Overview
- The film adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel to reimagine William Shakespeare’s domestic life around his wife Agnes and their children.
- Current coverage frames the story’s grief after the death of Shakespeare’s son as the emotional engine rather than asserted historical fact.
- The film emphasizes that, in the period’s spelling, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably.
- Scholars maintain there is no definitive proof that the child’s death directly inspired Hamlet despite widely noted thematic parallels.
- The portrayal of Agnes as a mystic healer stems from the novel’s invention, with no documentary evidence supporting supernatural attributes.