As Hamnet reduces audiences to floods of tears in the run-up to the 2026 Oscars ceremony, I must admit I was wrong to write it off as another award-season-by-numbers grind. It is a stunning piece of theatre, and deserves to play an important role in a wider conversation about Shakespeare’s radical legacy.
More than four centuries after his death, William Shakespeare remains one of the most prominent English-language writers of all time. Times have changed: empires come and gone; languages reshaped; fashions and customs modelled, remodelled, discarded and reclaimed as retro. And yet, in spite of it all, Shakespeare is still drawn upon for inspiration by new generations of artists in all walks of life, all around the world.
You might think that this would make proponents of English exceptionalism happy, to have the name of ‘one of their own’ become the high-bar of cultural excellence for over 400 years. The phrase, “It’s hardly Shakespeare, is it?” is something which condemns something as less-than with a distinctly English measuring-stick. Even so, the legacy of the Bard has always troubled elites from the Anglosphere.
That is in part because he was the product of a world which was changing: a society in which a degree of class mobility – partially emerging from evolving economic conditions, partially emerging from the waves of plague which had left huge gaps in the ruling class – suddenly offered opportunities for lower castes to prove they could excel in all manner of fields. One of the most unforgivable aspects of Shakespeare’s life therefore seems to be that he was the son of a glover, something which has been sneered at by purveyors of the nakedly political project that seeks to cast doubt on the authorship of his plays.
Reshaping Shakespeare
From the murderous colonisers at the top of Victorian society, to the unaccountable law lords dictating the ideological direction of the US’ modern imperial project, generations of rulers and their chinless sycophants have since sought to discredit the idea anyone from the lower classes could produce anything worthy of centuries of adoration. The most important assertion here is that poor people are useless illiterates, without exception – and that Shakespeare either stole what he was credited for, or was actually the pen-name of a secret aristocrat.
As worrying a sign as this is – especially in an era where conspiracy theories can go from being publicly derided to commonly accepted in the span of months – however, ‘Big Shakespeare’ is only one prong of a bipartite assault on literary history. A second, less crude, more insidious movement has been in many ways more successful at reshaping the narratives around this topic – not through discrediting, but co-opting his works: as with the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, this has seen the issuing of safer, ‘poetic’ interpretations for some works, while minimising the prominence of others.
When Ian McKellen took centre-stage on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this year, the soliloquy from Sir Thomas More was likely entirely new to most of its audience. The speech, The Stranger’s Case sees Shakespeare reflect on riots 80 years before, which targeted an influx of migrant workers – and issues a rebuttal to the prejudices which no doubt continued to ripple through society in his day. It wasn’t performed at the time of writing, with some suggestions this was because of censorship – but it is telling that long after the fact, aside from McKellen’s reeling it off on one of the most-watched TV shows in the US, it has remained so obscure.
In contrast, that work has been buried beneath works which did make it past the censors – thanks in part to being about ancient or geographically distant characters, disguising their political content, or allowing enough space between their themes and the current reality to be ideologically acceptable. This also meant that through a little educational reinforcement, a few academic sleights of hand here and there, these works could be watered down into a format which asks fewer awkward questions of the status quo. And this is particularly evident in Hamlet.
Performer, writer and activist Riz Ahmed has been doing some excellent work in this area, particularly using the famous To be, or not to be speech to show how Shakespeare has been “defanged”. The speech, as it is commonly taught, is said to be a passive reflection on life and death – and “if there’s a dagger”, Ahmed notes, “it’s pointed inward”. So “people think it’s about suicide.” He contends, however, that is a long way from the intent behind the words.
“It’s about resistance. Armed resistance, even. To be or not to be” presents two options: whether it’s nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – all the injustice and bullshit of the world – or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
“If you take on a sea, it drowns you. So, the question is: should I fight back against injustice even though I know it will kill me?
“That’s completely different from asking whether to kill yourself.”
Ahmed has tried to reclaim the radical nature of this scene by way of his own adaptation of Hamlet, released to cinemas last year. But while that is in its own right a venture very worthy of an audience’s time, I’d like to conclude by considering how Hamnet – the critical darling currently racking up awards-season nominations, fits into this re-evaluation of Shakespeare.
Hamnet
Based on a 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who adapted it for screen in collaboration with director Chloé Zhao, the film dramatises the relationship of Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (often known as Anne) Hathaway, following the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet (played by Jacobi Jupe, who somehow manages to act rings around the rest of an excellent cast). The film has received glowing reviews from critics, but has divided audiences – with some labelling it ‘grief porn’, while others have questioned whether it works to undermine the radical implications of Hamlet.
On that first point, using the term ‘porn’ as a suffix for anything is supposed to imply a kind of indulgence that is aimed to shame its creators and viewers. I don’t agree with that concept in the first place due to its belittling of sex-workers, but beyond that, the idea that art which makes you feel sad should be shamed is a special brand of pathetic. Grief is not just an indulgence, but an important process of reflection that can help us to think about and understand life, society, and the world around us. It is telling that some people would seek to belittle that, while no doubt ‘-porn’ never enters into their vocabulary for films which generally provoke no thought, or questioning of authority – Rambo III is not ‘war porn’, for example.
On the second front, I think there is an understandable backlash of this kind – but I also feel it is an oversimplification, which draws battle lines where they need not be. McKellen, for example, has been vocal in questioning Hamnet’s authenticity.
Considering the tumultuous times which the events of the film take place in – times which Shakespeare clearly had an interest in commenting on – the fact the film hinges largely on the Bard using Hamlet as a means to come to terms with the death of his son Hamnet could be read as part of that ‘defanging’ process again. While Ahmed notes that To be, or not to be is “about grieving the illusion that the world is fair”, here you might read that as being boxed into a less challenging individual angle, where the ‘natural injustice’ is of a loved-one dying, while again the lesson is to somehow go on with life in spite of it.
For me, I think there is something of a failure of imagination in taking this standpoint. Not just in the sense that you would have to be really, really determined to push past the fact Hamnet and Hamlet are separated by a single consonant (which, according to the opening of the film, might have been interchangeable back then anyway), to argue personal trauma did not play a role in writing this play. But further than that, we still so often have this vision of a radical visionary as being a single-minded monolith, focused only on the sweep of history as a source of inspiration.
In reality, an artist draws on many experiences to breathe life into their work. Injustice is easy to make into an abstraction, removed from a personal sense of horror or grief which is somehow considered base or indulgent – instead driven by that great train of history, and a determination to inform its forward trajectory undistracted by that individualism. But what I think makes Hamnet such a remarkable, powerful work, is that it shows no such divide needs to exist. In fact, the latter is toothless without the former.
The film’s final scene sees Shakespeare essentially trade places with his late son – playing the ghost of the murdered King of Denmark, visiting his son Hamlet. As well as the opportunity for a tearful farewell he had been deprived of in reality, this also comes as a chance for that grief to inform a call to arms – beyond bidding Hamlet to live on despite his grief, to get over ‘natural injustice’, it is a request to fight on in the hope of making a better world, whatever the risk.
It’s not a spoiler to say Hamlet ends up paying the ultimate price for this quest, but – in the moment which finally brought forth that promised flood of tears – it is a moment of triumph, of collective strength. Moved by his struggles, the tearful crowd – including a hidden Agnes Hathaway – reach forward to reassure and connect with the dying Hamlet. To comfort him in his pain, and to identify with his struggle. That is a moment crafted from Shakespeare’s emotional intelligence: he has not lived through the injustice of being a prince watching his father’s murder ascend to the throne, but he has lived through the injustice of living in a society where the state’s wealth is not used for protection from famine or disease, and where the demands of bringing in a salary mean he was not present for the death of his son in those conditions. And invoking that experience, to empathise with the character he creates, he imbues him with an authenticity that the audience can relate to, be moved and inspired by.
It is that empathy which is the answer to one of the Big Shakespeare crew’s most asinine riddles: how could this son of a glover, this commoner, know of any of the grand themes he is speaking, or be able to relate to characters who are kings and emperors? But while it is probably not a surprise that a cultural conservative might struggle to get their head around the concept of empathy; it is something that, as radicals look to reclaim Shakespeare, we must not lose sight of.
What we see in the climax of Hamnet is not the diminishing of a political subtext with the inclusion of a personal angle. It is the informing and infusing of the political with the personal. Certainly it is art as catharsis – but not just as an end in itself: it is catharsis as call to arms. It need not be one or the other. And for that reason, Hamnet’s praises should be sung from the rooftops by a global progressive movement, a political left, a radical front – whatever you want to call it – that has struggled for so long to connect with the masses on the human basis necessary to challenge the injustices of our age.
If we are to take arms against a sea of troubles, we must remain connected to the loves and losses which inspire us.
Phew…mountanish inhumanity
This is really interesting article. And I thought ‘Hamlet’ was a fine adaptation, though with a couple of minor flaws; one being the staging of ‘To be or not to be’. But I seriously disagree about the movie ‘Hamnet’. Certainly the novel is a poetic imagining of an aspect of Shakespeare’s work and producing [for me] a suspension of disbelief. But the movie suffers from the literalism of a Hollywood-style adaptation. We get ‘To be or not to be’ twice’! if one critic is right Shakespeare is working on ‘Romeo and Juliet’ before he is acquainted with Elizabethan theatre. And the actual staging of the play is anachronistic with the castle of Elsinore represented by a backdrop of greenery and a hidden cave?
What really puzzles me is that the author, Maggie O’Farrell worked on the script.