Shakespeare's Timeless Appeal Endures Through Centuries

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 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."

Arnold is a leading scholar of Shakespeare's theater and early modern English politics and a 2026 recipient of UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award. His research explores how Shakespeare's plays engaged with the institutions of government and the diverse audiences that shaped his career and public reputation. Here, he discusses the film adaptation of Hamnet, the intersection of personal grief and artistic creation, and why Shakespeare is still so popular more than 400 years after his death.

The following conversation includes specific plot points and the conclusion of the film Hamnet.

UC Berkeley News: You teach classes on the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, especially Shakespeare, and about Shakespeare in popular culture. Why do you think we are still so obsessed with Shakespeare?

Oliver Arnold: Shakespeare's plays were produced for a mass audience. They've always belonged to popular culture, both in our time and in his own time. To succeed as a playwright, you had to write plays that would attract everybody. An audience would have included men and women, servants and apprentices, but also aristocrats or even the queen or the king at a court performance. It would have people who were illiterate but also those who knew Latin and English.

One of the things I really appreciate about Hamnet is that it's trying to reckon with the phenomenon that you just described: Why are we, more than 400 years later, still so obsessed? The movie is, at least in part, about the mystery of his creative genius. It is tapping into and trying to provide an answer to that question.

I think it does so in a couple of ways. It both shows him becoming the Shakespeare who could write, and it shows us, in that last scene, just the breathtaking capacity of art to move people and to bring them together.

We'll come back to the last scene. But first, I'm curious: How does Hamnet portray how Shakespeare went from living in a small town in Warwickshire to becoming, many would argue, the most famous playwright in the world? How close is it to what we know about Shakespeare's life?

I think Hamnet's liberties with the historical record are pretty modest. There's no evidence he was a tutor. There's no evidence that he had conflict with his father. In the film, he became Shakespeare because he falls in love with this extraordinarily unusual person, who's also a person of great emotion. Although there's no evidence that she was this kind of witchlike character, a healer, the film uses that element to deepen its exploration of creativity and loss.

I like the part in the film where he says, "I need more," which captures his ambition. Shakespeare was the most worldly person you could imagine. He made huge amounts of money. He was the most successful theatrical entrepreneur of his time. He was a primary shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men - the best theater company in London - and also owned a one-eighth share of the Globe Theatre itself. So he was very worldly, very ambitious for success.

Shakespeare's 11‑year‑old son, whom Hamnet is named after, dies of the bubonic plague. A few years later, in 1600, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, a tragedy about a prince tormented by his father's ghost and trapped between grief and the demand for revenge. Do you think Hamlet was shaped by the death of his son, as it's portrayed in the film?

It seems impossible that one could write a play called Hamlet (the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable during the time period) four years after the death of your own son Hamnet without being haunted in some way by your son's death.

Whether Shakespeare was attracted to the story because it seemed to present the opportunity to write a play about loss, we can't know. But I think what we can know for sure is that it would take a kind of radical compartmentalization to write a play called Hamlet after your son Hamnet died and not think about that.

So we don't know why he wrote it, but it is pivotal. It's the beginning of the great tragic phase of his career.

How so?

It's the time period when Shakespeare is starting to turn from writing mostly history plays and comedies to writing mostly tragedies. Julius Caesar is 1599, then Hamlet is 1600, and then after that it's Othello and King Lear. It's not that we don't get a few comedies - Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure - but after his son's death, it's mostly tragedies.

OK, let's talk about the last scene of Hamnet. Shakespeare's wife Agnes is sitting in the audience at a performance of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre, watching him play the ghost of Hamlet's father. As he speaks the lines from the stage, she realizes how deeply he has been grieving their son - and how he has turned that grief into art she can finally see and feel.

After Hamnet's death, Agnes thinks that her husband isn't grieving sufficiently. But she recognizes that the play Hamlet is the result of grieving, the fulfillment of the wonderful moment when he says, "He can't just have vanished. He must be somewhere." I think the movie shows the astonishment of loss, the absoluteness of it, in a way.

Even so, I don't know if the movie captures how ruthless Shakespeare is when he represents loss and grief. Loss is loss is loss. That something like personhood just stops at death and that there isn't anything left of the person except in your memory - that's a staggering thing to confront audiences with.

One of the most difficult parts about being human is that we really don't know if we can understand death, isn't it? You can't do it.

You can't do it. One of the things I always find astonishing about Shakespeare is that he so often denies his characters the chief consolation that faith, that the state religion in his England, offers, which is: There is a life after this life. And there is a reunion with those you love.

I think Shakespeare's on your side; we can't really reckon death. Often Shakespeare's characters, when they're grieving a lost beloved, don't think, "Oh, well, I'll see them again in heaven." Sometimes they do, but they often don't.

You've been studying and teaching Shakespeare for a few decades now, since you were a Berkeley Ph.D student in English in the '90s. Why do you continue to be fascinated with Shakespeare after all this time?

I think Shakespeare is the smartest writer I know. The integration of so many different ideas, so many different plots, so many different aims, I think is just quite amazing. I think his intellectual interests are remarkable. He's a savvy political thinker. He's an incredible diagnostician of the flaws of every imaginable arrangement - monarchy, republicanism. He's just an extraordinarily penetrating thinker. His plays are philosophical interrogations of everything from the nature of faith, the nature of justice to what constitutes freedom and unfreedom.

I think part of the mystery is how someone could do what Shakespeare did. And it doesn't have to be Shakespeare; it could be Emily Dickinson, any great artist. I think it's in part wanting to find some explanation for something that I think may - I know this sounds corny - just be beyond explanation.

I often think that what is moving to me about a play by Shakespeare is that I'm just in awe of what a human being can do. Great humans are deeply moving. What the species is capable of at its best is profound.

For those who want to deepen their knowledge of Shakespeare, what would you recommend?

I'd encourage them to read Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare High and Low: Character, Audience, Career. Jeff recently retired after a long and distinguished career as a professor of English and Renaissance literature at Berkeley, and this book, written after retirement, is a wonderful advanced introduction to Shakespeare.

This interview has been condensed and edited.