How Biographical Is ‘Hamnet’?

English professor Sarah Beckwith weighs in on how the popular film raises broader questions about grief in society

"Hamlet and the Ghost of His Father" drawing by Adam Vogler, mid-nineteenth century, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"Hamlet and the Ghost of His Father" drawing by Adam Vogler, mid-nineteenth century, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This is a summary of a story that originally appeared on Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

One of the most talked-about films of the year, “Hamnet,” invites audiences to consider: Did the death of William Shakespeare’s young son shape the writing of “Hamlet”?

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, the film imagines the playwright and his wife Agnes coping with the death of their 11-year-old son during a plague outbreak in the 1590s. While deeply personal, the story also raises broader questions about how grief works, both on the page and in society.

Those questions are central to the work of Duke professor of English Sarah Beckwith, whose book “Shakespeare and Loss: The Late, Great Tragedies” argues that Shakespeare’s most famous plays are less about isolated sorrow and more about what happens when communities lose the ability to mourn together.

Beckwith welcomes the attention “Hamnet” brings to Shakespeare, but she warns against turning biography into a shortcut. “‘Hamlet’ may have been written in response to the death of Hamnet,” she notes, “but it would be an oversimplification” to treat that loss as the play’s secret key.

In Beckwith’s reading, “Hamlet” is a portrait of a society where shared practices of grief break down. King Hamlet’s murder is hidden. Funerals are rushed. The court is encouraged to move on without asking hard questions. When shared rituals of mourning fail, grief doesn’t vanish. It mutates into suspicion, obsession, and violence. As Beckwith puts it, “to lose the forms for the expression of loss is to be deprived of a basic grammar of recognition.”

This perspective reframes Hamlet himself. He is not simply indecisive but a man unable to grieve openly. Revenge becomes a way to avoid sorrow rather than confront it. The play questions revenge itself, suggesting that bearing witness to loss may be the harder and more human task.

As audiences connect emotionally with “Hamnet,” Beckwith hopes they’ll look past the tempting “what if” and see Shakespeare’s tragedies as searching examinations of grief, community, and what it costs when meaning is left unspoken.

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