Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction

The first Hamlet on film was Sarah Bernhardt. Probably the first Hamlet on radio was Eve Donne. Ever since the late eighteenth century, leading actresses have demanded the right to play the role - Western drama’s greatest symbol of active consciousness and conscience. Their iconoclasm, and Hamlet’s alleged ‘femininity’, have fascinated playwrights, painters, novelists and film-makers from Eugène Delacroix and the Victorian novelist Mary Braddon to Angela Carter and Robert Lepage. Crossing national and media boundaries, this book addresses the history and the shifting iconic status of the female Hamlet in writing and performance. Many of the performers were also involved in radical politics: from Stalinist Russia to Poland under martial law, actresses made Hamlet a symbol of transformation or crisis in the body politic. On stage and film, women reinvented Hamlet from Weimar Germany to the end of the Cold War. This book aims to put their half-forgotten achievements centre-stage.

• Includes an historical survey of the international appearance onstage of the female Hamlet from the mid-eighteenth century to today • Discusses the female Hamlet in relation to politics and popular culture • Documents diverse film genres: silent and sound, avant-garde and commercial

Preface; 1. Introduction: The drama of questions and the mystery of Hamlet; 2. Playing Hamlet, writing the self; 3. ‘Is this womanly?’; 4. Virile spirits: Sarah Bernhardt and her inheritance; 5. ‘I am whom I play’: Asta Nielsen; 6. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’: Zinaida Raikh; 7. Behind the arras, through the Wall: Poland 1989; 8. Hamlet from the margins: Spain, Turkey, Ireland; 9. Films and fictions: Hamlet, men’s eyes and the ages of woman; 10. Women’s voices in the cathedral of culture; 11. Beyond silence, imagination.

Selected as Book of the Season by Shakespeare\'s Globe 2007 - Winner

\'This masterly study is encyclopaedic in its coverage of the history of both theatre and film, extraordinary in the international breadth of its coverage, sophisticated in its treatment of both governmental and sexual politics, and at every point deeply thoughtful and critically engaged.\' Professor Stanley Wells

\'… fascinating study … exciting book …\' Professor Dr Dieter Mehl