‘Hamnet’ is making audiences break down in tears – and upending beliefs about male grief

One viewer commented on Reddit that the movie was an “out of body experience.” Another posted on X that it left them “covered in tears” and “ugly crying the entire drive home.” New York Times columnist Sarah Wildman wrote that the film left her “sobbing in my seat.”

In “Hamnet,” which director Chloé Zhao adapted from Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, William Shakespeare’s youngest son, Hamnet, dies of the bubonic plague at the age of 11. The film traces the profound impact this loss has on his family, while also suggesting that Hamnet’s death influenced the genesis of Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece “Hamlet.”

But as critics debate whether “Hamnet” constitutes “grief porn” or is instead a brilliant field guide for how to move through the dark woods of sorrow, I found the film so compelling due to how the characters themselves grieve.

Much like Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Hamnet” critiques the notion that grieving is somehow unmanly.

A mother mourns

“Hamnet” offers an intimate portrait of Shakespeare’s personal life, though aspects of the story are highly fictionalized.

In the film, Shakespeare and his wife, commonly known as Anne but renamed Agnes in “Hamnet,” fall in love, bear three children and suffer through the tragic death of 11-year-old Hamnet.

The couple’s marriage is tested by the contrasting ways they grieve Hamnet’s death. Agnes believes Shakespeare, who is in London writing plays when Hamnet dies, fails to grieve their son appropriately because of his desire to return to London so shortly after Hamnet’s death. At the same time, the film suggests Agnes would prefer to stay in the family’s dilapidated home forever because it tethers her more closely to Hamnet’s memory.

In a feminist move, the film notably centers Agnes, who’s been an afterthought in popular memory: She’s largely known for Shakespeare bequeathing her his “second best bed.”

Her perfect love for her children is made palpable through her vigilant care for them – in health, sickness and death.

And yet, “Hamnet” would not be “Hamnet” without Shakespeare and the way his failure to grieve affects Agnes. Agnes losing her son is the film’s central tragedy. But the second tragedy is her loss of faith in her husband, who suddenly strikes her as cold and overly career driven.

How could a man capable of writing poetry with such emotional depth be so clueless about how to grieve their dead son? For Agnes, this is no man at all.

Then and now, expressions of grief are often gendered.

In her 1996 study “Telling Tears in the English Renaissance,” literary scholar Marjory E. Lange explains how in Shakespeare’s time, men who cried might be perceived as being dramatic and weak for appropriating a female form of expression; those who shed tears in public – to borrow a contemporary term – could be accused of “sadfishing” for attention, even if they were genuinely overcome with emotion.

And in her monograph “Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature,” literary scholar Jennifer Vaught also notes that men during Shakespeare’s life were expected to be stoic in their grief.

But Vaught complicates the idea that male weeping was universally frowned upon back then. She points to how emotion routinely serves as a springboard for virtuous action in the era’s literature. For example, in Shakespeare’s tragicomic romance “The Winter’s Tale,” King Leontes’ tears facilitate his evolution from jealous, abusive monarch to loving husband and father. Without this grief-induced transformation, the reunion with his wife and daughter – whom he believed were dead – would never have been possible.

To grieve or not to grieve?

Zhao’s “Hamnet” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” each explore the anxiety men can feel about expressing grief. But they also find ways to show how that grief can be both beautiful and productive.

In “Hamlet,” Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, challenges his masculinity due to his overwrought grieving style.

Hamlet’s grief is essentially the polar opposite of how Shakespeare’s is portrayed in “Hamnet”: When Hamlet enters the stage, he’s wearing an inky black coat, which symbolizes his ongoing mourning of his dead father. His mother, Gertrude, has moved on after just two months and has married her dead husband’s brother, Claudius.

Claudius is quick to chastise Hamlet for his “unmanly grief.” He acknowledges that “tis sweet and commendable” that Hamlet mourns his father, but to persist in grief amounts to a weakness of heart, reason and faith. Why mourn death when it is so common and perhaps even willed by God? Instead of crying, Claudius suggests Hamlet profess, “This must be so.”

“Hamlet” reveals how grieving men are held to different standards than women, and that these fluctuating standards can be contradictory and confusing.

It isn’t that Zhao’s Shakespeare doesn’t feel Hamnet’s loss with the same profundity that Agnes does; he just can’t express it in the same manner. In the same way Claudius suggests Hamlet must move on because the kingdom needs governance, Shakespeare insists on getting back to work to fulfill his artistic calling, provide for his family and, in a surprising twist, grieve his son.

‘Hamlet’ as a vehicle for grief

The satisfying resolution of the film reveals that Shakespeare has been living in deplorable conditions in London.

Agnes believed he was enjoying the trappings of his budding celebrity. But the small, disheveled room above the theater where he sleeps and writes suggests he has been mourning in private. He channels his private grief into his very public play “Hamlet,” which, when performed before Agnes, reads as a coded articulation of his love for her, their dead son and the playwright’s endless well of sorrow.

The play cleverly allows the deceased Hamnet to live on perpetually through the character Hamlet.

At the film’s start, Zhao cites literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s finding that Hamnet and Hamlet were the same name and entirely interchangeable, which makes Hamnet’s death and the birth of “Hamlet” feel inevitable. Zhao invites viewers to imagine that the character of Hamlet grieves openly in a way that Shakespeare does not have the courage or capacity to do. Though Claudius ridicules Hamlet for his emotional vulnerability, his grief drives him to avenge his father and emerge as a hero.

Even the most open-minded readers may fall into the trap of emasculating Hamlet, simply because he begins the play by visibly grieving.

I’ll sometimes ask my students or colleagues to tell me what they think Hamlet looks like, and their descriptions often play into anti-masculine stereotypes: The Hamlet of their imagination is usually slim, slight and a bit wan, much like actor David Tennant, who played Hamlet in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production. Franco Zeffirelli’s casting of Mel Gibson as Hamlet in his 1990 film adaption of Shakespeare’s play created a stir because it went so clearly against type.

Now I hope reading Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” alongside Zhao’s “Hamnet” can instill an appreciation for manly grief, one that expands the possibilities of who Hamlet can be.

It has become trendy to say real men cry. But Zhao’s film suggests they can also create emotionally devastating art that invites audiences to cry with and for them.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jeanette Tran, Drake University

Read more:

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Jeanette Tran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.