The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet is that it does violence to an ideal.  Literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine types that we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeing Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from the fancy that the Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with crises of mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady.  Hamlet is in nothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himself unequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them.  If we could suppose him a woman as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved his perplexities with the delightful precipitation of his putative sex.  As the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that case would have had to be a wicked aunt, wedded to Hamlet’s father hard upon the murder of her mother, she would have made short work of her vengeance.  No fine scruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment’s question whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out with her bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it through her aunt’s breast.

To be sure, there would then have been no play of “Hamlet,” as we have it; but a Hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine Hamlet, Mme. Bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully.  It is in attempting a masculine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates an ideal.  It is not thinkable.  After you have seen it done, you say, as Mr. Clemens is said to have said of bicycling:  “Yes, I have seen it, but it’s impossible.  It doesn’t stand to reason.”

Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonable in the work of an artist is inartistic.  By the time I had reached these bold conclusions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, and to declare that in a true civilization such a thing as that Hamlet would be forbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to something precious and sacred.

In the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals in the arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves to judgment when they violate them.  After Mme. Bernhardt was perversely willing to attempt the part of Hamlet, the question whether she did it well or not was of slight consequence.  She had already made her failure in wishing to play the part.  Her wish impugned her greatness as an artist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as the assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor.  There is an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader.  I can note merely that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginary actions to figure as men than for men to figure as women.  In the theatre we have conjectured