Hamnet, The Movie

Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast · Dec 2, 2025 · 23m

Friend of the pod Katherine Scheil is the author of Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway and the co-editor of the upcoming Palgrave Handbook of Shakespearean Biofiction, is the perfect person to talk about Chloé Zhao's film version of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. Scheil highlights some of the differences between the novel and the film; some head-scratching marketing choices; how the novel and (especially) Jessie Buckley's performance, empower Shakespeare's wife in a way we've never seen before; and a curious similarity between Paul Mescal in Hamnet and Tim…