Women as Hamlet : performance and interpretation in theatre, film and fiction
"The first Hamlet on film was Sarah Bernhardt. 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 books aims to put their half-forgotten achievements centre-stage"--Publisher description
Print Book, English, 2007
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2007
Film adaptations
xi, 329 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780521864664, 0521864666
76064565
Introduction : the drama of questions and the mystery of Hamlet
Playing Hamlet, writing the self
'Is this womanly?'
Virile spirits : Sarah Bernhardt and her inheritance
'I am whom I play' : Asta Nielsen
'Why are you looking at me like that?' : Zinaida Raikh
Behind the arras, through the Wall : Poland 1989
Hamlet from the margins : Spain, Turkey, Ireland
Films and fictions : Hamlet, men's eyes and the ages of woman
Women's voices in the cathedral of culture
Beyond silence, imagination
Includes index