There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there were moments of leaden lapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in her elocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit.  Her voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strong emotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman.  At times her movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drolly womanish, especially those of the whole person.  Her quickened pace was a woman’s nervous little run, and not a man’s swift stride; and to give herself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman’s high heels to her shoes, and she could not help tilting on them.

In the scene with the queen after the play, most English and American Hamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of two brothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but Mme. Bernhardt’s preferred full-length, life-size family portraits.  The dead king’s effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the scene-painter’s art, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to it in the wall at the right moment.  She achieved a novelty by this treatment of the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone she took with the wretched queen.  Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but though it could be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the part of a good daughter to give it her?

One should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had become impossible to think at all of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet as a man, if it ever had been possible.  She had traversed the bounds which tradition as well as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which an actress may personate a man.  This condition is that there shall be always a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know all the time that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herself such before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a man only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it.  Shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in men’s roles, which, as women’s roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be more naturally managed then than now.  But when it came to the eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have been confused if not weakened.  If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity of doing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in men’s roles.  These characters are, of course, “lighter motions bounded in a shallower brain” than the creation she aimed at; but she could at least have made much of them, and she does not make much of Hamlet.

III.