The 'Hamnet' Trailer Brings a New Twist to Shakespeare's Work

It's been over 400 years since playwright William Shakespeare posthumously broke big in 1623 with the "First Folio," after spending his entire life as a minor homegrown English celebrity. In that time, partly thanks to the British Empire and colonialism, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare have been translated into every primary language found on Earth, except for whale song, and a few alien languages, including Klingon. His plays and sonnets, including the unfinished works and the apocrypha attributed to him without evidence, have been performed on every continent except Antarctica. Yet somehow, 402 years later, we have a brand-new tale arriving this fall, in the big-screen adaptation of Hamnet.

In our age of remakes, reboots, and reimaginings, Shakespeare remains the king of stories we already recognize. One would think there was nothing new to uncover about the Bard in 2025. However, the playwright's own history is rarely told. When Shakespeare appears as a character on screen, it's almost always in a fictionalized form, such as Shakespeare in Love, which presents the Bard as having lived through a series of stories echoing his most familiar works. Hamnet technically falls into that category, purportedly telling the story of how Shakespeare wrote his greatest tragedy, Hamlet (i.e., The One Where Everybody Dies).

However, do not expect Shakespeare to meet two dopes named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose puppet show antics lead to the production of a play. Written by Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet is a psychological portrait of a family who have suffered the traumatic loss of their only son, Hamlette, and connects it to the debut of his greatest tragedy.