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

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Cambridge University Press, 22 Feb 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 329 pages
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.
 

Contents

Section 12
106
Section 13
107
Section 14
117
Section 15
137
Section 16
141
Section 17
150
Section 18
160
Section 19
183

Section 20
184
Section 21
206
Section 22
265

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Page 164 - Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me ; you would seem to know my stops ; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery ; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass : and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe ? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
Page 101 - If it assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape, And bid me hold my peace.
Page 24 - If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this 'within...
Page 35 - Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will speak to thee: I'll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane, O, answer me!
Page 68 - He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, ,to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Page 301 - The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego)— who always regards the self as the essential— and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential.
Page 93 - Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984...
Page 68 - I was at first a little disappointed that my baby was not a man-child, ee^ca^on for the lot of woman is seldom happy, owing principally, I think, to the many serious mistakes which have obtained universal sway in female education.
Page 68 - We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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About the author (2007)

Tony Howard is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Warwick.

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