Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 2/22/2007
EAN 9780521864664, ISBN10: 0521864666
Hardcover, 342 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
List of illustrations
Preface
1. Introduction
The drama of questions and the mystery of Hamlet
Part I. The Women in Black
2. Playing Hamlet, writing the self
3. 'Is this womanly?'
4. Virile spirits
Sarah Bernhardt and her inheritance
Part II. Case Studies
Hamlet, the Actress and the Political Stage
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
Part III. Repression and Resurgence
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
Index.
'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