Episode Transcript: Hamnet vs Shakespeare in Love

This episode, we’re going to be talking about adaptation in three different ways, because we’re going to be looking at three different works of adaptation, all of the same story. We’re going to be looking at Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, the brilliant novel. We’re going to be looking at how she and Chloé Zhao adapted that novel into the movie Hamnet. Then we’re going to go back in time almost 30 years to a much earlier adaptation of the same story in Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s brilliant script, Shakespeare in Love.

We’re going to be looking at the similarities and the differences in these three acts of adaptation so that you can develop a process when adapting in your own screenwriting.

Why Every Screenwriter Is an Adapter

As screenwriters, we all have to adapt. And I don’t just mean getting used to our life circumstances. I mean we all end up with a project at some point in our career that is an adaptation. Whether it’s a novel that we’re adapting, a piece of IP, a short story, whether it’s a work-for-hire project where you’re adapting somebody else’s idea, whether it is a rewrite project where you are adapting an earlier draft of somebody else’s screenplay, whether you’re adapting your own true life story or the story of a historical figure, whether you’re adapting a memoir, or even if you’re adapting an earlier draft of your own script.

When you’re adapting, by its very nature, it means you’re taking something that is not yet a screenplay and you’re pushing on it to figure out how to transform it into a screenplay. And because a true life story, a memoir, a novel, a nonfiction book, a piece of IP are built to do different things than a screenplay, there are necessary choices and changes that we need to make along the way in order to successfully adapt anything.

And that all begins with a concept I call finding the location of your adaptation.

Finding the Location of Your Adaptation

So what does it mean to find a location in your adaptation?

Well, by nature, stories are big and screenplays are small. Stories are complicated and screenplays are simple. Stories are about many things and screenplays are about one thing.

Trying to adapt the life story of William Shakespeare is probably one of the most challenging things ever, right? This is one of the greatest writers to ever live. And somehow you have to try to capture the poetry of Shakespeare, the character of Shakespeare, and you’ve got to somehow deal with the plays of Shakespeare.

But where the location for you lives is going to be dependent on what you want to say, what you’re interested in. In a way, you can think if the whole story is a giant pie, that’s too much pie to eat in a hundred pages. So you have to ask yourself: what’s the little slice of the pie? What’s the part that’s going to represent the whole? What’s the piece that I can fully savor, fully get the most out of in this screenplay?

This is where a lot of screenwriters get really overwhelmed. They’re trying to tell the whole story. And as they research, the story gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It becomes harder to contain the story. And then they start to tell themselves things like, “Maybe it should be a miniseries. Maybe it should be a series.” But even as they start to adapt it into these different forms, they still find that the story just wants to spill over. Because somehow you’re trying to capture a whole life, and you simply don’t have enough pages to do it.

When you’re first starting a screenplay, it’s okay if you’re kind of all over the place and digging in a lot of different places. But our goal is not to dig shallowly in lots of places. It’s to dig deeply in one place, to find that one little piece of the pie that we’re most interested in.

How Maggie O’Farrell’s Novel Hamnet Locates the Story in Absence

In her novel Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell finds that location not in Shakespeare, but in Agnes, his wife. In fact, in the novel, Shakespeare is mostly depicted as an absentee husband. And we’re really watching the story of Agnes and her children trying to live their lives while Daddy is off in London trying to make it as a writer.

We’re really watching the story of what does it mean when your husband turns towards his art rather than towards you? And we’re watching this family go through this incredible tragedy together, unable to actually communicate about it, except in a powerful climactic scene where she finally understands what her husband is going through, not through their relationship, but through the play that he has written, Hamlet.

And, of course, connecting all that is the idea that Hamnet and Hamlet are actually the same name.

So in finding her location for her novel, Maggie O’Farrell shifts the location away from the famous bard, who’s not even named in the piece. He never receives a name, even when he’s present. She shifts the location towards his family, towards his wife, who does not fit in with her community, who’s both connected to nature and distrusted and feared by the people around her, who’s trying to raise three young children on her own in the absence of her husband. It shifted towards a title character, Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, who shares a name with Hamlet, the title character, of course, of his most famous play. And we learn that in these times, the name Hamnet and the name Hamlet were indistinguishable from each other.

The piece is told out of order. It’s told out of chronology, because it’s a piece about absence. So rather than evolving chronologically and watching two people fall in love and drift away from each other, we start in a place of absence. We learn about what was once between these two people that’s been lost.

In other words, because the location is not in Shakespeare’s presence, but in his absence—because the heart of the story, because the theme of the story, is not in Shakespeare’s presence, but in his absence, because this is a feminist take on this material that we all think we know—the structure of the piece is designed to amplify that.

In fact, not only with the absence of Shakespeare, but even with the absence of Agnes. When we start the book, we are following Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, whose twin sister seems to have the plague. And we’re watching this young child, whose mother has been called away, try to deal with this overwhelming thing that he cannot fully comprehend, to save the life of this twin sister that he so loves. And we’re watching him deal with it, not from an adult point of view, but from a child’s point of view.

This culminates when he tries to draw the sickness out of her and into him, because he doesn’t want his sister to die.

We’re then going to flash back—and there are going to be some major spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t read it or watched it and need to pause, go for it, because I can’t talk about adaptation without showing you how this thing is built. We’re going to flash back and learn how Shakespeare and Agnes fell in love. We’re going to see what was lost in all this absence as he turned towards his art rather than towards his wife.

A Death That Shimmers Between Magic and Reality

And at the center of this book, there is this moment that we don’t even know how to interpret. Is it supernatural? Is it the fulfillment of little Hamnet’s wish? Is it a magical realist moment? But it’s not Judith Shakespeare, the twin sister, the sickly twin who has the plague, who dies. It’s Hamnet.

And again, in the book, we don’t know: Did he draw that sickness into him as he believed? Did he just contract the plague while she got better? Is this some kind of magical, symbolic thing? Because there’s a play throughout this piece on an idea that’s rampant in Shakespeare, right, of people trading places, dressing up as each other and being indistinguishable from each other. It’s a theatrical convention that Maggie O’Farrell seems to be grabbing and using for her own devices here.

But we watch in the second half of this novel as the absence grows even more strong. First, Shakespeare, despite knowing that Judith is sick, is absent on the day that Hamnet dies. But he also becomes even more absent from his wife as he turns towards his art rather than towards her to deal with this tremendous loss. And similarly, Agnes is absent from her husband, unable to forgive or understand his absence, unable to make sense of what is happening.

So we’re watching this family dissolve around their grief, until we culminate in this beautiful and complicated moment where she goes to see the play. And in the words “Remember me,” in the words of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, she finds her husband again through their shared grief over their son, realizing that this play that he has been working on is in fact an adaptation of the grief that he has not been able to share with her.

So this is an absolutely gorgeous novel, and you can see the radical choices made in how to adapt this work—that we’re going to turn this piece inside out and upside down.

Hamnet the Movie: Shifting the Location Toward Presence and Love

What’s really interesting is when they decide to adapt the piece for film, Maggie O’Farrell and Chloé Zhao find a slightly different location. So even though Maggie O’Farrell is adapting her own novel, she finds a slightly different location for the screenplay.

Unlike the non-linear story that she’s created in the novel, the story of Hamnet the movie is told in chronological order, which means it’s built more like a love story than the story of absence. William Shakespeare is a character in that story. In fact, he’s even named. And our focus from the beginning is not on a little boy’s journey to save his sister, but rather on a beautiful dream of a family coming together.

The film is no less devastating. And in fact, it has the same sea change. That midpoint, where everything turns, is Hamnet’s death. But the death is handled differently.

Unlike in the novel, where it kind of shimmers and changes, in the screenplay, Hamnet literally says to his sister, “I give my life for yours.” Instead of having a child’s half-imagined dream of sucking the poison out of her, he has a plan to cheat death, to trick death.

In fact, there’s a scene early in the movie that also exists in the book, where Hamnet and Judith switch clothes and their parents pretend that they can’t tell them apart. Again, a play on that old Shakespeare trope that when men and women switch clothes on stage, absolutely no one can tell. And it’s a sweet scene.

And in the structure of the movie, which is so different than the structure of the book, it’s built to create the feeling of this sweet family where dad is present. So instead of rooting us in a world of absence, it roots us in a world of presence that then turns around the sea change.

In fact, even when Shakespeare goes to London, he goes at the behest of Agnes, who knows that he needs to go, that he needs to get away from his family, but who fears to go with him because she fears for Judith’s health. So we’re building a different kind of story.

Even though the death of Hamnet happens in the same place, it has a completely different effect. In one story, we’re watching the story of absence that then gets punctuated by what used to be a beautiful love story, and then that gets twisted by the loss of a child. In the movie, we’re watching a beautiful story of love that gets broken by the loss of a child.

So structurally, we found a different location. Even though we’re using the same puzzle pieces, we found a different location for them, and a different feeling that grows out of it, and a different Shakespeare. Because rather than watching the story of Shakespeare the deadbeat dad, we’re watching the story of Shakespeare the loving father whose life falls apart in the aftermath of his son’s death.

So it’s a different location. Out of that different location, we get a different character. And out of all this, we get a different theme: the theme of trading one life for another, the theme of this swap.

What’s allowed to shimmer and be interpreted in multiple ways in the book is given a different level of clarity in the movie. In the movie, rather than being a wish to draw the sickness out of her, young Hamnet literally says to his sister, “I trade my life for yours.” He literally plans to trick death, just like he tricked his parents.

Leaning Into the Magic

So what in the novel is allowed to shimmer in that place between magical realism and reality, in the screenplay is actually leaned towards the magic. In fact, you can feel Maggie O’Farrell and Chloé Zhao leaning towards the magic in the very opening pages of the script.

This is the opening sequence in the screenplay for Hamnet: Exterior, forest, day. Opera: Purcell’s “When I Am Laid in Earth.” A red egg is nesting on a bed of fallen leaves surrounded by circular tree roots. We are in an ancient forest of Britain. The overwhelming soundscape begins to merge with the opera as if the thick canopy has swallowed the mournful singer. Her voice cries to us through the patterns of the forest, bending, contorting, flowing in an ever-ending circle of life and death. Is this a dream? It doesn’t feel completely real, yet it seems more substantial and potent than reality.

So you can see the leaning of this piece towards magic not at the midpoint, but from the very beginning. You can see the adaptation of this moment, the revision of this moment, from being a lone little taste of “is it magical realism?” inside of a very naturalistic book to becoming a logical extension of the magical form feeling of what we’re watching. And you can see the revision of the character’s lines to codify the meaning of that moment.

So we found a different location, a location that’s both more magical and also more connected, and that’s really about Hamnet’s death much more than it is about absence.

And we’re going to watch how Chloé Zhao as a director leans into that magic in the way she shoots this. Unlike the book, which is built around Hamnet’s absence, in the movie they send Hamnet home. Now he gets there too late, but we get this really interesting shot. We don’t know yet that Hamnet is dead.

We get this moment where he tells his sister he trades his life for hers. And then we get this moment where we watch the boy, and Shakespeare is racing into town, and our eyes are on the boy looking out for his father. And it’s not until Shakespeare gets there, just too late—so relieved to find that Judith is alive, and then to find out that Hamnet is dead—that we realize that Hamnet has died, and that the little boy that we’re watching is a ghost.

Right? This is Chloé Zhao leaning into the magic of the world that she’s built, leaning into her location for the piece, which is different than the location of the book. That is not about absence, but rather about the haunting of this boy, the longing and the holding on to this boy.

In fact, the very last image of the piece is again going to be about the boy. We’re going to get this beautiful moment where the play and the experience of these characters’ lives converge, where Agnes comes to her husband to watch the play that he has created, getting a sense of what his life has been like—that he’s been living in an attic despite all his wealth, that he has been writing a tragedy, even though she believes he’s writing a comedy.

And she’s going to see this happen on stage. And like in the book, she’s going to be devastated by it and then moved by it. But rather than building around the idea of “Remember me,” we’re going to build around an image of her literally reaching her hand towards the character playing Hamlet, and watching all of the audience members reach their hands towards that character.

We get this unbelievable image that, again, is not pure naturalism, right? That is this expressionistic adaptation of what it feels like to be in that audience. And then we’re going to watch that little boy, Hamnet, disappear into the hole, the doorway of the stage, and say goodbye.

That doorway is a mirror for that pit at the beginning, right? This piece is about the reaching out and letting go. This piece is about these characters connecting in the play the way they can’t reconnect in life.

So in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation, she is going to amplify visually the role of the ghost of Hamnet. She’s going to take what exists on the inside of the characters in the novel, and she’s going to externalize it. And this is some of the best stuff in the piece.

Where the Adaptation Struggles: The Love Story

The earlier stuff, the sections that are in the novel flashback but that are chronologically the love story, is actually some of the most challenging stuff in the adaptation. There are a couple of different challenges.

The first is that the poetry of Shakespeare really only occurs in the later section, when we’re starting to see the actual words of Shakespeare. And this isn’t a problem in the novel, because the novel is about absence. So we’re not looking for the greatest love story ever told by a man whose words are the most beautiful words ever spoken. Rather, we’re processing what was lost on the other side of meeting a character who’s already absent.

But in the movie, at least from my experience, it’s hard to fully feel the love story, because we want Shakespeare to be Shakespeare, but the Shakespeare we’re meeting is barely capable of self-expression. We’re dependent almost entirely on the performance of the actors to create that feeling of love.

The other challenge that happens because of where we start is that there’s no real relationship built between Hamnet and his sister. There’s really just one scene where we watch them change places. And it’s a delightful, beautiful little scene. But because we don’t have the story of Hamnet searching and trying on his own to take care of his sick sister, because we don’t ever really fully get to see his love for his sister, that moment where he trades his life for her really kind of exists on its own.

In fact, the movie kind of starts at that moment. I think if you watch Hamnet again and just end right before that moment, you’ll find that what you’re really watching is an okay, but kind of dissatisfying, love story. But at that moment where he sacrifices his life for his child—from that moment forward, as we start to get into the Shakespearean stuff and start to use the words of the real Shakespeare to communicate the grief and start to lean into those images—we start to see the piece really take off and become overwhelming and beautiful and sad.

When You Change Your Location, You Change What You Must Amplify

So this is another little piece about adaptation, because I would argue, despite all its success, that Hamnet the movie is less successful than Hamnet the book, because Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell don’t fully lean into their new location. Because their new location is a love story, they need to actually amplify that love story. And because their new location is the relationship between Hamnet and his sister, they need to fully build that story too.

So the lesson here is that sometimes when you change your location, it changes what you need to amplify. And it means that elements that weren’t important in the piece that you’re developing become extremely important. And sometimes moments that really worked well in the piece you started with don’t work in the same way.

And this is why it’s so important, especially when you’re adapting your own stuff. You’ve got an early draft of a script that isn’t working, and then you get a bunch of notes. And we have this urge to hold on to everything that we’ve created. But really, in order to transform our piece, we need to find a location. And once we find the location, we have to be savage about the stuff that’s not the location. We have to be savage about going, “This is not where it lives, and this is not where I’m going to focus, because I need to make room to fully explore this little tiny slice of the pie that I really want to tell.”

Now, if you disagree with me and you think the first half of Hamnet is fully working as a love story, then I challenge you to go watch Shakespeare in Love.

Shakespeare in Love: A Third Location for the Same Story

What’s interesting is that Shakespeare in Love is doing the same story. It takes place maybe a couple years later, but we even have a little bit of the same intersection—the sense that Shakespeare is working on Romeo and Juliet during the time period of Hamnet. It’s really taking place on or around the same period in Shakespeare’s life.

But Norman and Stoppard find a completely different location for the piece. The location of Shakespeare in Love is William Shakespeare in London falling in love with Viola, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. We’re looking at the same story, but from a different angle. And this one’s going to be a comedy that makes you cry, rather than a tragedy about grief.

His wife is referred to as Anne Hathaway in Shakespeare in Love, which is how most people knew her. We never meet her. She’s just the wife back at home. We don’t know any of this stuff that’s going on with his kids. All we know is that he’s married and doesn’t seem that into her.

The Shakespeare that we meet is not the absentee father. And he’s also not the father, shaken by grief, who can no longer express himself except through his plays. The location of the Shakespeare character we find is writer’s-blocked Shakespeare—Shakespeare who can’t seem to write, and who is living in the shadow of Kit Marlowe, the most famous playwright in London.

He’s working on his Romeo and Juliet, which at this point is called “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter.” And actually, the journey of Shakespeare in Love is watching Shakespeare fall in love. And with that, find the location of what he thinks is his comedy, learning that the comedy is actually a tragedy. It’s actually a tragic love story, right?

In other words, it’s a master lesson on adaptation by playing around with the process of one of the greatest playwrights in history, who at the point we meet him feels more like you on an average writing day. Like, “Wow, there’s these great writers whose shadow I live in, who I both admire and maybe feel a little bit jealous of, who I both learn from and whose lives I wish I had.”

We’re meeting a Shakespeare who is struggling to survive, who’s playing both sides of two different theaters, who’s stealing lines from everyone he listens to, including Kit Marlowe. In fact, “A plague on both your houses” in Shakespeare in Love is stolen from a super-religious anti-theater person who is calling for a plague on both theater houses.

He thinks he’s writing a comedy. He learns that the location is a tragedy. And like Hamnet, Shakespeare in Love interweaves the story of Shakespeare’s play with the real life, and culminates, just like Hamnet, with a performance in which the real emotions come out. It’s built on the exact same structural framework. The only difference is the location of that framework is not Hamlet. It’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s not a story of loss and revenge. It’s a story about love gone wrong.

When we first meet Shakespeare, he is kind of in love with a Rosalind, an actress who’s sleeping with everybody. When he finds out that she’s sleeping with somebody else, he says he was going to make her immortal. And we watch him find his muse through Gwyneth Paltrow’s character.

Viola is a noblewoman destined to be married to a terrible man, in traditional Shakespearean fashion, who decides that she is going to be an actor. And in classic Shakespearean fashion, in the same way that Shakespeare’s kids do it in Hamnet, she gets herself a male wig and a fake mustache and instantly convinces everyone that she is a man.

So we’re playing with these same theatrical conventions of gender switching, right? And the theatrical convention that a wig makes someone totally unrecognizable. And we’re going to watch Shakespeare at first not even recognize that the woman that he’s in love with is the same person that he has cast to play Romeo in his play, then slowly see through that subterfuge and fall in love with her.

And in fact, the only role that Anne Hathaway—Agnes—is going to play in Shakespeare in Love is that when Viola realizes that Shakespeare is married, she’s going to feel horrifically betrayed.

So you can see the different location, and you can see the mercilessness with which Norman and Stoppard are cutting out all this incredible source material that Maggie O’Farrell used to build a book and a movie.

Building a Love Story with the Poetry of Shakespeare

But the thing that you will see if you look at Shakespeare in Love is the difference when you build that love story with a Shakespeare who has the poetry of a Shakespeare, compared to when you build that love story with a Shakespeare who does not.

If you look at Shakespeare in Love next to Hamnet, you will actually see what’s missing from the first half of Hamnet—not because it didn’t work in the novel, but because the restructuring of the piece demanded a different kind of Shakespeare. In the early section, you will see what happens when you bring Tom Stoppard in to bring the poetry of Shakespeare to the character of Shakespeare, beyond just using Shakespeare’s lines.

So here you have three different scripts. They are all built on the same structure: a tragic relationship.

At the end of Shakespeare in Love, we don’t end with Shakespeare and Viola together, because Viola is a woman and her fate is not her own to control. We end with a running joke that somehow theater is a total disaster, but somehow it all comes out at the end. Viola says to Shakespeare, “It will all be all right at the end.” And the running gag is, “How?” “I don’t know, it’s a mystery.”

And the final image of Shakespeare in Love—we know that she’s being taken to America with a terrible man. She does not have control of her own life. The man of her dreams is staying in London to be a playwright. They cannot be married. And we just see her walking along a distant shore, disappearing into the distance, and we watch that loss lead not to a sad ending, but to a happy ending. Not from Romeo and Juliet to the writing of Hamlet, but from Romeo and Juliet to the writing of Twelfth Night.

The Location of Your Adaptation Is About Meaning

This is our power as screenwriters. We take the complex stories of our lives, the confusing elements of history, of true stories, of novels, of plays. And the beauty and power of what we get to do is that we get to find the location that matters to us, the theme that matters to us, the story that matters to us—if we are merciless with that, cutting out everything that doesn’t serve it, so that we can build fully and dig deeply in the places where our stories really live.

When we give ourselves the freedom not only to be limited by the source material, but also to go beyond it in order to deliver our location, what happens is we get to infuse the beauty of our creativity with meaning.

The location of your adaptation is not just about what’s going to sell. The location of your adaptation is about what does it mean?

Is the story of Shakespeare the story of a family trying to survive without their husband and their father, trying to navigate an impossible loss without him, and finally finding the beauty of him and the healing that they need, not in their relationship but in his art?

Is the story of Shakespeare the story of the most beautiful love story ever told, falling apart around the death of a child and then somehow being healed through theater?

Or is the story of Shakespeare the story of a struggling poet finding his voice through tragedy and love?

This is the beauty of what we get to do as screenwriters. We get to pick and choose the locations that we want to explore so that we can make our own meaning out of the source material of our lives. Whether that’s a novel, a dream, a short story, a piece of IP, a work-for-hire project, or even the story of our own lives.

I’d love to hear what you think of Hamnet, the novel, the screenplay, or of Shakespeare in Love.

Edited for length and clarity.