Hamnet Shakespeare: A Difficult Dead Celebrity Child

Abstract

Hamnet Shakespeare’s fame arises from his premature death. In historical biography and literary criticism Hamnet would be guaranteed celebrity status as the only son of William Shakespeare and, by association, as his name is similar to world’s most famous play, Hamlet. However, the scant facts of Hamnet’s biography, his death at the age of 11, and an apparent lack of a response from his literary genius father make this dead child an inviting subject for creative appropriation. Recently, Hamnet has been the star of the one-boy play Hamnet (Dead Centre, Hamnet. Oberon Books, London, 2017), a recurring character in the BBC sitcom Upstart Crow (2016–2018), a spectral presence at the heart of Kenneth Branagh’s biopic All Is True (2018), and the focus of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel Hamnet (2020). Regardless of their differences, each of these works, I propose, reveals that Hamnet provides a useful nexus between the issues of child death, parental grief, and the social role of art. As this chapter demonstrates, these four texts depict Hamnet’s death as difficult; grant him a voice and agency in his life and afterlife; and use Shakespeare’s body of work to suggest that art aids in understanding and coping with loss.