Both Hamnet (novel and film) and Hamlet turn on a child named Hamnet/Hamlet and on devastating bereavement, but they face in opposite directions: Hamnet imagines the death of Shakespeare’s son and its impact on his parents, while Hamlet stages the death of a father and its impact on his son.rohanmaitzen+4
Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, and Chloé Zhao’s film) is a historical-fictional reconstruction of Shakespeare’s family life, centering on the boy Hamnet’s death and his mother Agnes (Anne Hathaway).gatesnotes+3
Hamlet is a revenge tragedy about Prince Hamlet avenging his father’s murder by Claudius, raising questions of action, conscience, and mortality.sparknotes+2
The novel and film both treat the play Hamlet as Shakespeare’s imaginative response to his son’s death, a way of working through grief and guilt.howardgardner+2
They draw thematic parallels: love and loss, parents and children, ghosts, and the difficulty of living with unbearable knowledge, echoing Hamlet’s concern with death, memory, and the afterlife.litcharts+3
O’Farrell’s bold premise is that Shakespeare “recreates” his lost son as a young man onstage—Prince Hamlet—turning private mourning into public art.howardgardner+1
Direction of grief: Hamnet is about parents haunted by a dead child; Hamlet is about a child haunted by a dead parent.sparknotes+1
Genre and stakes: Hamnet is intimate domestic historical fiction (and its film a grief‑drama), concerned with marriage, motherhood, and everyday life; Hamlet is a court tragedy about kingship, revenge, and metaphysical doubt.indiewire+4
Ethics: Hamnet dwells on care, healing, and survival after loss; Hamlet dwells on revenge, justice, and the moral paralysis of overthinking.coursehero+3
Hamnet shifts the spotlight from Shakespeare to Agnes (Anne): she is the main consciousness, portrayed as fiercely independent, spiritually attuned, and central to the family’s emotional life.marianaownroom.substack+3
Shakespeare himself is unnamed or ghostlike on the page and relatively recessive in the film, which counters the usual Shakespeare‑centric narrative.rohanmaitzen+2
Hamlet keeps its focus on the prince’s interiority—his soliloquies define the play—while women (Gertrude, Ophelia) are more marginal and often read through his perspective.litcharts+2
Novel vs play: O’Farrell’s book moves fluidly across time, weaving childhood scenes, courtship, and death into a non‑linear tapestry about memory; Shakespeare’s play is tightly structured around escalating revenge and political decay.marianaownroom.substack+2
Film vs novel: Zhao’s film makes the story more linear—running from Agnes and Will’s first meeting to her watching Hamlet—and prunes digressions such as the plague’s journey, to keep focus on love, loss, and creativity.indiewire
Stage vs page/screen: Hamlet externalizes inner turmoil through soliloquies (e.g. “To be, or not to be”), ghosts, and court intrigue; Hamnet relies on close description, domestic detail, and, in the film, a stylized limbo space that visually rhymes with the Globe Theatre and the ghostly world of Hamlet.rohanmaitzen+3
Both the novel and the film culminate in Agnes seeing a performance of Hamlet, where she recognizes her dead son in the prince and her husband in the ghost, realizing the play is an “offering” to Hamnet rather than the reason he matters.gatesnotes+3
That scene makes explicit how the fictional world of Hamlet grows out of the private catastrophe narrated in Hamnet, while also insisting that Agnes’s and Hamnet’s lives have value independent of the famous play.howardgardner+3