This Week in Literary History: Shakespeare’s Hamlet Makes Its Silver Screen Debut—with Sarah Bernhardt in the Title Role

Click here to read this email in your browser.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet makes its silver screen debut—with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role.

As Mark Twain famously said, “There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses, and Sarah Bernhardt.” 

The French actress was certainly a force to be reckoned with. In 1899, she took over the Théâtre de Ville in Paris and renamed it the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, which is, as one Lit Hub editor once put it, “basically cell phone providers in the early ’00s levels of confidence.” That same year, she premiered a new production of Hamlet, with herself in the title role—a production that she would eventually also take on tour. Critics were divided—not only was she a woman, but she was a woman in her mid-fifties!—but audiences were largely enthralled, and if nothing else, the performance is now legendary. 

Bernhardt may not have been the first female Hamlet—that was probably 18th-century actor Charlotte Charke—but she was the very first to play the Prince of Denmark (a bro who didn’t even like sex, mind you) on screen. On October 1, 1900, the audience of the Paris Exposition (also known as the Exposition Universelle) was treated to Le Duel d’Hamlet, the very first known film adaptation of Hamlet—albeit one that is only a minute and a half long, comprising a single scene: the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. The short was filmed only a year after Bernhardt first played the role; in it, she is 56. “She’s somber, quick, natural—easily expert with her sword and clearly used to dueling,” Robert Gottlieb wrote in a biography of the actress. “There’s nothing campy or feminine about her; she’s manly and she’s coolly resolved. This isn’t an exhibition of virtuoso acting—it’s modest, in fact. But it’s certainly a vindication of her right to perform the greatest of male roles, and a welcome clue as to how she pulled it off.” Indeed. Luckily, we have even more female Hamlets in our future. 

For now, watch it for yourself:

Yep, it’s even more iconic than Schawzenegger’s Hamlet. 

SPONSORED BY THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE

The Baillie Gifford Prize rewards excellence in non-fiction writing, bringing the best in intelligent reflection on the world to new readers. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. Check out the 2021 longlist now!

ON ACTING

“Once the curtain is raised, the actor ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third. And to this end the actor must forget his personality and throw aside his joys and sorrows. He must present the public with the reality of a being who for him is only a fiction. With his own eyes, he must shed the tears of the other. With his own voice, he must groan the anguish of the other. His own heart beats as if it would burst, for it is the other’s heart that beats in his heart. And when he retires from a tragic or dramatic scene, if he has properly rendered his character, he must be panting and exhausted.”

In other (old)

news this week

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road is published (September 26, 2006) • Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes a sketch of Alfred Tennyson as he reads from his new book Maud, and Other Poems at a party at Robert and Elizabeth Browning’s house in London (September 27, 1855) • Franz Kafka’s short story “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” is published in the Prague newspaper Bohemia (September 29, 1909) • Marian Evans, who will later go by George Eliot, puts her totally normal hands to work as an assistant editor of the Westminster Review (September 29, 1851) • The first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is published (September 30, 1868) • The first installment of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is published (October 1, 1856) • Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is published (October 1, 1867) • Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit is published (October 2, 1902) • Charles M. Schulz’s countercultural masterpiece Peanuts debuts (October 2, 1950) • The Twilight Zone premieres on CBS, introducing the non-reading masses to the work of Richard Matheson (but not Ray, or not exactly) (October 2, 1959)

THE 50 GREATEST APOCALYPSE NOVELS

A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF MURAKAMI NOVELS, WITH MURAKAMI HIMSELF

HOW KURT COBAIN’S FAVORITE NOVEL MADE ITS WAY ONTO NIRVANA’S FINAL ALBUM

“I don’t write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.”

–AUGUST WILSON

Died this week in 2005

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

–ELIE WIESEL

Born this week in 1928

Copyright © 2021 Literary Hub. All rights reserved.

Unsubscribe | Manage Preferences