“Grief fills the room of my absent child.”
Adapted by Maggie O’Farrell’s from her 2020 novel with the Director Chloe Zhao, starring Jesse Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare. Cinematography by Lukasz Zal, Music by Max Richter, Production Design by Fiona Crombie. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes.
I am writing this article assuming that most people who read it will by now know that the film deals with the death of Hamnet, the Shakespeare couples young son, and suggests how this may have affected William’s work on the playHamlet.
In it I look at how the film affected me and those I have seen it with, especially those closely acquainted with grief; how truthfully it seemed to speak about the nature of grief; how the media of print and film can speak to us in different ways; with a brief exploration of possible actual links between Hamnet’s death and his father’s writing; and lastly a consideration of the film’s score, and the slight critical dispute about it.
It is generally understood that our response of any film depends on what we bring to it.
Some audiences of Hamnet will not have read the book. They will, I think, enjoy a beautifully filmed love story, set in the late 16th century English countryside, with two very good actors playing Agnes and Will Shakespeare alongside a fine supporting cast, sensitively directed and lusciously filmed with a wonderfully persuasive score and soundscape. It may well move them to tears, but not, I expect, leave them bereft. I hope that many of them will then read the book.
Some will have read the book, and come wondering how it has been have adapted for the screen. I do not think they will be disappointed. I am sure that many will, like me, appreciate the way the filming of the final scene offers rather more than the written word could.
There are also some who come to see it knowing that both book and film centre on grief, in this case parental grief; but grief is grief is grief, and all grief is about love. So they will not expect this movie to be altogether easy to watch – or listen to. They too may be moved to tears as, we are told, many previous audiences have been. But the ending comes to a kind of resolution and a reconciliation that I found comforting and profound. Having watched it twice, with friendsI am now sure that this beautiful and demanding gift from the novelist, film maker and crew offers catharsis and consolation to those who need it and are willing and able to accept it. Our response of any work of art depends on what we bring to it – and are able to take from it.
I also want to encourage those who have not seen this movie to do so in a cinema. Sharing laughter and/or tears in the company of an audience is so much more powerful than home viewing.
Good Art, in its visual, literary, musical or kinetic forms, can sometimes reach into our heart-strings and strike chords there that evoke deep responses of joy, pity, compassion, love, agitation, calm – and sorrow.
I have read Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet twice, once to myself and once out-loud to someone I love, so I knew that grief was at its core. As young and brilliant actor Jacobi Jupe, who played Hamnet, said at the Golden Globe Awards, “This film is about grief and love. And grief is love.” We do no grieve for someone we do not love. More than that; love is the sea on which we sail our little lives and grief but one of the storms that disturb it. We hold on, praying that the storm will abate with time, and the sea will abide.
Hamnet is a work of fiction and Ms O’Farrell does not claim that its story is true. But fiction can be truthful rather than true. I have now seen it twice, with four friends, and out of the five of us three have been bereaved, two by losing a boy-child, one their wife; two are trained therapists and one of us a Vicar who has worked with hundreds of families before, during and after funerals. This film reached deeply into all our hearts and the chords it struck there rang true.
For the first part of the film I was, in a way, ‘watching the book’, seeing how O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao had between them transferred the words to the screen, and how the cast, especially Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Will, had interpreted their characters. From the start I loved this watching this ‘translation’. And then the film itself took over. The production design and costumes seemed very authentic, properly grubby and lived in. The composition of every image was gorgeous. The editing, which obviously could not replicate that of the book, was coherent. The soundscape and music carried us forward without ever being intrusive.
And all of that was scene-setting for the central and essential tragedy, and its aftermath. And now it became very personal. Jessie Buckley’s anguished howl as she held her dead son instantly took me back nearly twenty years to when I held my own dead wife in my arms. Then Paul Mescal’s acting out of Will’s response reminded me of how I had also struggled for years to find a way to live out my own grief.
Agnes and Will may share a common grief, but like so many of us they responded to it in differing ways, and that is not always easy for grieving couples or families. But then came the film’s masterstroke, expanding the book’s final chapter not with words but with profound direction and the acting of the two lead players as we watched their healing in front us. Here the medium’s advantages became most important. I love written fiction, but sometimes words can be brought even more to life by film. It is a little like the way a type printed page differs from an illuminated manuscript, but much more so. The uses of pauses, silences, gestures, looks and facial expressions cannot be written on the page as well as they can be shown on the screen.
It is only when Will has transmuted his grief into words, into the play that bears his son’s name, transferring it as he needed to from those of the father for his son, Hamnet, to that of the son, Hamlet, for his Father, and then physically acting them out on stage, that he
can break down and privately weep. Then we see Agnes’ dawning understanding of her husband for the first time, of how his art was vital and essential to his emotional processes. She is then no longer enraged that he had run away to avoid his grief, now seeing that he had run away to find a way to express – and ultimately perform - his grief.
We also see the child Hamnet freed at last from the dim grey space he entered when he died. This seemed to me to resemble the Jewish Sheol or classical Greek realm of after-life in which the dead are not punished but live a half-life in a shadowy realm where there is no hope, no volition, no direction. Very early in the story Will tells Agnes the story of Eurydice and Orpheus and how she was condemned to remain in Hades. Both Ursula le Guin and Phillip Pullman wrote about their versions of this place in their Earthsea: The Other Wind and His Dark Materials volume Three; The Amber Spyglass, each of them finding way for these dead souls to be released. And we see Hamnet released as both his parents allow him to move on - as they have at last moved on. The film ends with the glorious smiles of the child and mother.
Most of the audience who watched Hamnet with us sat in silence for some time after the credits had finished, and I remember how glad I was that by accident or design the houselights were not turned up for a while. And yes, there were tears, as reported from many previous showings, but I think and hope that for many of us, maybe even most of us, they were tears of relief. Agnes and Will’s grief had not become lessened, but this play, Hamlet, had helped them to become more reconciled to it and to each other. Now at last they could walk forward together, hands and hearts joined together again. And it seems to me that by the magic of this high art so could some of us, as we also move forward a little, having revisited our own personal losses and taken an another small but significant step along our own healing journey.
With regard to the quote that heads this piece, Will Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596. He was eleven or twelve years old. Shakespeare’s play King John appeared in the same year. In it Constance is the widow of King Richard I’s younger brother Geoffrey, and the mother of Prince Arthur. Arthur had the most legitimate claim to the throne so John had him assassinated. In Act 3, scene 4 we hear Constance pouring out her rage and grief. Having lost her husband and her son she is drawn to suicide. When Cardinal Pandulph, the Papal Legate, tells her she is talking madness, not grief, she says;
“Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost!
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then ‘tis like I should forget myself:
O! If I could, what grief would I forget.
Preach me some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canoniz’d, Cardinal,
For being not mad but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be delivered from these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself”.
Is this a pre-echo of ‘To be or not to be’ in Hamlet? Some critics have objected to this speech being used in the film as Will contemplates suicide, but King John shows that close to Hamnet’s death Shakespeare had deeply looked at the link between grief and suicidal thoughts. Hamlet is surely a better play for Maggie O’Farrell to use as a conduit of Shakespeare’s grief than the much slighter King John. I would also suggest that by this time in his writing his internal word-thoughts could take metrical form. I know it can be quite easy – easy enough to become natural - to think in iambic pentameters, not to turn thoughts into poetry but to think in so natural a poetic form, so why would not Will do so at this crucial juncture?
And when scolded for holding ‘ too heinous a respect for grief,’ Constance turns on the celibate priest saying ‘He talks to me, that never had a son.’ King Philip of Spain then says to her ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child,’ and she replies,
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then I have reason to be fond of grief.”
Constance is actually given 73 lines in this short scene, and they are the most memorable in the play, speaking to us about the emotional and fearless power of her maternal love and grief. It seems likely that Shakespeare made his Arthur younger than the historical account, maybe almost as young as Hamnet, in order to express something of his own grief; and he did not mind putting his words into the mouth of a grieving mother. It was almost five years before Hamlet appeared on stage, and grief is much more central there, even if it is for a son grieving his father, rather than a father grieving his son. Tom Stoppard once said, rather ruefully I thought, that in the links between an artist’s life and work ‘Nothing is wasted.’
After seeing the King John connection I sought out the Steven Greenblatt article The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet referenced at the beginning of the film telling us that in the 16th century the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. In this article the earlier play is explored more deeply. He suggests that by the time Shakespeare was writing Hamlet his own father may well have been approaching death, and that writing Hamlet was a turning point for Shakespeare. Hamlet considerably expanded his vocabulary – and ours – and moved his characters away from actions motives based on reason to actions that grew out of powerful but confused feelings (Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus?) (The article can be downloaded at scribd.com.).
I also confirmed that my supposition that Agnes, the name used for the woman we know as Ann Hathaway, comes from the Greek and Roman for Holy and lamb. In both the novel and film Agnes is shown to be a deeply spiritual, though not religious woman, and shows the willingness to sacrifice her own happiness to help her husband fulfil his destiny, almost like a sacrificial lamb. In her father’s Will she is indeed named Agnes.
As a postscript for those who pay attention to film scores, I see that Jesse Buckley’s suggestion that Max Richter’s previous composition, On The Nature of Daylight, be used for the final scene was taken up. Some critics have found fault in this.
I remember reading this reproach in the New York Times review in November 2025, and it was recently repeated by one of my favourite film critics, Mark Kermode. And yes, this music has been used a number of times, perhaps most effectively in Arrival where it was added to Johann Johannsson’s score. Mark Kermode celebrated Arrival as showing ‘the way that joy and love and grief and mourning and celebration can be refracted’ by the combination of film and music. He did not object to On The Nature of Daylight being used again in podcast review, or in his movie music book Surround Sound. I love Arrival, and its inclusion of Max Richter’s piece. Surely what matters is how appropriate a piece of music is, not how often I has been used?
Allegri’s Miserere Mei has been used at least ten times in films ranging from Chariots of Fire to Two Popes. Faure’s Requiem in a similar number, and Bach’s Cello Suites in well over 20. If On The Nature of Daylight was as obvious as ‘manipulative’ strings playing swooping minor cords, the Faure piece or Samuel Barber’s Adagio (in fact especially Samuel Barber’s Adagio) I may well have abreacted to it. But its use in Hamnet was, for me, seamless with the rest of Richter’s score, and utterly at one with the complex emotions the final scene evoked.
I have seen some fine films in the last twelve months, Conclave, Flow, 28 Years Later, Sinners and One Battle After Another, but I am sure Hamnet is the one that will live with me the longest.
