“Remember Me”: The Afterlife of Hamlet's Myth in Hamnet

This paper reads Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet as a contemporary reconfiguration of Hamlet as a myth, arguing that the novel transforms the historically undocumented loss of Shakespeare’s only male son into a narrative of universal and transhistorical resonance. While Shakespeare’s Hamlet has traditionally been approached through biographical criticism (Ackroyd 2005; Bloom 2003; Bevington 2010; Bate 2011), this study proposes a shift towards a mythopoetic framework in which absence, grief, and memory are articulated as recurring narrative structures rather than as recoverable historical facts. Considering the lack of reliable material surrounding William Shakespeare’s domestic life, the paper explores how O’Farrell’s novel—previously established as a critical-biographical reinterpretation of Hamlet (García Santos 2023)— occupies this epistemological gap, reimagining Hamnet as both a historical subject and a mythic construct. In this sense, following Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction (1988), Hamnet functions as a fictionalisation of the past that simultaneously constructs and interrogates its own narrative authority, while reactivating the myth of the lost child as a source of narrative and symbolic continuity. Through a comparative reading of both texts and in dialogue with Chloé Zhao’s 2025 adaptation, the paper explores motifs of spectrality and remembrance as a way of “acting-out” and “working-through” (LaCapra 2001) grief. In conclusion, it argues that Hamnet reframes Hamlet as a literary myth through which individual grief becomes a culturally enduring narrative.