From the Red Carpet to the Classroom, Shakespeare is Having a Moment

One of the year’s most talked-about films has left audiences pondering a haunting literary “what if”: Did the death of William Shakespeare’s young son shape the writing of “Hamlet”? 

Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel of the same name, “Hamnet” the film stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, navigating their grief after the death of their 11-year-old son during the plague of the 1590s. While the film imagines an intimate family tragedy, the questions it raises about grief and loss are ones that medieval and early modern literature scholar Sarah Beckwith has spent decades researching. 

In Beckwith’s new book, “Shakespeare and Loss: The Late, Great Tragedies,” the Katherine Everett Gilbert Distinguished Professor of English explores how grief, broken relationships and humans’ failure to truly understand one another shaped Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies. 

The timing of “Hamnet’s” Oscar success, earning eight Academy Award nominations and win for Best Actress, offers a moment to contemplate Shakespeare’s tragedies with fresh eyes — but Beckwith cautions against the appeal of straightforward biographical explanation. 

“‘Hamlet’ may have been written in response to the death of Hamnet,” she said, “but it would be an oversimplification to assume that this bit of biography is the key to one of the most mysterious and questing plays ever written.” 

Beckwith notes that Shakespeare’s father also died even closer in time to the play’s first performance , and the play itself centers on two Hamlets: the elder King Hamlet and his son. “Such musings are attractive but can short circuit a greater interrogation of the play and its ability to explore grief and loss.”

For Beckwith, “Hamlet” is not simply a story of personal sorrow but a portrait of a society that has lost the ability to mourn, and in doing so, also lost the ability to fully understand itself. Mourning, she explains, is not just a private feeling, but something communities do together to recognize loss and make sense of the past. 

In “Hamlet,” those shared practices break down. King Hamlet cannot be properly mourned because his death was a murder covered up by his own brother, Claudius. As the new king, Claudius urges the court to move on quickly, without asking difficult questions. Other deaths in the play are also handled poorly, with funerals rushed, incomplete or treated as inconveniences. As Beckwith puts it: mourning rites are maimed, and when grief is denied or distorted, the consequences can be profound. “To lose the forms for the expression of loss is to be deprived of a basic grammar of recognition,” she said.

In other words, shared ways to acknowledge loss — through rituals, public remembrance, storytelling or even the permission to speak openly — are essential to a healthy society. The unacknowledged grief in “Hamlet” doesn’t disappear; it reemerges as suspicion, obsession and violence. Hamlet himself, Beckwith suggests, is less a man unable to act than one unable to grieve openly and honestly.

“‘Hamlet’ may have been written in response to the death of Hamnet, but it would be an oversimplification to assume that this bit of biography is the key to one of the most mysterious and questing plays ever written.” 

One of Beckwith’s most striking arguments in “Shakespeare and Loss” is that “Hamlet” questions the very idea of revenge. “The play decisively ends as it puts under scrutiny one kind of heroic idiom — revenge tragedy — to explore Hamlet’s vital and difficult new task of bearing witness to loss,” she said. Revenge, in this reading, becomes a way to avoid grief rather than face it. “The play exposes how the revenge tragedy genre substitutes grievance for grief. Hamlet is a thwarted griever, rather than a revenger.” 

Poorly healed grief is a recurrent topic of Shakespeare’s work. In her book, Beckwith also examines later tragedies, such as “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” grouping them in what she calls “tragedies of exile.” In these plays, characters are pushed out of families, communities and shared understanding, struggling to connect with others in meaningful ways — a thematic legacy that continues to influence modern drama and film.

As audiences connect emotionally with “Hamnet” on the screen, Beckwith hopes viewers will let go of the shallow “what if” and look beyond the Bard’s own loss. “If we focus too narrowly on biography, we can miss a larger vista of profound dramatic investigation,” she said.