Hamnet Shakespeare
Hamnet as depicted in an engravingc. 1890
Born	Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Baptised	2 February 1585
Died	Buried 11 August 1596 (aged 11) Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Parent(s)	William Shakespeare Anne Hathaway

Hamnet Shakespeare (baptised 2 February 1585 –buried 11 August 1596) was the only son ofWilliam Shakespeare andAnne Hathaway, and thefraternal twin ofJudith Shakespeare. The twins were probably named after Hamnet Sadler, a baker who witnessed Shakespeare's will, and the baker's wife, Judith.^[1] Hamnet died at the age of 11. Some Shakespearean scholars speculate on the relationship between Hamnet and his father's later playHamlet,^[2] as well as on possible connections between Hamnet's death and the writing ofKing John,Romeo and Juliet,Julius Caesar, andTwelfth Night.

Hamnet found cultural representation in the 21st century works such asNeil Gaiman'sThe Sandman, 2018 filmAll Is True,Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 bookHamnet and its 2025film adaptation, as well as comedy drama seriesUpstart Crow (2016–2020).

Little is known about Hamnet.^[3] Hamnet and his twin sisterJudith were born inStratford-upon-Avon and baptised on 2 February 1585 inHoly Trinity Church by Richard Barton ofCoventry.^[4] The twins were probably named after Hamnet Sadler, a baker who witnessed Shakespeare's will, and the baker's wife, Judith;^[1]Hamnet was not an uncommon personal name in medieval and early modern England.^[5] According to the record of his baptism in the Register ofSolihull, he was christened "Hamlette Sadler".^[6][7]

By the time Hamnet was four, his father was already a London playwright. As Shakespeare's popularity grew, he was probably not regularly at home with his family in Stratford.^[8]Park Honan believes Hamnet may have completedLower School, which would have been typical for the contemporary eleven-year-old.^[9]

The exact circumstances of Hamnet's death are unknown,^[10][11] as parish registers did not always record the cause of death.^[10] One possible explanation was that Hamnet's death resulted from the famine and plague that devastated the Warwickshire countryside.^[12] At that time in England, about a third of all children died before age 10.^[13]

Hamnet was buried at theChurch of the Holy Trinity in Stratford on 11 August 1596,^[14][3][10] likely before his father (who was on tour in Kent in early August) learned of his death.^[12]

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief?

Scholars have long speculated about the potential influence of Hamnet's death upon William Shakespeare's writing. Unlike his contemporaryBen Jonson, who wrote a lengthy piece on the death of his own son, Shakespeare, if he wrote anything in response, did so more subtly. At the time his son died, Shakespeare was writing primarily comedies, and that writing continued until a few years after Hamnet's death, when his major tragedies were written. It is possible that his tragedies gained depth from his experience.^[13]

Biographical readings, in which critics would try to connect passages in the plays andsonnets to specific events in Shakespeare's life, are at least as old as theRomantic period. Many famous writers, scholars, and critics from the 18th to the early 20th century pondered the connection between Hamnet's death and Shakespeare's plays. These scholars and critics includedSamuel Taylor Coleridge,Edward Dowden, andJ. Dover Wilson, among others. In 1931,C. J. Sisson stated that such interpretations had "gone too far". In 1934, Shakespeare scholarR. W. Chambers agreed, saying that Shakespeare's most cheerful work was written after his son's death, making a connection doubtful. In the mid-to-late 20th century, it became increasingly unpopular for critics to connect events in authors' lives with their work, not just for Shakespeare, but for all writing. More recently, however, as the ideas of theNew Criticism have lost prominence, biographical interpretations of Hamnet's relationship to his father's work have begun to re-emerge.^[8]

Some theories about Hamnet's influence on his father's plays are centred on the tragedyHamlet, composed between 1599 and 1601, but not everyone agrees that grief over his only son's death may have spurred Shakespeare to write the play. Although the namesHamlet andHamnet were considered virtually interchangeable, and Shakespeare's own will spelled Hamnet Sadler's first name as "Hamlett",^[7][16][17] critics often assume that the name of the character in the play has an entirely different derivation.^[18] John Dover Wilson, one of the few editors ofHamlet who had a directly related comment, remarks: "It is perhaps an accident that the name [Hamlet] was current in Warwickshire and that Shakespeare's own son Hamnet (born 1585) was christened Hamnet, a variant of it."^[19] HoweverEric Sams points out that it seems to be the author of theUr-Hamlet who first put an "H" in front of the character's name, and argues that this might be significant: "It was no mere Englishing; he could readily have been called Amleth here too. He had been deliberately rebaptised by his new creator." Sams describes the given name Hamlet as "otherwise unrecorded in any archive ever researched" outside Tudor Stratford, and argues that this name-change was probably Shakespeare's work, because "Only Shakespeare among known dramatists had any known links with the name Hamlet, and his could hardly have been more intimate or intense."^[20] Stephen Greenblatt agrees on this last point: "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries".^[16]

Despite this, Prince Hamlet's name is more often seen as related to theAmleth character inSaxo Grammaticus'Vita Amlethi, an old Scandinavian legend that is very similar to Shakespeare's story.^[21] More recent scholarship has argued that, whileHamlet has a Scandinavian origin and may have been selected as a play subject for commercial reasons, Shakespeare's grief over the loss of his only son may lie at the heart of the tragedy.^[16][22]

Speculation over Hamnet's influence on Shakespeare's works is not limited toHamlet. Richard Wheeler theorises that Hamnet's death influenced the writing ofTwelfth Night, which centres on a girl who believes that her twin brother has died. In the end, she finds that her brother never died, and is alive and well. Wheeler also posits the idea that the women who disguise themselves as men inThe Merchant of Venice,As You Like It, andTwelfth Night are a representation of William Shakespeare's seeing his son's hope in his daughters after Hamnet's death.^[8]Bill Bryson argues that Constance's speech from the third act ofKing John (written in the mid-1590s) was inspired by Hamnet's death. In the speech, she laments the loss of her son, Arthur.^[23] It is possible, though, that Hamnet was still alive when Constance's lament was written.^[8] Many other plays of Shakespeare's have theories surrounding Hamnet. These include questions as to whether a scene inJulius Caesar in which Caesar adopts Mark Antony as a replacement for his dead son is related to Hamnet's death, or whetherRomeo and Juliet is a tragic reflection of the loss of a son, or if Alonso's guilt over his son's death inThe Tempest is related.^[8]Sonnet 37 may have also been written in response to Hamnet's death. In it, Shakespeare says, "As a decrepit father takes delight / To see his active child do deeds of youth / So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spight / Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth." Still, if this is an allusion to Hamnet, it is a vague one.^[13] The grief also echoes in one of the most painful passages Shakespeare ever wrote, in the end ofKing Lear where the ruined monarch recognises his daughter is dead: "No, no, no life! / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!"^[22]

Michael Wood suggests thatsonnet 33, which is typically grouped with Shakespeare's so-called "Fair Youth" sonnets, might instead allude to Hamnet's death. In this sonnet, there is also an implied pun on "sun" and "son": "Even so my sun one early morn did shine / With all triumphant splendour on my brow; / But out, alack, he was but one hour mine, / The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now".^[24] Juan Daniel Millán believes that not only sonnet 33 alludes to Hamnet's death, but that all of the Fair Youth sonnets were dedicated to Hamnet and that they were Shakespeare's way of dealing with the loss. He suggests that Hamnet is the fair youth the poems are addressing.^[25]

• Imogen Clark wroteWill Shakespeare's Little Lad, an 1897 fictionalization of Hamnet's life.^[26]
• Hamnet appears in two comics byNeil Gaiman, which share a setting. InThe Sandman #19, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", he accompanies his father and plays the role of the changeling boy in the aforementioned play; at the end, it is implied that the faerie queenTitania has taken him toFaerie. InThe Books of Magic #3, "The Land of Summer's Twilight", he is shown as her servant.^[27]

• He appears as a character in the 2018 filmAll Is True, written byBen Elton. The largely fictionalised plot revolves around William Shakespeare coming to terms with Hamnet's death and his relationship with his family.^[28]
• Irish novelistMaggie O'Farrell's 2020 bookHamnet is a fictional account of the life of Hamnet.^[29][30]
  • Jacobi Jupe plays Hamnet inChloé Zhao's 2025film adaptation of the novel.^[31]
• Hamnet Shakespeare is a character in the BBC comedy drama seriesUpstart Crow, about the life of William Shakespeare in London and Stratford-upon-Avon. Hamnet's death occurs in the final episode of series 3.^[32]
• Suzanne Collins's 2005 bookGregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, the third book in herUnderland Chronicles series, featured a character named Hamnet.^[33]

• Shakespeare's children and grandchildren

• 1585 births
• 1596 deaths
• People from Stratford-upon-Avon
• Shakespeare family
• Child deaths from disease
• English twins
• Burials at Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon

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