In her eighth novel Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell imagines the short life and tragic death of Shakespeare’s only son, aged 11, in 1596. Although it is not known how Hamnet died, O’Farrell attributes his death to the plague. She creates a visceral and affecting portrait of his swift decline and the powerlessness of those around him, particularly his mother, to save him.

A critical and commercial success, the novel’s popularity was aided by its connection with Shakespeare, whose enduring reputation as a literary genius ensures that, as the scholar John Sutherland once asserted, “where there’s a Will there’s a payday”.

The death of Hamnet is one creative trigger for this bestselling novel, but is it the main source? And was Hamnet’s death really the source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet? With the film adaptation, co-authored by O’Farrell and director Chloé Zhao, arriving in Australian cinemas this month, it is timely to consider the broader influences on O’Farrell’s novel and Shakespeare’s play.

The inspirations are not singular in either case. Shakespeare was influenced by clear creative precursors, while O’Farrell’s depiction of maternal grief is haunted by her personal experience.

O’Farrell has repeatedly stated in interviews that she had two motivations for writing Hamnet: to “rescue” Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway from negative representations in biographies of Shakespeare, and to “correct” what she perceives as the lack of acknowledgement of the significance of Hamnet’s death to Shakespeare’s art.

Her former concern manifests in her representation of Anne as a quietly wilful character, who engineers her husband’s escape from his overbearing father in Stratford to London, where his career can take flight. The novel’s third-person narrative is increasingly filtered through Anne’s perspective as the story progresses, placing her grief centre stage.

In a pointed intervention, O’Farrell names her “Agnes”. This is the name she is given in her father Richard Hathaway’s will, though the assertion that Agnes is her “true” name is problematic, due to a lack of other documentary sources and because spelling was variable at the time.

Renaming Anne is indicative of O’Farrell’s desire to offer a fresh vision, but this in itself is not a new project. Carol Anne Duffy’s poem Anne Hathaway (1999) and Germaine Greer’s speculative biography Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) are two of many earlier revisionist treatments. Katherine West Schiel’s

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