Chloé Zhao's drama took home the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Drama at Sunday night's ceremony in LA, and is expected to challenge the likes of Sinners and One Battle After Another for the Oscar statuette when the Academy Awards roll around in March.
It also suggests that arguably Shakespeare's most famous, revered masterpiece of all – Hamlet – was written in response to the tragic death of his son, with the film's opening text explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are actually regarded as two different spellings of the same name.
But how accurate is the film: is this a truthful retelling of historical events or a work of fiction? Read on for everything you need to know.
Rather the film – and Maggie O'Farrell's novel before it – is a speculation that draws on certain historical records to suggest a plausible scenario that might have happened. Such is carried out in the same vein as 1998's Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, albeit operating in a very different register to that altogether more light-hearted film.
O'Farrell makes this all very clear in the afterword to her novel, in which she wrote: "This is a work of fiction, inspired by the short life of a boy who died in Stratford, Warwickshire, in the summer of 1596."
Meanwhile, O'Farrell also pointed out that while many people will know of Shakespeare's wife as Anne Hathaway, she is actually referred to as Agnes in her father's will – and so clearly sometimes went by this name also.
"The Black Death, or 'pestilence', as it would have been known in the late sixteenth century, is not mentioned once by Shakespeare in any of his plays or poetry," she wrote. "I have always wondered about this absence and it's possible significance; this novel is the result of my idle speculation."
How accurate is the portrayal of Agnes Hathaway and William Shakespeare's relationship?
In these early scenes, Agnes is presented as something of an outcast from her family – although she does have a staunch ally in her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn). She is someone who the other locals are suspicious of, owing to her interests in folk medicine and herbal remedies, her pet hawk and various other elemental pleasures.
In truth, little is known for sure about Agnes' life and her marriage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no evidence exists to suggest she had healing powers or the ability to see into the future as is shown in the film, with this aspect of the story being an interesting invention by O'Farrell. Indeed, most of the scenes between the pair are based on imagination rather than fact.
Meanwhile, during an appearance on the Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, she explained: "Why did she marry him? Why did she choose this penniless, wageless 18-year-old? I suppose if that question was asked of it, I thought, ‘Well, maybe she saw something in him. Maybe she looked at him and realised he was extraordinary, that he was a genius, that he was peerless in that sense.
"So I suppose that that’s where this kind of grew from; that maybe she was the one person who could see into his soul and see what he was capable of."
Did William Shakespeare really have an earring?
View Green Video on the source websiteIndeed, in an interview with GQ, the film's costume designer Malgosia Turzanska explained how the earring was more or less "the only thing" she kept from those portraits when creating the look for the character, partly due to the fact that there are actually relatively few renderings of Shakespeare available.
That said, the costume was still fairly accurate to the period, with crowd paintings from the Elizabethan era being used as a source to determine how people dressed on a day-to-day basis, rather than in the more formal clothes they might wear when being painted by a portrait artist.
Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
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