Words by Daphne Chouliaraki Milner
photographs by Chloé Zhao, Agata Grzybowska, and Jessie Buckley
Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream is the visual companion that emerged alongside Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao’s new film, Hamnet, a fictionalized retelling of William Shakespeare’s family tragedy—the death of their son—through the eyes of Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes. The book brings together Agata Grzybowska’s haunting photographs, Jessie Buckley’s lyrical writing, and outlines much of the imaginative groundwork that shaped Zhao’s adaptation.
Created during the making of the film, which premiered earlier this week on November 26, Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream grew out of the shared rituals among the three collaborators. The book develops its own style of storytelling, moving between concrete scenes and abstracted, impressionistic material that inspired the film’s aesthetic universe. The result is a restrained reinterpretation of Hamnet’s story, the boy who has long been viewed as an influential but little-documented part of Shakespeare’s biography.
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Inside the Visual World That Informed Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’
Inside the Visual World That Informed Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’
