Hamnet true story: is the film a truthful account or historical fiction?

It's been almost a week since Hamnet was released to rave reviews in UK cinemas, and with the film set to be a major fixture in the ongoing awards season, it looks like it will be sticking around for a fair few weeks to come.

Chloé Zhao's drama took home the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Drama at Sunday night's ceremony in LA, and is expected to challenge the likes of Sinners and One Battle After Another for the Oscar statuette when the Academy Awards roll around in March.

As you'll probably be aware, the film stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and Will – more commonly known as Anne Hathaway and Britain's most esteemed playwright William Shakespeare – with the film focusing on the grief that struck the couple when they lost their young boy, Hamnet.

It also suggests that arguably Shakespeare's most famous, revered masterpiece of all – Hamlet – was written in response to the tragic death of his son, with the film's opening text explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are actually regarded as two different spellings of the same name.

But how accurate is the film: is this a truthful retelling of historical events or a work of fiction? Read on for everything you need to know.

Hamnet true story: how accurate is the new film?

It's worth noting from the outset that Hamnet is a work of historical fiction, and has never been intended as a completely truthful account of the short life of young Hamnet and the impact his tragic death had on the rest of Shakespeare's family.

Rather the film – and Maggie O'Farrell's novel before it – is a speculation that draws on certain historical records to suggest a plausible scenario that might have happened. Such is carried out in the same vein as 1998's Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, albeit operating in a very different register to that altogether more light-hearted film.

Really, it's only fitting that this approach should be taken by authors and screenwriters wishing to draw from Shakespeare's life, given that the Bard himself was well-versed in the historical fiction tradition, with several of his most famous works falling into that genre.

O'Farrell makes this all very clear in the afterword to her novel, in which she wrote: "This is a work of fiction, inspired by the short life of a boy who died in Stratford, Warwickshire, in the summer of 1596."

She added that she had "tried, where possible, to stick to the scant historical facts known about the real Hamnet and his family." Continuing, she explained that a few details, most notably some of the character names, "have been altered or elided over."

Meanwhile, O'Farrell also pointed out that while many people will know of Shakespeare's wife as Anne Hathaway, she is actually referred to as Agnes in her father's will – and so clearly sometimes went by this name also.

Perhaps most crucially, the author wrote that it has never been known how exactly Hamnet died – with the cause of his death not noted alongside his burial in the historical record.

"The Black Death, or 'pestilence', as it would have been known in the late sixteenth century, is not mentioned once by Shakespeare in any of his plays or poetry," she wrote. "I have always wondered about this absence and it's possible significance; this novel is the result of my idle speculation."

How accurate is the portrayal of Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare's relationship?

The early sections of the film focus on the courtship between Will and Agnes, with the pair meeting after the former is hired to work as a tutor for the latter's younger siblings, as part of a deal to settle debts the Shakespeare family owed to the Hathaways.

In these early scenes, Agnes is presented as something of an outcast from her family – although she does have a staunch ally in her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn). She is someone who the other locals are suspicious of, owing to her interests in folk medicine and herbal remedies, her pet hawk and various other elemental pleasures.

While others are put off by this, Will is entranced. The two are quickly engaged to be married and, soon after, Agnes reveals she is pregnant, which causes the still suspicious Shakespeare clan to begrudgingly welcome her into their family.

In truth, little is known for sure about Agnes' life and her marriage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no evidence exists to suggest she had healing powers or the ability to see into the future as is shown in the film, with this aspect of the story being an interesting invention by O'Farrell. Indeed, most of the scenes between the pair are based on imagination rather than fact.

In an interview with The Guardian, around the time of the book's publication in 2020, the author explained how she wanted to write the story in part as a response to the dismissal of Agnes that is commonly found in academia and historical biography, claiming that "There is no evidence [Shakespeare] hated his wife or his domestic life."

Meanwhile, during an appearance on the Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, she explained: "Why did she marry him? Why did she choose this penniless, wageless 18-year-old? I suppose if that question was asked of it, I thought, ‘Well, maybe she saw something in him. Maybe she looked at him and realised he was extraordinary, that he was a genius, that he was peerless in that sense.

"So I suppose that that’s where this kind of grew from; that maybe she was the one person who could see into his soul and see what he was capable of."

Did William Shakespeare really have an earring?

Yes! Although some cinemagoers have commented that Paul Mescal's earring doesn't look especially period accurate, most portraits of the iconic playwright do indeed show him wearing a golden hoop – as was common in those times.

Indeed, in an interview with GQ, the film's costume designer Malgosia Turzanska explained how the earring was more or less "the only thing" she kept from those portraits when creating the look for the character, partly due to the fact that there are actually relatively few renderings of Shakespeare available.

"It was kind of an additional permission to just reimagine him from scratch and not worry about it," she explained, later adding that: "I absolutely do not care about accuracy if the feeling is there."

That said, the costume was still fairly accurate to the period, with crowd paintings from the Elizabethan era being used as a source to determine how people dressed on a day-to-day basis, rather than in the more formal clothes they might wear when being painted by a portrait artist.

Hamnet is now showing in UK cinemas.

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