Academy Awards 2026: How 'Hamnet' Will Help Me Lead Shakespeare Classes About 'Hamlet's' Ophelia

(MENAFN- The Conversation) When I teach Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, many students love the character Ophelia, and so do I. But the play seems to silence her just when readers need to know more about how she sees the world and her place in it - especially the young women in my classes.

After all, as Shakespeare critics have noted, Ophelia is a young woman who is bossed around by her brother and her father and slut-shamed and violently rejected by Hamlet - the prince who said he loved her.

Over the centuries, Ophelia appears frequently in popular western culture - recently in the Taylor Swift song of the same name, just as Ophelia imagery is referenced on Swift's Life of a Showgirl album cover.

Read more: The pre-Raphaelite muse who inspired Taylor Swift's The Fate of Ophelia

Hamlet's Ophelia goes mad in the wake of her father's murder. She ends up falling into a brook and drowning, according to the weirdly poetic account delivered by Queen Gertrude:

Finally, Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet, and the Hamnet movie that she wrote with director Chloé Zhao - now nominated for eight Academy Awards - have given me something important to share about Ophelia the next time I teach Hamlet.

Hamnet imagines origins of 'Hamlet'

Hamnet, novel and movie, tells a compelling story about the origins of the play Hamlet in Shakespeare's life as O'Farrell and Zhao imagine it, focused on the passionate relationship between Shakespeare and his wife and the tragedy of their son Hamnet's death from plague at age 11.

Read more: After the plague, Shakespeare imagined a world saved from poison, slander and the evil eye

The film draws on sparse historical details, such as the name of Shakespeare's wife Agnes (aka Anne Hathaway) and the known death of one of their children.

The film shows us the shattering grief they felt - and envisions Hamlet as a gift of remembrance for the dead Hamnet, a gift that seems strong enough to begin to heal the broken love between Agnes and William.

But in the book and the movie, the potential healing a work of art can catalyze has roots eleswhere: Agnes's art of natural healing. From her late mother, a woman said by the locals to have been a“forest witch,” Agnes learned how to gather the flowers and herbs that grow in the forests near Stratford and how to concoct them into medicines able to heal the sick and broken bodies of her neighbours.

Regardless of the historical implausibility of Hamnet, could it possibly tell us something about Hamlet that we don't already know?

In my analysis as a Shakespeare scholar, the film can open up a new way of seeing, loving and standing up for Ophelia, precisely by seeing Ophelia in dialogue with Hamnet's Agnes.

Face to face with Ophelia

To understand that story, let's consider that the theatre Shakespeare and his company made in London around the turn of the 16th century iswhat I am calling a“thinking machine.”

This idea emerges from collaborative interdisciplinary research I'm doing that brings Shakespeare into conversation about social, environmental and political upheaval and explores the convergence of art, science, technology and human experience.

Why a machine? Like large language models (LLMs) today that train on huge archives of digital data, Shakespeare's play-making didn't just draw on previous plays, but also on literary, political and legal language, street talk, sermons, songs - the whole textual and spoken ecosystem of his time and the textual works of earlier ages.

However, unlike LLMs, which use predictive logic to generate what word should follow what word to generate a text, Shakespeare's plays are human-made mechanisms with meanings that grow larger over time and more complex by way of the creative, networked intelligence of actors and many other interpreters.

Hamlet, itself drawing on a vast trove of literary and cultural works, has generated a multitude of different performances, different critical accounts and thousands of other works of art. The works Hamlet has inspired have also been able to loop back and bring to light aspects of the play that have passed unremarked in earlier interpretations.

Ophelia as healer

Eighteenth and 19th-century Germans, for example, took up Hamlet as a play about their own struggles toward nationhood. Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote a poem“Hamlet” (1844) with the line“Deutschland ist Hamlet.”

That new way of thinking about the play took root across many European nations. It even ended up giving voice to 20th-century Québecois aspirations toward nationhood in Hubert Aquin's novel Prochain Épisode.

Hamnet, like other interpretations of Shakespeare's work, can help advance our understanding of Ophelia, a character who has been at the centre of much feminist scholarship across fields for at least the past 40 years and has been a central concern in theatrical, literary and visual art for far longer.

Maggie O'Farrell's Agnes, brought to life on-screen by Zhao in Hamnet, can begin to bring forward stronger readings of the role of Ophelia.

Building on earlier readings that amplify studies of corruption and governance, we might consider how Ophelia, like Zhao's Agnes, also sets out to be a healer, but a healer of souls and of the nation itself.

In the play's Act 4, Opelia's“mad” talk, heard by ordinary people in the streets, is already stirring the people up against the corrupt monarchy.

Fighting moral disease

The“mad” Ophelia uses herbs and flowers to get at the moral disease that has infected Denmark. Like Hamlet, she is bent on bringing healthy nationhood back to Claudius's“rotten” state.

The flowers and herbs she offers to the king and queen and to her brother Laertes, or simply imagines she is offering, include, among others, rosemary“for remembrance,” pansies“for thoughts,” and rue,“herb of grace.” They are medicinal drivers of reflection and repentance and offer rich opportunities for symbolic analysis.

But the king and queen don't heed what the poor“mad” girl has to say, and the play ends with spectacular show of killing and dying. Both Ophelia and Hamlet fail to save Denmark from corruption and death. It is a tragedy, after all.

Let's consider then that Gertrude's weird poetic narrative about how Ophelia died was only the first attempt to tell her story.

It falls to me, my students and you to tell it more truthfully for our time - and Hamnet offers a pathway forward.

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