Hamnet (2025), the screen adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name about Shakespeare’s family life and the death of his son, excavates the pitiless hardships of life, the redemptive power of work and art’s strength in processing pain. An echo of Virgil’s Georgics early in the film triggers a series of reminiscences of the poem, an apt reference point given Virgil’s importance in Elizabethan education and Shakespeare’s own engagement with the classical tradition. Viewing Hamnet with the Georgics in mind also allows us to appreciate in greater depth its exploration of questions about human life.

In an early scene of the novel Hamnet (2020), a young Shakespeare is tutoring Latin. His pupils conjugate the verb incarcerare. The meaning is obvious enough, and it is clearly a wry nod from the narrator about how both the pupils and Shakespeare feel about their current predicaments. In the entire corpus of extant Latin, however, the verb only occurs in the sermons of a fourth-century AD African-Italian bishop, Zeno of Verona. Idiomatic Latin for ‘imprison’ is either in carcerem conicere, in carcerem condere, or carcere includere, but not incarcerare. The uncompounded form of the verb, carcerare, is just as rare and post-classical as incarcerare. It is highly unlikely that a tutor of Latin grammar would use so under-attested a verb. Shakespeare’s Latin was sufficiently proficient that he would not have set his pupils the verb incarcerare.

It would have to be for him to work as a schoolmaster although not much is known about his career as a teacher. In his Brief Lives, 17th-century biographer John Aubrey says that ‘in his younger years he had been a schoolmaster in the countrey’. It has been speculated that from 1589 to 1592, Shakespeare joined the household of the Earl of Southampton as a secretary, tutor and general factotum. The requirements in this job to teach Latin, religious studies, grammar and mathematics would have doubtless informed how steeped in the classical tradition his plays were. Shakespeare even includes meta-literary nods to his time in the world of classical tutoring, for example with Holofernes, the pedantic scholar at the court of the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who has been associated with the English humanist John Florio (1552-1625).

Shakespeare’s repurposing of classical culture is especially evident in his engagement with Virgil. Consider, for example, Othello’s description of how Desdemona fell in love with him (Othello 1.1.128-69). Asked by her father to tell him the story of his life, Othello had regaled them with tales of his travels, which Desdemona listened to and ‘loved… for the dangers I (sic) had passed’. This derives from Aeneas’ extended description of his wanderings after the fall of Troy in Aeneid 3, which resulted in Dido, Queen of Carthage, falling in love with him. This literary DNA probably started with Shakespeare’s early Latin learning with aids such as William Lily’s Short Introduction to Latin Grammar (1553). He could conceivably have used it both as a student and teacher. In the section on Impersonal verbs in Latin, such as decet (‘it is proper’) or oportet (‘it is necessary’), Lily explains how oportet works by giving this example: oportet me legere Vergilium (‘I ought to read Virgil’).

The film’s version of Shakespeare’s tutoring scene improves on the Latin of the novel. Instead of incarcerare, Shakespeare sets his pupils a passage of Virgil to memorise, conveying Lily’s lesson oportet legere Vergilium. They recite the following line from Virgil’s poem about rural life and farming, the Georgics (3.8-9).

temptanda uia est, qua me quoque possim

tollere humo uictorque uirum uolitare per ora.

‘I must try a path whereby I might be able to raise myself from the ground and fly victorious over on the lips of men.’

Published in 29 BC, it is a poem about human life and how to live it in the world of first-century BC Italy. Mankind’s interaction with nature is a combination of cooperation and conflict, as farmers must contend with seasons and elements to grow crops and tend livestock. The poem teaches all of us how to get by.

In these lines, Virgil looks forward to the task of writing an epic about the emperor Augustus. This ended up as the Aeneid, Virgil’s greatest achievement, narrating Aeneas’ journey from the ruins of Troy to the foundation of Rome and connecting his family line to Augustus’. Virgil pledges to build a marble temple with a statue of Octavian (Augustus’ name at the time of the poem’s completion), at its centre, by the banks of the river Mincius, a tributary of the Po, which flowed through Virgil’s home of Mantua. This ‘temple’ will be his Roman historical epic that people will talk about forever. It is a deeply fitting line for Shakespeare’s pupils to recite, and a neat foreshadowing of Shakespeare’s future success. By the end of the film Shakespeare will have written Hamlet, his greatest achievement, which will ‘fly victorious on the lips of men’.

After the recitation, the poem continues to echo around Hamnet. Agnes (Jessie Buckley) tells an insistent William (Paul Mescal) to tell her a ‘good story’ after he has followed her into the woods. He selects Virgil’s version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as told in book four of the Georgics (4.457-527). After her death from a snake-bite, Orpheus journeys to the Underworld to bring Eurydice back. By the power of his singing ability, Hades allows her to leave on the condition that he does not look at her until they leave the Underworld. This story helps Shakespeare’s courtship: ‘That was a good story’, Agnes concedes.

The Orpheus and Eurydice story derives from a section of the Georgics fundamental to Elizabethan grammar school education. Georgics 4 was popular for its complex exploration of the art of beekeeping and how bees are a useful mirror for human society, prompting the 20th-century Shakespeare critic T.W. Baldwin to note ‘Probably no Elizabethan schoolboy ever escaped those bees.’ Shakespeare’s own deployment of this material manifests in Henry V, when, in order to urge Henry to divide England’s forces into four and send one quarter into France, so the bulk of England’s strength is defensive, the Archbishop of Canterbury describes how bees split their society into four:

CANTERBURY (to HENRY, EXETER, WESTMORELAND)

Therefore doth heaven divide

The state of man in divers functions,

Setting endeavour in continual motion;

To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,

Obedience: for so work the honey-bees,

Creatures that by a rule in nature teach

The act of order to a peopled kingdom.                                   (Henry V 1.2.183-9)

After describing life in the hive, Virgil reports a miraculous and fictional practice of bugonia (‘birth from oxen’): should the hive fail and perish, a carcass of a calf, slain in early spring, kept in a small room, and stuffed with herbs will regenerate bees and lead to the hive’s renovation (4.281-314). This practice, obviously a far-fetched marvel, derives from traditional folklore.

The second half of book four describes how the art of bugonia was developed by a mythological shepherd named Aristaeus and provides an origin story for the marvel of bugonia. Aristaeus’ bees die because of disease and hunger thanks to the anger of Orpheus and the nymphs, who blame him for Eurydice’s death; according to Virgil, Eurydice was fleeing Aristaeus (we assume because of unwanted sexual advances), but as she fled across a river, was bitten by a poisonous water snake and died. Aristaeus and his mother Cyrene find all this out from a visit to the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus, who tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that Shakespeare tells Agnes.

Cyrene explains to Aristaeus that the grief of Orpheus and Eurydice’s fellow nymphs is the causa morbi (‘cause of the disease’, 4.532). She says he must appease them by sacrificing livestock to them. He does so, returns to the carcasses, and sees a miracle: his bees have returned (4.554-8).

hic uero subitum ac dictu mirabile monstrum

aspiciunt, liquefacta boum per uiscera toto

stridere apes utero et ruptis efferuere costis,

immensasque trahi nubes, iamque arbore summa

confluere et lentis uuam demittere ramis.

‘They (Aristaeus and Cyrene) suddenly saw an amazing miracle to describe: out of the whole bellies of the oxen through their oozing flesh, bees seethed out of the oxen’s burst ribs with a great buzz, swarming in huge clouds, and already flocked around the canopy of a tree and produced fruit from gently swaying branches.’

The Aristaeus-Orpheus-Eurydice story is partly about how we recover from disaster and grief, much like Hamnet. This echoes the suffering experienced by the Roman people during 15 years of on-and-off civil war. It also ties in with a major theme of the Georgics and Hamnet, namely how, despite hard work, our lives are often blindsided by suffering.

Labour is essential to humanity’s survival. The Georgics makes this clear as soon as it describes how the quasi-Edenic ‘Golden Age’ of mankind never wanting for anything is over. Jupiter sees to it that snakes now have venom, wolves are predatory, the sea is restless, trees do not produce honey, fire is unavailable and streams of wine no longer flow (1.129-32). Human beings must therefore acquire skills in agriculture, hunting, sailing and metallurgy in order to survive, and, consequently, their lives are largely filled with labour, as Virgil goes on to summarise (1.145-6):

                                    labor omnia vincit

improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.

‘Insatiable toil permeates existence, and want prevails when toil does not succeed but motivates us onwards.’

Virgil’s point in the Georgics, encapsulated in these lines, is that life is hard work, and no matter how hard we work or diligent we are, we will suffer. Our work may not alleviate or give any meaning to our suffering. This pessimistic worldview is also outlined very clearly at the beginning of book three, where the other meaning of labor as ‘suffering, distress’ is activated but the feeling of ‘toil’ lingers:

optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aeui

prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus

et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis. 

‘All life’s best days flee quickly from wretched mortals; close at hand are disease, gloomy old age, and distress, and harsh, merciless death snatches them.’ (3.66-8)

Life’s hardships make carrying on seem daunting and/or pointless. Despite their best efforts, the farmers’ crops are wiped out in a storm (1.311-34); in book 3, Virgil describes at length a plague that wipes out livestock, and after a pathology of all the symptoms and mortality, he exclaims quid labor aut benefacta iuuant? (‘What is the point of toil or hard work?’, 3.525, essentially a classical anticipation of Shakespeare’s ‘Who would fardels bear?’ in ‘To be or not to be’). Orpheus also learns the hard way that good work can be undone in an instant, thanks to a moment of love-fuelled retrospection, when he glances back at Eurydice (4.490-3):

restitit Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa

immemor heu! uictusque animi respexit. ibi omnis

effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni

foedera.

‘He stopped and without thinking looked back at his Eurydice, just as she was coming into the light, and was defeated in his purpose. At that moment all his hard work was void, and the agreement of the pitiless king (Hades) was broken.’

The theme of labour is patent in Hamnet. A frustrated and sleepless Shakespeare exclaims ‘I need to work! All is well. I just need to work.’ Granted, the work here is dramaturgy and not manual labour, but the importance of labour echoes in the idea that Shakespeare’s distress is soothed by discipline. In the next scene, Bartholomew, Agnes’ brother, disapproves of Shakespeare’s and Agnes’ solution to his ennui that he go to London to seek his fortune, saying ‘What he needs is proper work! A man needs proper work.’

Nature’s caprice and nourishment are also thematically prominent. Agnes’ connection to the natural world is so strong that she goes to the woods to have her first child by the roots of a tree. She is supposedly the daughter of a witch and knows all the healing qualities of plants and herbs. Yet, Hamnet is killed by a merciless plague that his mother, despite her knowledge of natural medicines, cannot cure. When this plague is first introduced, it distresses the bees in Agnes’ orchard, a neat combination of different Virgilian strands. Her bees swarm aggressively and, when Bartholomew asks her what has upset them, she says ‘The weather, a change in air perhaps. Better tell Joan to keep the children inside.’

Despite our pain, we keep living, alleviating our suffering however we can; one of Virgil’s solutions is poetry, song and art. In a beautiful passage of Georgics 1, Virgil describes a husband and wife at home during a winter evening.

multa adeo gelida melius se nocte dedere

aut cum sole nouo terras inrorat Eous.

nocte leues melius stipulae, nocte arida prata

tondentur, noctes lentus non deficit umor.

et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignis

peruigilat ferroque faces inspicat acuto.

interea longum cantu solata laborem

arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas,

aut dulcis musti Volcano decoquit umorem

et foliis undam trepidi despumat aeni.

‘Many things, too, go better in the cool night, or when, at first light, Dawn wets the Earth with dew. Slender stalks are best cut at night, and dry meadows, at night there’s no lack of lingering moisture. One stays awake by the late blaze of a winter fire, and sharpens torches with a keen knife, while his wife solaces herself with singing over her endless labour, running the noisy shuttle through the warp, or boiling down the sweet juice of undiluted wine, on the fire, while skimming the cauldron’s boiling liquid with a leaf.’ (1.287-96)

The consolatory power of song, and therefore poetry and art, is gently applied here to the wife’s working song while she weaves and cooks, but has wider ramifications within the Georgics. It points to Orpheus’ later dirges once Eurydice is dead, weeping to himself and singing his tale, much like a nightingale:

septem illum totos perhibent ex ordine menses

rupe sub aëria deserti ad Strymonis undam

flesse sibi et gelidis haec euoluisse sub antris

mulcentem tigres et agentem carmine quercus;

qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra

amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator

observans nido implumes detraxit; at illa

flet noctem ramoque sedens miserabile carmen

integrat et maestis late loca questibus implet.

‘They say that for seven months, one after the other, he wept to himself under a lofty cliff beside the waters of desolate Strymon and in the depths of icy caves unfolded this song, soothing tigers and marshalling oak-trees with his poetry.’ (4.507-15).

This view of art as redemptive consolation underpins the climax of Hamnet. Agnes attends a performance of Hamlet, where she watches her husband play the Ghost, as many scholars argue Shakespeare himself did. The Ghost bids farewell to Hamlet, who we are encouraged to see as a stand-in for Hamnet. Later, she has a vision of Hamnet himself disappearing into woods painted on the set. Tears stream down her face. The play does not heal her pain but gives her and the whole audience the space to feel and reflect on it. In this sense it offers what the Georgics offered its readers 2,000 years ago, and what Hamnet offers us today.

The ideas and lessons of the Georgics can be understood in Hamnet without knowing their literary ancestry. They do not need to be appreciated as Virgilian to recognise that they are symbolically meaningful. They are important ideas for us to grapple with to understand what it means to exist as a human being in the natural world. The resonances of Virgil in Hamnet and Shakespeare mean more than merely recognising his importance as an educational and rhetorical model; Virgil’s work, and the classical tradition more broadly, offer us, and offered Renaissance humanists, opportunities to reflect on significant questions about human existence – questions that life forces us to ponder, whether or not we have read the Georgics.