- Is Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, a movie based on a book that is based on Shakespeare's life, a true story? Here's what we know.
- The new movie stars Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare's wife (referred to in the film as Agnes), and Paul Mescal as the writer himself.
- Because of the lack of biographical details about Shakespeare himself, there's a lot up for debate.
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—starring a shattered Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal serving peak tortured-playwright—arrives with one very reasonable question attached: is any of this actually true? The answer is complicated, because Shakespeare’s personal life is basically an archival void. But, let's back up.
Hamnet is a reimagining of the private and mostly undocumented world inside Shakespeare’s family, told from the perspective of his wife and children rather than from the viewpoint of the playwright himself. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling 2020 novel, the story focuses on Hamnet Shakespeare, the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway (not that one), who died at age 11 in 1596. His death is a confirmed historical fact, while much of the family’s emotional life has never been recorded.
Instead of presenting Shakespeare as a distant literary figure, Hamnet follows the family he left in Stratford while he pursued his career in London. Hamnet’s central figure is Buckley’s Anne Hathaway (called Agnes in the novel), and explores her early relationship with Shakespeare, the complexities of their marriage, the daily rhythms of their household, and the devastating impact of their son’s death.
The story also addresses a long-debated possibility: that the loss of Hamnet influenced Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet. There is no historical document that proves this, but the timing of the play, the similarity of the names, and the themes of loss and mortality have made the connection compelling for generations.
At its heart, Hamnet is about grief, love, marriage, parenthood, and the emotional experiences that history did not preserve. It takes the limited facts known about the Shakespeare family and builds a sensitive and immersive portrait of the people who lived behind the legend.
So, what do we actually know?
Here’s what historians do know: Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582 when he was 18 and she was 26, already pregnant with their first child. They had three kids: Susanna in 1583, then twins Judith and Hamnet in 1585. And in 1596, Hamnet died at just 11 years old, cause unknown, and the documents stop there. No letters. No diary entries. No “my grief process” monologue. Shakespeare told the world everything except how he felt about his own family.
As for the theory that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in direct response to losing his son Hamnet, we have absolutely no proof. That said, those names were interchangeable in the 16th century, the timing lines up, and Hamlet is literally three hours of poetic spiraling about death. We can connect the dots.
So is Hamnet a true story? In the strict historical sense, no. It’s a beautifully rendered guess.
‘Hamnet’ premieres in theaters on November 26th, 2025.
