Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare: How ‘Hamnet’ Reimagines Genius, Grief, and Love

Hamnet: Bringing Shakespeare’s Family Out of the Shadows

There’s a moment in Chloé Zhao’s new film ‘Hamnet’ that lingers in the mind: Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare, hunched over candlelight, wrestling not only with words but with the ghosts of loss and longing. In this Oscar-tipped adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Mescal doesn’t just play the world’s most famous playwright—he embodies a husband and father whose genius is inseparable from grief.

For centuries, William Shakespeare’s family life has been a blank canvas, filled in by scholars with more speculation than certainty. Records confirm that he married Anne Hathaway (or Agnes, as her father’s will names her) at 18, and that their son Hamnet died at age 11, likely from the plague. Yet almost everything else about the Shakespeares is shadowed in mystery. No letters survive. No diary entries reveal the texture of their days. The spaces left by history have become fertile ground for fiction—and now, for Mescal’s deeply human performance.

Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare: Caged Genius or Devoted Husband?

From the film’s first scenes, Zhao frames Mescal’s William as a man boxed in—literally, shot through glass, watching the free-spirited Agnes (Jessie Buckley) stride through the forest, hawk on her arm and wild remedies at her fingertips. Mescal’s Shakespeare is torn between duty and desire, a Latin tutor trapped by family debts, yet drawn to Agnes’s elemental connection with nature and her fierce independence. Their romance, depicted as passionate and mutually transformative, runs counter to the old scholarly trope of Shakespeare as a reluctant husband fleeing domestic boredom.

This revision isn’t mere wishful thinking. As Jo Eldridge Carney, author of ‘Women Talk Back to Shakespeare,’ notes, the film’s Agnes is a repudiation of centuries of ill-informed assumptions about Anne Hathaway. Instead of a passive figure, Buckley’s Agnes is smart, opinionated, and rumored to be the ‘child of a forest witch.’ Mescal’s portrayal makes clear why such a woman would captivate a restless genius. The chemistry between Mescal and Buckley anchors the film’s emotional turbulence, giving Shakespeare’s personal life a vibrancy that history rarely affords.

Fact and Fiction: Filling the Gaps in Shakespeare’s Story

Yet ‘Hamnet’ is careful to signal its own artifice. O’Farrell’s novel and Zhao’s adaptation are works of inspired imagination, spun from sparse facts and abundant empathy. The historical record tells us little about Anne/Agnes—whether she could read or write, or even her true name. The film leans into this ambiguity, choosing Agnes from her father’s will and building a character who feels both timeless and modern.

Mescal’s Shakespeare, meanwhile, is not just a playwright but a man haunted by absence. The film, like O’Farrell’s novel, draws a direct (if speculative) line between Hamnet’s death and the creation of ‘Hamlet.’ The names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in 16th-century England, fueling the notion that Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy was born of paternal grief. Scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt have long debated this connection, and the film plays with the idea visually—casting Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet and Noah Jupe as Hamlet, their resemblance underscoring the link between art and life.

But Zhao’s approach is not to prove a thesis. Rather, she invites viewers to feel the weight of loss and the awkwardness of healing. Mescal’s performance is most affecting in moments of restraint—when Shakespeare stumbles through rehearsals, distracted by sorrow, or walks the Thames, reciting Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ as if searching for meaning in his own pain. The film’s emotional center isn’t Shakespeare’s genius, but the family he left behind, and the wounds that genius could not heal.

A Feminist Reimagining—Or Just Another Myth?

‘Hamnet’ is as much Agnes’s story as Shakespeare’s. The domestic claustrophobia, the sacrifices made by Agnes as William pursues his calling in London, and her journey from suspicion to grudging respect among her in-laws—all are rendered with sensitivity. Yet the film does not entirely escape the gravitational pull of Shakespeare’s legend. Agnes’s silent resentment of William’s absences is palpable, but Zhao ultimately gives genius its due. Mescal’s Shakespeare is allowed his creative suffering, even as Agnes’s perspective offers a corrective to the myth of male genius.

Some critics, such as The New Yorker, question whether the film’s entwining of art and life risks reducing ‘Hamlet’—one of literature’s richest works—to mere therapy for a grieving parent. There’s a touch of kitsch in the way the play becomes a vessel for closure, and the lush emotional score (Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’) leans into sentimentality. Still, the film’s greatest strength lies in its willingness to see Shakespeare through fresh eyes—those of a wife whose story has, for too long, been told by others.

Performances and Cinematic Craft

Mescal’s performance is notable for its subtlety. He brings a sense of creative frustration and vulnerability to Shakespeare, never resorting to grandiosity. Jessie Buckley’s Agnes is every inch the force of nature, moving from serenity to anguish with magnetic intensity. Their Irish roots and shared gifts make for compelling on-screen chemistry, and their portrayals avoid melodrama, grounding the film’s emotional stakes in lived experience.

Visually, Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal create a world that feels at once pastoral and claustrophobic. The Shakespeares’ home is shot with an air of surveillance, often head-on or from above, emphasizing the characters’ smallness in the face of fate. Sunlight filters through woodland canopies, recalling the Edenic beginnings of Agnes’s story and the joy of children at play. Yet indoors, the atmosphere tightens, mirroring the grief that suffuses the family after Hamnet’s death.

The film forgoes the novel’s non-linear structure, opting for a clear narrative arc that moves from love and hope to loss and uncertain healing. The result is emotionally direct, if sometimes hurried in its reconciliation of personal and artistic suffering.

Legacy: Changing How We See Shakespeare and His Family

What ‘Hamnet’ ultimately offers is not a definitive biography, but a new way of imagining Shakespeare’s domestic world. The absence of evidence—no letters, no clear accounts—becomes an invitation to empathy. The film’s popularity is likely to cement the image of Agnes as Shakespeare’s true partner, a woman whose intelligence and intuition shaped the man and his art. As Maggie O’Farrell herself notes, perhaps we will all have to change our minds again when new evidence comes to light. For now, Mescal’s Shakespeare and Buckley’s Agnes give us a story that feels both truthful and necessary, in its refusal to let history’s blanks define the people behind the legend.

Paul Mescal’s turn as Shakespeare in ‘Hamnet’ doesn’t rewrite history—it brings its silences to life. By filling the gaps with nuanced emotion and respectful imagination, the film asks us to reconsider not just the genius of the Bard, but the realities of love, loss, and partnership that shape every life. For audiences in 2025, it’s a timely reminder that behind every myth is a human story worth telling.