Book contents
- Shakespeare Survey 79
- Shakespeare Survey
- Shakespeare Survey
- Copyright page
- Editor’s Note
- Contributors
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Tables
- Reformation Memory-Work in Late Shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s Late Plays: The Last Rites of Chivalry
- Inflexions of Lateness in Pericles
- Time’s Queer ‘Recoil’ in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare’s Bohemia and Oyeyemi’s Druhástrana: Gingerbread’s Appropriations of The Winter’s Tale
- Held in Silence: Trauma and the Ethics of Response in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ali Smith’s Summer
- ‘Baseless Fabric’: Prospero’s Other Spirits
- The Figurative Platea: Foolish-Wise Subplotters in The Tempest
- ‘O World, Thy Slippery Turns!’: An Epicurean Coriolanus
- If Biscuits Be the Food of Love: Huntley & Palmers’s Twelfth Night in Little
- Second Thoughts about Othello
- Slow-Motion Rhetoric in Titus Andronicus
- Sensory Shakespeare: Performance Pedagogies and Special Education
- #Shaxrace: Teaching Shakespeare and Race through Performance
- Eco-Shakespeare, Race and Pedagogy: ‘Invasive Species’
- Imitation as a Teaching Technique in The Taming of the Shrew and Erasmus’s Colloquies
- Knowing the Minds of Others: Hamlet and Neurodiversity
- Freetown
- Sexual Shame, Reputation and Early Modern Community Practices: Measure for Measure
- Shakespeare’s Ark: The 1632 Folio
- ‘I Am Set Naked on Your Kingdom’: Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham
- ‘When I Read Shakespeare I Become Greater’: Flaubert’s Shakespeare
- Of Tempests: Shakespeare, Césaire and the choc en retour
- Hamlet, the Opera
- Avignon Shakespeare: Inheriting the Bard in Contemporary France
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2025
- Productions Outside London, 2025
- The Year’s Contribution to Shakespeare Studies
- Abstracts of Articles in Shakespeare Survey 79
- Index
Hamlet, the Opera
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2026
Edited by
Book contents
- Shakespeare Survey 79
- Shakespeare Survey
- Shakespeare Survey
- Copyright page
- Editor’s Note
- Contributors
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Tables
- Reformation Memory-Work in Late Shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s Late Plays: The Last Rites of Chivalry
- Inflexions of Lateness in Pericles
- Time’s Queer ‘Recoil’ in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare’s Bohemia and Oyeyemi’s Druhástrana: Gingerbread’s Appropriations of The Winter’s Tale
- Held in Silence: Trauma and the Ethics of Response in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ali Smith’s Summer
- ‘Baseless Fabric’: Prospero’s Other Spirits
- The Figurative Platea: Foolish-Wise Subplotters in The Tempest
- ‘O World, Thy Slippery Turns!’: An Epicurean Coriolanus
- If Biscuits Be the Food of Love: Huntley & Palmers’s Twelfth Night in Little
- Second Thoughts about Othello
- Slow-Motion Rhetoric in Titus Andronicus
- Sensory Shakespeare: Performance Pedagogies and Special Education
- #Shaxrace: Teaching Shakespeare and Race through Performance
- Eco-Shakespeare, Race and Pedagogy: ‘Invasive Species’
- Imitation as a Teaching Technique in The Taming of the Shrew and Erasmus’s Colloquies
- Knowing the Minds of Others: Hamlet and Neurodiversity
- Freetown
- Sexual Shame, Reputation and Early Modern Community Practices: Measure for Measure
- Shakespeare’s Ark: The 1632 Folio
- ‘I Am Set Naked on Your Kingdom’: Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham
- ‘When I Read Shakespeare I Become Greater’: Flaubert’s Shakespeare
- Of Tempests: Shakespeare, Césaire and the choc en retour
- Hamlet, the Opera
- Avignon Shakespeare: Inheriting the Bard in Contemporary France
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2025
- Productions Outside London, 2025
- The Year’s Contribution to Shakespeare Studies
- Abstracts of Articles in Shakespeare Survey 79
- Index
Summary
Shakespeare’s Hamlet has travelled the world, across genres, languages, periods and media. Its characters have migrated into other plots and poems. Books, articles and courses have traced its travels. One such trajectory begins with the 1827 visit of English actors to Paris. During that visit, Harriet Smithson’s portrayal of Ophelia was such a sensation that it profoundly marked French cultural production throughout the nineteenth century – not only theatre and translation, but also painting, opera, and even seemingly unrelated fields such as psychiatry and medicine. Miss Smithson’s Ophelia inspired Alexandre Dumas (père) and Paul Meurice’s translation into French of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1847) and subsequently the libretto by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier for Ambroise Thomas’s grand opéra Hamlet, which is my focus here.
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- Shakespeare Survey 79Late Shakespeare, pp. 254 - 259Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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