Golden Globes 2026 |400-year mystery surrounding Hamnet and Shakespeare's wife (and son) - News Mundo

There is no information about the writer's wife in the film, but it offers a new perspective of a woman who is often presented in a negative image.

400 years of mystery surrounding Hamnet and Shakespeare's wife (and son).

Author, Karin James

- Reading time: 9 minutes

In Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell's eloquent 2020 novel and the poignant new film based on it, Shakespeare's wife Agnes is an herbalist skilled in potions and has an almost supernatural ability to sense the future.But he fails to save his young son from the plague, a death that leads the boy's father to write one of the greatest works in all of literature: Hamlet.

But there's no way to know if any of this is true.

Even in a film that just won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, O'Farrell's novel Ment is a work of fantasy, a rich exploration of grief woven from simple facts.

O'Farrell, who also wrote the film's script with director Chloé Zhao, can't be said to have distorted real history because neither story is known despite the centuries historians have spent shedding light on Shakespeare's life.

The puzzling information about Shakespeare's family far outweighs the questions it raises.

Records show that in 1582, William Shakespeare, then 18, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant with their first daughter, Susanna.Three years later, their twins were born, named Judith and Hamnet, a name that at the time was interchangeable with Hamlet.

Hamnet died in 1596 when he was only 11 years old. He was buried on 11 August, but it is almost certain that Shakespeare, traveling with his troupe, missed the funeral in time.

About four years later, he wrote Hamlet.Draw your own conclusions.

No one knows if Shakespeare felt compelled to marry Anne because she was pregnant, or if they were really in love.No one knows how Hamnet died, but the plague was raging at the time and seems to have been the likely cause of his death.

Most importantly for the book and movie, no one knows much about Annie herself, even though she can read and write.

The legend gives her a strong-willed personality (portrayed by Jesse Buckley, who also won a Golden Globe for the performance) and shows her in a passionate romance with Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescale.

Hamnet is actually about Agnes.

Changing the story about Anne/Agnes

At the end of his novel, O'Farrell acknowledges how little is actually known about Hamnett and his parents.However, he backs up his story with careful study of the late 16th century and places it in that historical context.

The author shares his thoughts during the research period:

"I was a little distracted by how badly history and academia have treated Shakespeare's wife, the woman they were taught to call Anne Hathaway. In fact, we've only been offered one story about her, and most biographers have simply taken it for granted: that she was an illiterate peasant woman who tricked him into marrying him, that he hated her for London, and that he hated her."

Her name has also been questioned in relation to Shakespeare's wife.Her father, a prosperous farmer, left her a dowry in his will, which named her Agnes.O'Farrell decided to give his character that name.

If anyone knew his name, it would be his father, he thought.He says, "It seemed very iconic to me that, on top of everything else, we didn't even get his name right."

O'Farrell makes a strong case for Shakespeare's wife abuse.

Joe Eldridge Carney, an expert on Shakespeare's works and professor of English at the College of New Jersey, says:

"(O'Farrell's) portrait is a deliberate rejection of centuries of unfounded assumptions about Anne, either as the patient but bored saint who kept the flames of the Stratford hearth burning, or as the promiscuous harp who lured Shakespeare into a miserable marriage."

His real name is harder to find.

David Scott Kastan, a leading Shakespeare scholar and professor emeritus of English at Yale University, said:

"She appears as Anne in many records, and Agnes in only one: her father's will."

According to him, it is possible that "she was born Agnes, but called Anne".

And he adds: "I like how the novel takes advantage of this possibility to give it its own identity, apart from a marriage about which we know very little and which we always see through the prism of Shakespeare."

a modern woman

To create the unique character of Agnes, O'Farrell recreated her from Shakespeare's work.

"What I did was go back to the plays and read them differently, to see if I could find her, because I always thought I could see Ment in Hamlet. I was surprised ... I thought she must be there."

One of the inspirations for Agnes' intuition came from these readings.

"There's a lot of clairvoyance in the works. Think of Julius Caesar's oracle, for example," says O'Farrell.

Agnes' legendary knowledge of herbs and potions also has its counterpart in the works, particularly in Ophelia's soliloquy in "Hamlet," when she appears mad and gives flowers and seeds to other characters, with lines that include, "Rosemary, this is for remembrance."

"I read that every house had a herb garden at that time," says O'Farrell."And the woman of the house, the matriarch, would be responsible for how to make medicine and treat illness. It wouldn't be something that men knew."

O'Farrell said he could imagine Shakespeare drawing on his wife's knowledge for this speech.

Seeing her as a truly equal partner perhaps gives us a dose of idealization, an Anne/Agnes for the 21st century.Buckley's Agnes is the kind of woman Shakespeare wants us to have;that is, someone who is exceptional in his own way.

She is so unusual that Shakespeare's mother, as she warns him in the film, is rumored to be "the daughter of the witch of the wood".She is intelligent, has strong convictions and is sensible enough to understand that her husband should pursue his art career in London.

She's the kind of woman a genius could fall in love with, and we can see why Shakespeare on screen is drawn to her from the start.

However, this conception of Anne/Agnes is not necessarily a simple idealization.

Carney says, "Although it might be tempting to see O'Farrell's Anne simply as an attempt to make her an early modern feminist, a figure more in tune with our own sensibilities, that portrait actually accords with what we know about the lives of many women of the time."

“We know that many women are successfully running what we now call 'small businesses' in brewing, herbalism, malting, trade, weaving and more.

We still don't know if Shakespeare's wife could read.Agnes the movie can, but O'Farrell himself believes that the real-life equivalent of the character is probably illiterate.

"You would think there was no point in teaching a sheep farmer's daughter to read," writes the writer.

The Hamlet-Hamnet connection

When Shakespeare leaves his family in Stratford-upon-Avon and works for many years in the theaters of London, the married life imagined in the book and the film becomes more and more distant.

But when it comes to Hement's death and its traumatic aftermath, there is only speculation.

According to Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt's influential 2004 essay The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet, O'Farrell sees a direct connection to the play, even beyond the echo of Hamnet's name.

In the film, when Agnes goes to London to see the play herself - a kind of legend - we see, like her, that the actor who plays Hamlet comes out with clothes and hair color that makes him look like Hamlet.

In successful casting, Jacoby Jupe plays the boy Hamnet, and his brother Noah Jupe plays Hamlet on stage.The physical resemblance between the two is unquestionable.

In this interpretation, the play is not just a way for Shakespeare to channel his grief.By playing the ghost of Hamlet's father, Shakespeare is able to say goodbye to his son on stage in a way he could not in real life.

About the connection between Hamnet's death and the work, Kastan says:

"There must be an (influence), we just don't know what it is. It is tempting, perhaps irresistible, to link the death of his son to 'Hamlet'. The death of Hamnet/Hamlet must have felt like a terrible loss for Shakespeare and his family."

"This may be, at least in part, a few years after the boy's death. Shakespeare revisits (Thomas Kyd's) old play about a son named Hamlet and a ghost crying for revenge. He was long overdue to write his own 'Hamlet,' which appeared on stage. He was dead."

However, there are many other influences on the work, both literary and cultural."The connections between living events and Shakespeare's art are nothing more than speculation, although they are interesting," says Kasten.

Little Test was not exposed to thoughts and feelings about his wife and family.

However, new research into a fragment of a letter from an unknown sender may or may not shed light on whether or not the Shakespeares were married.

Matthew Steggle, professor of English at Bristol University, says the letter sent to "Mrs Shakespeare" in London was intended for Anne.It means that she lived there with her husband between 1600 and 1610 and shows that she could read and write.Steggle himself said that his research "opens the door" to this idea, and "it seems harder to ignore, than to fully understand."

More than any academic study, however, it is likely to be in this high-profile film that will change the public perception of Shakespeare's wife and cement her as Agnes.

That would be "really cool if this is true," says O'farkel.But "maybe it's just a setting thing. Maybe, like this letter, comes out anything else and we must all again change the mind."

And he adds the two words that explain much of what surrounds the Shakespeares and their sons: "Who knows?"

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