Hamnet's trees

Scholar Jean E. Feerick of John Carroll University looks at how Chloé Zhao’s film of Hamnet takes us back to a premodern world when people knew how deeply nature pervades us, its elemental substances forging and sustaining us. Inspired by Shakespeare’s own eco-sensibility, she writes that the film invites us to recast how we understand our place in the world today.

Chloé Zhao’s award-winning film Hamnet opens with a view from above, gazing down on two towering trees whose girth and mossy roots announce their antiquity. The camera slowly descends like a falling leaf into the realm of “earthly things” (As You Like It, 5.4.113). It is a lurch of perspective. Unlike these majestic trees, whose lives span centuries and whose height denotes an other-worldly status, we humans are bound by our relatively brief lives. Positioned alongside these giants, we appear small, pedestrian, ephemeral.

Zhao’s camera ultimately settles upon the body of Agnes Hathaway, who sleeps within the vast network of roots on the forest floor, curled in a tight fetal position. A vine seems to tether her to this arboreal mother.  From above, we hardly notice her presence among the leaves, ferns, soil, and roots.  She blends in with the scenery, clad in a berry-brown dress. Barefoot and hair flowing, this opening scene embeds her within this forest world. Only when the camera zooms closer do we perceive a separation between her and the natural world. From above, there is only one continuum of life.

The 2025 film, which builds on research by author Maggie O’Farrell (who also co-wrote the screenplay), conveys in exquisite detail an early modern understanding of humanity’s place within nature. It contains a vision that is instructive for those of us living today when nature is often regarded as little more than a repository of resources for us to tap. Zhao has noted in interviews that learning English as a second language made accessing Shakespeare’s work a challenge for her. Yet her film does a superb job of capturing the tissue-thin boundary between human and nonhuman life that is the axis of Shakespeare’s ecology.

Zhao’s arguably Eastern view of nature as an animate, healing force allows her to fully inhabit Shakespeare’s sense of nature. As the film shows, people did not always see themselves as separate from nature. Her film encourages us to step back in time, to a premodern world when people knew how deeply nature pervades us, its elemental substances forging and sustaining us. The film takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s own eco-sensibility and invites us to recast how we understand our place in this world.

Born and raised in the rural area of Warwickshire, a two-day ride by horse or carriage from London, Shakespeare knew his native plants well. He made them a constant touchstone in his works, referring to more than 100 different species of wild plants in his plays and poems. From flowering vines and bushes like woodbine or eglantine, to woodland perennials like the oxlip or cowslip, to weedy sprouts like nettles, fumitory, or darnel, Shakespeare’s plays brim with allusions to the wild plants of his native region.

But apart from the abundance of natural motifs in his plays, Shakespeare’s attunement to the natural world manifests in his tendency to think of people alongside other life forms. In his eyes human morphology resembles that of trees and plants. In one colorful example in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania suggests that green corn, stunted in its growth by bad weather, is evocative of a pre-pubescent male.  Like the youth, the corn lacks a beard, its process of ripening impeded by floods and freezes. Elsewhere Shakespeare reveals he understands emotion as tying us to animal life. In Henry VI, Part 2, King Henry compares a cow’s wailing as its calf is carried off to be slaughtered to his own grief at witnessing his uncle Gloucester’s execution. In the tragedies Shakespeare often foregrounds the earthiness of the human body, viewing passions as weeds or herbs that sprout from our inner soil (Othello). In his hands most every feature of our humanity echoes across or extends from an analogous entity in nature.  We are the world and the world is us.

Zhao’s film has fully internalized this way of thinking, guided by O’Farrell’s focus of the thin line that separates the human from the more-than-human world.  In the novel, an extended chapter accounts for how the plague could arrive in the English midlands. Though there was no knowledge in early modernity of viruses, people intuited that air pervades us deeply, sweeping through our bodies and sometimes delivering death. They also knew that nature provides healing tools, such as herbs, to counter harm. In Hamnet, Agnes and her brother learn the ancient “Nine Herbs Charm” from their mother. The chant celebrates the power of different herbs to ward off evil, whether by alleviating pain or neutralizing poison. Mugwort, prominently featured in the chant, was known to soften the effects of menstrual cramps and to aid in childbirth, making it an appropriate touchstone in a film where death in childbirth is a constant threat. Early modern herbalist John Gerard, whose work O’Farrell consulted for her novel, notes of the herb that “he who hath it about him can be hurt by no poysonsome medicine, nor by any wilde beast, neither yet by the Sune it selfe” (254). A talisman of sorts, it was credited with being able to reverse the effects of the black plague.

Agnes is the figure who most embodies the entanglement of human and nonhuman that anchors Shakespeare’s imagination. O’Farrell fashions her from figures like Ophelia or Perdita, young women who use flowers and herbs as a defense against courtly attacks. Few historical records about the real Anne Hathaway and her mother have survived, so O’Farrell invents when she imagines their strong bond to the natural world, even as she builds on evidence that early modern women often kept physic gardens to minister to their families, such as the ones Agnes tends in the film. Agnes’s mother is given the name Rowan, moreover, which evokes the rowan tree central to Celtic folklore. In Celtic mythology this tree was regarded as the tree of life and as a protection against evil spirits and death.  Moreover, the first woman is said to have been created from this tree. The film pays tribute to these associations by embedding branches or trees with red berries on the set, most notably in the final scene when a rowan-like tree occupies a central position as a prop in Will’s play. If this scene focuses on Agnes’s growing awareness of how her husband’s play has transformed his grief into art, the rowan tree’s associations with rebirth helps symbolize that alchemy.

Shakespeare’s favorite author, Ovid, often represented people, especially women, transforming into trees. In one of the most famous examples he drew from classical mythology, Daphne flees the predatory Apollo and escapes by being transformed into a laurel tree. Shakespeare echoes and adapts Ovid’s mythology in his plays and replicates this alignment of women with trees. In Hamlet, Ophelia’s death, which occurs offstage, is described as occurring after she has climbed and adorned a willow tree, an emblem of sorrow in this era. In Othello, Desdemona sings a willow song just before she is murdered by her husband. Moments prior, finding her asleep, Othello describes her as a rose which he will soon pluck. Before doing so, he pauses to savor her floral scent, saying, as he moves toward her: “I will smell thee on the tree.” The myths Ovid rendered as poetry were often metaphors for loss and trauma, but they could also serve as etiologies for aspects of the natural world. In this regard beautiful young boys like Adonis or Narcissus become, through death, the material from which flowers bloom, including both the anemone and daffodil. O’Farrell extends this view of the world as a continuous thread of life in conveying Hamnet’s death.  Preparing her son’s body for burial, Agnes comes across a “leaf from a plum tree” (224) tangled in his hair. Soon after, when Will arrives and pulls back the shroud to see his deceased son, Hamnet’s face is described as a “blue-white lily-flower” (229).  The implication is clear: he is already metamorphosizing into something more-than-human.

Zhao makes the interpenetration of human and nonhuman realms a key focus of the film’s final scene, which is developed well beyond its original shape in the novel. In interviews, Zhao explained that her intent was to make the Globe theater resemble what it would feel like to be inside a tree. In preparing his set, Will hangs a cloth adorned with a painted forest for the backdrop for the stage. Earlier, the camera captured craftsmen transporting and hewing trees to form the theater’s wooden frame, which Shakespeare described as a “wooden O” (Henry V), a circular structure made of wood like a forest. We also catch  a glimpse of Will preparing his body to perform the Ghost. Notably, he coats his face with earthly materials—clay or lime—making him look like he has come from the earth. In doing so he evokes the “muddy death” that Gertrude associates with Ophelia’s demise. By staging it this way, Zhao foregrounds the continuity of human flesh and earthly soil, inviting us to see ourselves as fully blended with the material of the natural world.

Some might object that in representing nature through his creative flourishes, Will remains at a remove from nature, inhabiting the domain of culture, in ways that anticipate the rupture from nature that defines our modern condition. Such a view, while tempting, would be incorrect. To understand why, we need to know that early moderns spoke of nature as a great artisan. Shakespeare articulates this view in The Winter’s Tale, in a scene about plant grafting, which questions if the human art of blending plants serves to corrupt nature. Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, is disguised in the moment and might be described as having grafted or blended his own body with another’s through his disguise. Notably, he speaks up to defend grafting as “an art / That nature makes” (4.4. 108–109) and commends “great creating nature” (4.4.104). These linkages help us see that when a poet like Will engaged in poetic production, the very act of creating drew him closer to nature. As such, Will’s green worlds and Agnes’s herbal remedies are both creative acts that derive from and imitate nature’s processes.

Their labors in both domains—theater and botany—might also be said to imitate nature in that their labors seek to transform death into life. Agnes’s herbs do so by seeking to reverse illness and extend life. But Will’s play can be seen as another kind of remedy, one that ministers to the heart and soul. Experiencing a major catharsis as she watches Hamlet unfold, Agnes comes to equate his art with a channeling of their shared grief into a collective form of healing. Through the prism of his art, she comes to see that their son is not lost but metamorphosed, memorialized by his father’s imaginative construct and otherwise present in features of the natural world. The spirit of the young Hamnet, who until this point has been wandering aimlessly on the stage of a vacant Globe theater, limbo-like, registers this change by crossing through the forest backdrop and into the hereafter.

Zhao’s film does a marvelous job of capturing Shakespeare’s early modern eco-sensibility. It revives from a dusty and distant past the sensory experience of what it was like to live and behave as if we were fully integrated with nature, saturated by the stuff of the nonhuman world. Shakespeare’s moment better understood how dependent we are on this world. They knew nature gives, and that it takes. They also could intuit that what we do to our world, we also do to ourselves. Zhao invites us to inhabit Shakespeare’s estranging perspective and asks: what would it take for us to repair our own rupture with nature?

About the author

Dr. Jean E. Feerick is Professor of English at John Carroll University, a Jesuit university in Cleveland, where she is the recipient of the 2026 award for distinguished teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences. Feerick teaches courses on Shakespeare and early modern literature at all levels of the curriculum, including recent favorites like Eco-Shakespeare, Renaissance Ecocritical Literature, and Dreamworlds: Utopia Then and Now. She also serves as the manager of bi-annual visits to campus by a troupe of professional English actors known as the Actors From The London Stage (AFTLS), which stages a professional production of a Shakespeare play for the Cleveland community. She is the author of two books, including the monograph Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto, 2010) and an edition collection authored with Vin Nardizzi on The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave, 2012). Her work on pre-modern race, literature and science, and early modern ecocriticism has also appeared in many journals and volumes such as Shakespeare Studies, The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and the Natural World. Her current book project seeks to bring an understanding of Shakespeare’s art to a general audience by blending travel memoir, literary analysis, and consideration of our ecological predicament today. The study explores what Shakespeare’s ideas about humanity’s place within nature might contribute to our efforts to navigate the challenges of climate change.