“Happy reading!” scribbled your Book Review Editor, when she sent me these three books to review. She had her wish, for I greatly enjoyed reading all of them. But they are very different. Tony Howard's Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction is the most obviously aimed at a Theatre Survey audience; Margreta de Grazia's “Hamlet” without Hamlet is a closely argued, text-based reading of the play; while Marvin W. Hunt's Looking for Hamlet is an introduction to the play's reception, designed for the intelligent general reader. What they all have in common is, at least in respect of their titles, a concern for the nature of Hamlet's central character.

While his title, Looking for Hamlet, seems to allude to a modern film, Hunt's eloquently chronicled personal quest for what he ultimately concludes is himself involves an examination of words on the page rather than performances on the stage or screen. At first, this appears not to be the case: in an early chapter on the three earliest printed texts, he concludes that “the Hamlet we read and see today is an artificial construct, something quite different from what was performed by Shakespeare's acting company,” and he shows interest in the 1603 First Quarto as being “the closest version we have to the play as it was performed in Shakespeare's age” (41). He calls it a touring Hamlet, “streamlined so that it could be performed by a minimal touring cast” (35). This last statement seems to imply that the other two texts require more actors, but, in fact, recent doubling analyses have demonstrated that they don't.

Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that Hunt's real interest is in the 1604/5 Second Quarto, which “refocuses Hamlet as a figure of immense psychological complexity” (56–7) and, above all, in the 1623 Folio text, which goes on to “enrich and deepen Hamlet's complex interiority” (57). It is there, in the Folio, that Hunt finds “a radical new belief—or fear: that what goes on inside our heads is what is ultimately real” (8). It makes Hamlet “the single most important work in constructing who we are, especially how we understand our psychological, intellectual and emotional beings” (7–8). The play enacts a radical internalization of reality and “the resulting sense of a palpable interiority has reflected and shaped the intellectual history of the West” (7). Indeed, Descartes's Cogito ergo sum “is quite clearly prefigured in Hamlet's remark to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the Folio's Act 2 scene 2 that ‘there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so’” (178).

Even if this were an accurate quotation (it isn't, although he does get it right elsewhere), it is hard to see how it relates to Descartes; but Hunt's emphasis on interiority is nicely complemented by de Grazia's wish to forget, at least momentarily, that aspect of the play which she regards as providing a restrictively modern way of reading it. She explains her rather misleading title, “Hamlet” without Hamlet, thus: “The Hamlet this book would do without is the modern Hamlet, the one distinguished by an inner being so transcendent that it barely comes into contact with the play from which it emerges” (1).

She goes on to argue—carefully, subtly, forcefully—not just that Hamlet's deep and complex inwardness was not perceived as the play's salient feature until around 1800 (with which Hunt would agree) but that if we try to ignore the modern obsession with Hamlet's “modernity” and examine scrupulously the plot and the play's language, we can recover a play that is conceived as history as much as tragedy (all five early quartos call it a Tragicall Historie), and which is very much about the ownership and conquest of land. She reads the central character's behavior as being largely determined by the plain fact that his uncle and his mother have conspired to dispossess him of his property, and goes on to argue that Hamlet's delay, like his mad antics, is a function of the plot, and only became seen as ‘psychological’ once Coleridge began to use the term to describe Shakespeare's insight into character and Hamlet became associated with things modern. “By definition the ‘modern’ must always look new, up-to-date, or better yet, a bit ahead of its time, and Hamlet—once severed from plot and internally configured—remains open indefinitely to future modernization” (22).

De Grazia uses her knowledge of stagecraft to strengthen her arguments, particularly in her discussion of Hamlet as Clown and Vice: “psychology de-theatricalizes Hamlet's stunts, converting his pranks to symptoms” (196). She combats the modern emphasis on Hamlet's self-absorption with a telling observation that Hamlet's “Now I am alone” means not “Now no one is looking or listening” but rather “Now I have the audience's undivided attention, all eyes and ears are on me.” This goes too far, but is a useful corrective. Occasionally she undermines her own arguments, as when her own line reference contradicts the claim that “Hamlet begins with the command to revenge (‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder,’ 1.5.25)” (196). She is at her most brilliant and absorbing when she digs deeper into the play's verbal texture to unearth its “worldly preoccupations” (204), but her method is revealing of an interesting feature that all three books have in common. She, like Hunt and Howard, mines both Quartos and the Folio for her material. If, as a means of looking for Hamlet, we are looking for Hamlet, then it is to be found anywhere across all three early texts.

In Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction, Tony Howard argues that the First Quarto gives more scope to the woman's voice than do the later, conventionally preferred texts, but that they have nevertheless sufficiently “feminised” Hamlet to attract some actresses to the role. William Winter dismissed female Hamlets as absurd and George C. D. Odell called them “necessarily wrong,” but Sarah Bernhardt claimed that acting Hamlet is beyond any man because, by the time he is mature enough to understand the part, he is too old to look physically credible.

The fact is that, since Fanny Furnival first took the part in Dublin in 1741, over two hundred actresses have followed suit. In 1796 Jane Powell became the first female Hamlet in a London theatre (Drury Lane), and the first in America was probably Mrs. Bartley at the Park Theater, New York, in 1819, where female Hamlets became common in the 1820s and 1830s. Charlotte Cushman's 1847 Hamlet was so successful that, for the first time, there was rivalry between an actress and an actor (Edwin Booth) over the part, and Millicent Bandmann-Palmer claimed to have played Hamlet a thousand times. Despite hostile anti-Semitic and Francophobic London reviews, Bernhardt's 1899 Hamlet became legendary—indeed, simply the news that she was going to play it led to a spate of female Hamlets in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Finland, and even Australia. In 1900 she was the first Hamlet to be filmed, and in 1923 Eve Donne was the first Hamlet to be broadcast on radio.

Howard argues that “the histories of the human body and the body politic are inseparable, and the performer who crosses barriers of gender challenges a community's ingrained assumptions about power” (312). His enthralling study of the “subculture” (ix) of female Hamlets unearths sufficient evidence to confirm his assertion that this act of transgression always involves empowerment too. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, mature leading ladies facing the shortage of major leading roles found in Hamlet a particularly attractive opportunity to command the stage. A hundred years later readings of Shakespeare's plays had not only become a means of extending an actress's working life, but Fanny Kemble was also finding in a reading of Hamlet a way of funding various women's organizations, abolitionists, and her own divorce. In the mid-Victorian period, too, performances as Hamlet became associated with suffrage politics, educational reform (a woman playing a university student!), and “a woman's right to experience and express extremes of consciousness” (90). And over many years until at least the 1930s, lesbian actresses such as Felicita von Vestvali and Eva Le Gallienne were drawn to Hamlet as a character in conflict with his society and whose relationship with Horatio offered a model of same-sex friendship.

The Victorians debated whether women should be permitted to play Hamlet, but twentieth-century feminists were not sure they should want to. In 1985 Erika Munk in the Village Voice condemned as reactionary the whole tradition of women playing “a waffling neurotic prone to violent fits” (291) from a misogynist text; for her it was proof of patriarchy's power over the imagination and male producers who took advantage of actresses' frustration.

Faced with the fact that so many of the actresses who have played Hamlet have been entirely forgotten, Howard focuses on retrieving in impressive detail the stories of a handful of key performances from the twentieth century. His ability to both bring to life and sensitively interpret these performances is remarkable, along with a parallel talent for explaining their significance in political and cultural terms. The story of Asta Nielsen's 1920 film of Hamlet has been frequently examined since Howard first wrote of it in Women and Theatre: Occasional Papers 2 in 1994, but his discussion here usefully makes the point that it broke with the female Hamlet tradition in that Nielsen did not subsume her personality and gender in an act of male impersonation.

From the early 1930s onward, he goes on to explain, the Folio's phrase “Denmark's a prison” resonated as never before, and a series of female Hamlets stepped onto the political stage. In 1931, for example, Vsevolod Meyerhold's wife, Zinaida Raikh, acted the part of a Soviet actress who plays Hamlet before being killed in a political rally: this conceit allowed character, actress, playwright (Yuri Olesha), and director (Meyerhold) collaboratively to express subversion in the comparative safety of a piece of classical theatre. The Meyerholds, of course, survived only a few more years before their own violent deaths at the hands of Stalin's agents. Almost as provocative in their own societies were the twenty-five-year-old Nuria Espert, a working-class actress with leftist connections, who offended both propriety and the Franco regime when she cross-dressed as Hamlet in Barcelona in 1960; Fatma Girik who played Lady Hamlet in Metin Erksan's 1976 Turkish film—”the least inhibited of all transgender Hamlets” (211), “a bewildering cross of Shakespeare, the avant-garde, and low-budget exploitation cinema” (210)—and Olwen Foure who, in her 1993 performance in Dublin of Michael Sheridan's play Hamlet's Nightmare, and in the context of the uncovering of child abuse in Ireland, played the prince as a man who feels he was raped by Claudius.

Perhaps Howard's most interesting and moving act of reconstruction is his chapter on the Hamlet played by Teresa Budzisz-Krzyżanowska in Kraków soon after the lifting of Martial Law in 1989. In Andrzej Wajda's production at the Stary Theatre, the forty-seven-year-old actress didn't attempt to mimic masculinity; indeed, she didn't really play the character. Rather, seated at her mirrored dressing table behind the stage, where she could see only the backs of the other characters acting their parts, “she nakedly presented herself moving towards identification with it” (185). The audience of about a hundred was also crammed in backstage with her, and while the play “remorselessly explored the creative isolation of acting” (196), the small audience could hear people in the street outside the window. As for interiority, Budzisz-Krzyżanowska told Howard, “It was impossible to pretend that something separate was happening in here, it had to correspond to the reality outside” (197).