Chloé Zhao returns to the big screen this year with Hamnet, a fictionalized story about William Shakespeare’s life that takes a distinctly different route than the Academy Award-winning 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. After releasing Hamnet‘s first trailer, the film has already distinguished itself as a major one to watch going into award season.

In addition to a strong creative voice behind the project, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley star in Hamnet as William and Agnes Shakespeare, respectively. Confronting very real issues of early death and grief in 16th-century England, and constructing a narrative around Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dying as a child, the film looks to be something with great emotional weight.

With that said, most of Hamnet changes what likely happened in the true story. The film is an adaptation of the novel Hamnet, also published as Hamnet & Judith, an award-winning literary novel from 2020 by Maggie O’Farrell, who also co-wrote the film. While Hamnet deviates from what really happened, it still tells a very resonant story.

Hamnet Is A Fictionalized Story About Shakespeare’s Life

Hamnet‘s film adaptation is a work of fiction, but it is based on a documented historical event. In 1596, Hamnet, a son that William Shakespeare had with Anne Hathaway, pᴀssed away at the age of 11. This has led to speculation around the circumstances of the death, as well as reflection on how this has influenced many of Shakespeare’s plays.

Crafted a few years later, many believe that the death of Hamnet likely played into the writing of the play Hamlet. The names are strikingly similar, but it is the content of the play, which deals with both death and the relationship between a son and his father, that has influenced this reading.

With themes of grief and loss permeating through the work, it is all but certain that Shakespeare’s personal experiences of tragedy were impactful on the writing of this play, as well as others. Subsequent stories, including Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet are also speculated to have been impacted by the story of Shakespeare’s loss.

With that said, all of this is speculation. Little is actually known about Hamnet himself, whose cause of death was not even recorded. With great knowledge of Shakespeare having been divined from all kinds of cultural sources, the new film posits a possibility about what could have occurred.

Known for crafting some of the greatest plays in the English language, Shakespeare’s influence has been seen in all kinds of media for centuries. Stories like Othello and Romeo & Juliet have remained some of the most-seen plays on stage, and these and others have been adapted, sometimes stringently, sometimes liberally, into some of the best Shakespeare movies.

Still, even if it is speculative, there is much that a story like Hamnet offers in finding the truth. With great emotional care for the source material, in both the novel and Shakespeare’s own inspiring works, Chloé Zhao looks to have crafted an emotional story with a particular focus on loss through a mother’s eyes.

Where Hamnet Differs From Shakespeare In Love

Notably, Hamnet is not the first Oscar-hopeful that has built a fictional story around Shakespeare’s life. The 1998 Best Picture-winning Shakespeare in Love used the style and trappings of Shakespeare’s era, as well as components of his plays, to tell an original story about the immortal bard caught in a scintillating love affair.

More salacious than historical, Shakespeare in Love used the cultural idea of Shakespeare as the famous playwright, rather than taking real components of his history. The film stars Joseph Fiennes as William Shakespeare, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the fictional Viola de Lesseps.

Largely considered among the worst Best Picture-winners, Shakespeare in Love did not purport to be anything but an anachronistic, romantic drama. It used a romanticized 16th-century aesthetic to tell an effectively small story about the driving power of love, all while making obvious references to some of the playwright’s most popular works.

Hamnet, meanwhile, is looking to do something very different. While the film will certainly touch upon the influence that Hamnet had upon his father’s work, it is more of an investigation of grief and loss in the face of the bubonic plague that ravaged England during that period.

Built on capturing the horrors of the late 17th century rather than romanticizing them, Hamnet also gives much more focus to Agnes Shakespeare than it does to William. Based directly on Anne Hathaway, Agnes’ experience of loss and grief are the primary focal points of the story, which is a much darker and more personal work than Shakespeare in Love.

Just as there have been all kinds of different adaptations of Shakespeare’s work that are as different as Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet from 10 Things I Hate About You, so stories of the man himself can vary significantly. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet promises to be a devastating and special film when it is released later this year.