UC Berkeley Professor Oliver Arnold explores the 16th‑century playwright’s enduring appeal and the way ‘Hamnet’ imagines a small‑town son of a glovemaker becoming a global icon.
For centuries, scholars and artists alike have wondered: What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare? What gives his work its strange durability, its emotional force, its endless capacity for reinvention?
We know some things about William Shakespeare. He was born in 1564 in a small market town in England, the son of a glovemaker. We know he married a woman who became an abiding figure in his life, and that he had a son who died young. And we know he went on to become one of the most influential playwrights in the world, the writer behind dozens of canonical stage works that span the breadth of the human condition, from the early, lighthearted comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the late-career tragedies and romances, such as Hamlet and The Tempest.
But the distance between those humble beginnings and his enduring appeal remains hard to explain.
It’s a question that Hamnet — a historical fiction novel by Maggie O’Farrell that was adapted into a 2025 film by Chloé Zhao — attempts to answer. Not in a biographical, “this definitely happened” sense, but in a way that blends history, imagination and emotional truth.
“I actually like the liberties the film took,” says Oliver Arnold, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley and author of The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons. “They seemed to me modest and all in service of exploring how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.”