"Hamnet" — Read The Screenplay By Chloé Zhao & Maggie O'Farrell
Before the Play, There Was the Loss.
"Hamnet" reimagines the life of William Shakespeare through the eyes of his wife, Agnes -- a woman rooted in nature, intuition, and ancestral knowledge. When their young son falls ill, the screenplay unfolds as a meditation on love, motherhood, and the quiet devastation of grief.
Lyrical and restrained, the film treats loss not as an event but as a landscape -- one that reshapes time, memory, and creation itself. This is not a story about genius being born, but about what genius costs.
"Hamnet" — Educator Resources & Study Guide
Writing Grief: Memory, Nature, and the Unsaid.
"Hamnet" offers a masterclass in emotional storytelling through restraint. By centering grief, intuition, and the natural world, the screenplay demonstrates how cinema can convey interior lives without exposition or spectacle.
For writers, it’s an essential study in adapting literary introspection to screen -- showing how silence, ritual, and sensory detail can carry meaning more powerfully than dialogue alone.
Hamnet (2025) — Classroom Study
"Hamnet" places itself in the lineage of films like The Tree of Life, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and The Green Knight -- works that privilege sensation and memory over narrative urgency. What distinguishes it is its reclamation of authorship. Rather than centering Shakespeare’s genius, the screenplay explores the cost of that genius on the people who lived beside it. It reframes literary history through domestic grief, maternal intuition, and the unknowable weight of loss. For educators and students, "Hamnet" is a rare example of cinema as mourning ritual -- a screenplay that trusts the audience to feel rather than be told.
- Writing grief without melodrama.
- Non-linear emotional storytelling.
- Feminist reframing of historical narratives.
- Nature as character and chorus.
- Dreams, intuition, and embodied knowledge.
- Silence and restraint in dialogue.
- Adapting literary interiority to cinema.
"Hamnet" One Sheet & Script Intel
After losing their son Hamnet to plague, Agnes and William Shakespeare grapple with grief in 16th-century England. A healer, Agnes must find strength to care for her surviving children while processing her devastating loss. Focus Features
| Type | ... |
FYC
|
| Version | ... | FINALBlue Rev. |
| Date | ... | 10.02.2024 |
| Pages | ... | 118 |
| Genres | ... | Bio Drama History |
| Screenplay | ... | Chloé Zhao Maggie O'Farrell |
| IMDb ID | ... | 14905854 |
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