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Spoilers below.

Chloe Zhao’s stupendous film Hamnet does not purport to be a true story. It is not even necessarily based on a true story. The Oscar contender, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is as much a work of fiction as the book it is based upon: Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet , which collects a few known facts about the life of William Shakespeare’s wife and their son, Hamnet, and uses them to shape a devastating narrative about grief, love, and storytelling.

In Zhao’s film as well as in O’Farrell’s novel, a young Latin tutor named William Shakespeare (Mescal) meets Agnes Hathaway (Buckley) in the late 1500s, and they fall in love. They are

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