134. Good night, sweet princess…

The legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt once played Hamlet. This is new information to me, which I learned while doing a small project about her for my Oscar Wilde senior seminar.

Nowadays, we wouldn’t even blink if a woman were playing Hamlet. Women are frequently cast in male roles, since there are so many women in theatre (how funny is it that back in the day, women weren’t even allowed to be on stage, and today we have to duke it out for the roles available to us since we come to auditions in droves?), and the cross-gender casting is quite normal for plays by Shakespeare. We had a female Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, and the role of Egeus is frequently turned into Hermia’s mother instead. I have seen a female Sebastian in Twelfth Night as a result of the five-actor convention, and I myself am planning to take on the role of Horatio just as soon as Adam and I can figure out how the heck to get our own production of Hamlet off the ground and on the stage.

But it was 1899 when Sarah Bernhardt took on one of the most difficult and iconic roles that has ever been put upon the stage. Though plenty of women had played men before, and surely at least a handful had played Hamlet, none had reached the level of acclaim that Bernhardt had when she took on the role. I can’t imagine the pressure!

Check out this fantastic photo of her in her Hamlet garb:

To see her in action, here is a clip of “Le Duel d’Hamlet”: