fictional creation. A noblewoman from a family of mercantile, not ancestral, wealth, she’s destined to be married off to a titled aristocrat (Colin Firth) who needs her family money to sustain his tobacco plantations in Virginia.

Viola loves poetry and desperately wants to join a company of players, but the moral standards of the time didn’t allow women on the London stage. Instead, prepubescent boys played the female parts.

Despite this, of all playwrights, Shakespeare wrote some of the best and most memorable female parts in theater history.

So, Viola dresses as a boy (playing upon the gender-switching in Shakespeare’s plays and on the Elizabethan stage) and joins the cast of what eventually becomes Romeo and Juliet.

Her ruse is revealed, she and Shakespeare fall in love, and she’s mightily pissed to learn he’s married (not that it would have mattered if he wasn’t). Eventually she yields to her family’s wishes — but not before she gets one bravura performance as Juliet.

Like Agnes, Viola strains against the limitations of her time on women (at a time when England had an autocratic absolute monarch who was a woman, the second in a row).

Viola is not a pagan or a mystic but a dutiful Anglican. She’s bright, lively, talented, occasionally foolish — and ultimately sensible. I’d like to think she had the wherewithal to create a good life for herself, both in her marriage and in Virginia, hard as it may have been.

Feminism Over Fidelity to History

In both cases, modern feminist attitudes are imposed upon women who may or may not have held any of these ideas.

If the choices you have are all you know, and they are supported by everything in your culture, then spending your life railing against them is not only unlikely but seems a miserable way to live.

But this is what modern feminism has done to historical female characters.

In contrast, Shakespeare’s women, while undeniably of their time, are vibrant and powerful individuals. Go read or watch Macbeth, and tell me Shakespeare didn’t give his women personal power, desire and agency.

Making all historical women oppressed and unhappy may satisfy modern writers but it sells the real thing short.

The Catholicism

Althought it’s widely believed that members of Shakespeare’s family were recusant Catholics (dangerous in anti-Catholic Elizabethan England), with some scholars holding that Shakespeare himself likely practiced the Faith in private, it doesn’t really show up in either film.

Other then a few derogatory comments, Christianity plays almost no part in Hamnet.

In Shakespeare in Love, after mistakenly thinking he caused the death of fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, Will is seen fervently praying in a church. That’s it for that one.

But, the short-lived 2017 TNT drama Will, for all of its ahistorical excesses, does dive into the idea that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, and all the dangers that came along with it.

I wrote about it at the time, and the series’ one season can be rented on Prime Video, AppleTV and YouTube.

‘Will’: Why Catholics Should Be Watching TNT’s Shakespeare Drama

As for the Movies’ Depiction of the Writing Process

Hamnet

Since it stretches the point rather far that the deaths of Hamnet and Hamlet are connected, I would say, OK, but I don’t really buy it.

However, many writers do take the tragedies of their lives, and through the mysteries of the creative process, infuse them into stories. Unless it’s obviously a memoir or semi-autobiographical, it’s seldom a straight line or easily identifiable, but it does happen.

But, anyone who points at a loss in a fiction writer’s life and says, “Oh, obviously, that became that,” unless the writer has explicitly pointed out the link, is just guessing.

Shakespeare in Love

The notion that writers, as they move through life, scoop up odd bits of language, character traits, quirks, information and history, and then put them into their writing, is absolutely true.

The process, though, is not as straightforward as shown in Shakespeare in Love, or even with Charles Dickens in the 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas. And both films don’t give enough credit to the writer’s ability, not just to stitch a quilt out of everything he or she has seen or heard, but to create out of whole cloth.

This crystallizes in my favorite bit from Shakespeare in Love, which is not just true of theater but of writing — and, of Catholicism.