Originality is an echo that repeats itself through time. Inspiration is the dialogue between the works of the past that illuminate something new. Authenticity is the breath of life that a creator infuses into the copy or reflection of a primordial inspiration.

This is evident in the thread that connects William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (from between 1600 and 1602) and Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet (2020, Libros del Asteroide-Spain) and Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation (2025). The blending of influences and the different sources of inspiration and allegory can be summarized as follows:

The wind sings among the branches of the ancient trees in the forest, some of which, above ground, have roots like giant serpents that seem to be gateways to the Underworld. A place that tests love, life, pain, creation, dreams, and the ways of accepting or not accepting death. First there was Orpheus and Eurydice, then Hamlet and his father, and later Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway and William Shakespeare, but before all of it, at the very beginning, there was King Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu.

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (Stafford-upon-Avon, 1564–1616), is proof of this. This masterpiece, whispered by the gods, is merely an intermediate stage in time between the original story, rewritten by Shakespeare with such ingenious power that it seems as if it were the authentic version, and the subsequent works inspired by it that have enriched and diversified the various artistic expressions.

Genealogy of Hamlet and Hamnet

Here is a biographical line tracing the literary DNA of Hamlet and Hamnet, two names that were synonymous in Elizabethan times, from the present to the past:

The most recent example of the transversality, feedback, and hybridity of these works is Chloé Zhao’s 2025 film Hamnet;

which is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name;

which, in turn, draws inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (written between 1600 and 1602) and the events that led to its creation;

which, in turn, is based on the lost play Ur-Hamlet, by an unknown author, performed around 1587;

Shakespeare’s notes have even been found in a volume of François de Belleforest’s Les Histoires Tragétiques, circa 1570, a French version of the following medieval tale:

Amleth, which means something like “fool”, is a legendary Icelandic figure from the 5th to 9th centuries, appearing in the 12th-century text Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus. The legend tells of Gervendill, chief of the Jutes, one of the most powerful peoples of the Germanic Iron Age, who was succeeded by his sons Feng and Horvendill. Gerutha marries him, and they have a son named Amleth. Feng eventually murders his brother Horvendill and marries the widow. Fearing he will not follow in his father’s footsteps, Amleth pretends to be a fool, but his uncle suspects his deception and puts him to the test. In the end, he is banished to the Kingdom of Mercia in Britain, and the king orders his execution. But Amleth’s cunning leads him to marry the princess, amass a fortune, return to Denmark, and plot his revenge, ultimately killing Feng. However, the King of Mercia, who had stipulated a mutual revenge with Feng should either of them be killed, decides to use an intermediary and sends him as a suitor to Hermuthruda, Queen of Scotland, who had killed her previous suitors but ultimately falls in love with Amleth. Meanwhile, Amleth’s first wife awaits him, until…

William Shakespeare recounts that, on a dark night in the lands of Elsinore, Hamlet, the young, melancholic, and hesitant prince of Denmark, is visited by the ghost of his father, who reveals that he was murdered by his brother Claudius to seize the throne and take his wife, Gertrude. This confession shatters the prince’s moral, ethical, and emotional foundations, as he slowly descends into revenge. Hamlet zigzags between sanity and madness, emotion and reason, oblivion and vengeance, love and disdain…

The Spirits of Orpheus and Eurydice

Up to this point, the direct and familiar thread between Hamlet and Hamnet has been established.

But in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and the film adaptation, the Hamletian universe expands forward and backward through different lines of inspiration from that period in Shakespeare’s life. For example, it reaches back two thousand years by invoking Ovid and his Metamorphoses, which compiles legends from ancient Greece, including the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This story of love, death, and sorrow serves in Hamnet as a pretext for uniting arts and voices from different eras and furthering the relationship between Shakespeare and Agnes, his future wife. A myth that the aspiring poet and playwright tells her in the forest, a myth that culminates in a life-and-death struggle and the quest to recover a deceased loved one. Orpheus, a great musician and poet, descends to the underworld in search of his beloved Eurydice, a nymph of the trees and forests, who died from a snakebite. He convinces Hades to return her to him upon his plea, on one condition: during their journey out of the underworld, he must walk ahead and she behind, but he cannot look back. He does so, but when he is about to bring her back to the light, not feeling Eurydice’s footsteps, he turns his head, breaks the pact, and is bound to her in a fleeting eternity… Thus, they became a symbol of love, desolation, loss, and, all at once, union.

And it is in the woods where the two are most deeply felt, when Orpheus’s song becomes the wind, playing and whispering among the leaves and branches of the trees that are Eurydice. Thus begins the film, with the song of the wind between two immense trees.

It is a tragic story, sublimated by Ovid, whose origin lies in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first known book in history, written on clay tablets more than four thousand years ago. There, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, devastated by the death of his friend Enkidu, embarks on a journey to the Underworld, hoping to find the secret of eternity to bring him back to life. He faces great challenges, until…

In the film Hamnet, the scene in which Shakespeare tells his future wife what happened to Orpheus and Eurydice contains the core of their love affair and encapsulates the entire narrative of the novel, which is structured around Agnes’s importance in Shakespeare’s personal and creative life. Both the film and the book shed light on her life.

Both narratives are constructed with great sensitivity, lyricism, serenity, and profound thoughts and emotions.

The novel, with its blend of fable and allegory, travels through the past and present of Agnes and her husband. She is the soul of it all. Shakespeare barely appears and is referred to only as the Latin teacher or the husband. We observe Agnes’s life and her romance with him; How she orchestrates everything so that her husband can fulfill his dream of creating in London, knowing that was “his true calling”; how she raises her children alone (two girls and a boy); the path the tragedy took, from the other side of the Mediterranean, in a small box of threads carried by the Black Death on a flea; the anguish at the arrival of death that snatches away her only son, an eleven-year-old boy; how she copes with the pain and grief that corrodes her soul and distorts her feelings toward Shakespeare and life; the recriminations, the guilt, and, in the end, how she sees how the former Latin teacher she fell in love with and helped become a genius transfigured the pain of her beloved Hamnet’s death into an immortal play.

“What do I do now?” Agnes asks her brother, in a moment of great doubt after the death of her son and the absence of her husband during those dark days.

“Keep your heart open”, her brother replies.

Why did Agnes, an echo of Eurydice and daughter of a witch who could glimpse someone’s future by touching their hand, marry William Shakespeare?

The answer, according to the novel, was revealed to her brother:

“I have never known anyone who has so many things hidden inside”.

Did Hamnet inspire Hamlet?

In real life, Hamnet died at the age of eleven in 1596, but the cause is unknown. Shakespeare premiered Hamlet just four years later, around 1600-1602. It was the first tragedy he wrote after several successful comedies.

The film shifts from the puzzle-like structure of the book to a linear narrative that leaves small pieces of the family’s life scattered throughout, pieces that eventually come together to illuminate the entire story.

The screenplay was written by the novelist and the director herself. It stars Jessie Buckley (Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife) and Paul Mescal (Shakespeare), alongside Emily Watson (Shakespeare’s mother), Joe Alwyn (Agnes’s brother), and Jacobi Jupe (Hamnet). The production boasts meticulously crafted sets and costumes, faithful to the period, and is accompanied by a delicate and sensitive soundtrack. The atmosphere is lyrical, natural, rich in symbolism, and contemplative, with a serene tempo that subtly underpins the slow turbulence of the heart and of creation. It scatters pieces of a life story that gradually begin to fit together, revealing the complete picture. The play highlights the importance of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, both personally and creatively, and explores the sometimes painful paths that inspiration takes until it becomes something otherworldly.

Shakespeare’s original title is The History of the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. It is not only Shakespeare’s longest, most philosophical, existential, and earthly work, but also one of the most influential in literature. Hamlet is one of the greatest, most mysterious, profound, moving, and timeless characters ever created by art, delving into the human condition. He is also one of the most challenging roles for actors.

“It’s moving to read Shakespeare knowing that his dead son inspired Hamlet”, the writer said at a virtual press conference in 2021, during the presentation of her novel.

The whispers of inspiration

The novel and the film trace the arc of two lives: nature, a couple, the blossoming of love, the joy of finding love, the hope for children, his put-on-death dreams, her understanding as he pursues his, her role as the family’s pillar, the death of a child, the pain and grief in its many forms, her silence, his silence, until all that pain and ugliness that ravages the poet’s soul confronts and elevates him as he transforms into the murdered King of Denmark, now a ghost, and his child, his child, is brought back to life as a little prince who becomes eternal and lives forever in the imagination of the world.

One of the captivating and miraculous details of the film is that while in the novel the chapter dedicated to the Black Death’s journey by sea and land from the Mediterranean to Hamnet is exceptional and almost self-contained, a world unto itself, in the film, director Chloé Zhao resolves it ingeniously. When the shadows of night and death envelop the town, a small shadow puppet theater in the street recreates the path of death.

Almost nothing is known about the life of William Shakespeare, not even whether he is the man in that famous portrait. Nothing is known about how his life is reflected in his works, as is the case with every creator. Maggie O’Farrell, and later Chloé Zhao, imagine how the personal life shaped by his wife Agnes might have helped create the literary genius, and how a nameless pain, as deep and dark as that of the Underworld—a path once inaugurated for literature and art by Gilgamesh and Orpheus—was able to transform it into life and beauty.

• Read the first part of this special HERE: Hamlet, analysis of a classic of literature.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

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