In 1920, a silent film called “Hamlet: The Drama of Vengeance” was directed by Svend Gade, with the Danish actress Asta Nielsen playing the role of the Prince of Denmark. Many women have played Hamlet, going back to the eighteenth century, but in Nielsen’s case, she was playing Hamlet as a woman disguised as a man due to the circumstances of her birth. The idea for playing Hamlet as a woman came from a 19th-century scholar’s claim that Hamlet demonstrates feminine qualities and therefore may have originally been conceived by Shakespeare as a female character. Taking this idea and running with it, Nielsen presents the part with the added complications of a woman pretending to be a man and how that affects Hamlet’s attitude toward other characters. Rather than making the story comic like in other Shakespeare plays in which women dress as men, Nielsen’s performance makes the character even more tragic, as Hamlet must deal not only with her father’s murder, but also with her need to protect her true identity. This silent film and the study that served as part of its basis help to illustrate popular conceptions about gender characteristics and roles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they also demonstrate that changing Hamlet’s gender presents a number of intriguing options regarding the story and the character.
About the presenterAaron B. Butler
Aaron B. Butler is an Assistant Professor of English at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. He earned his B.A. in English and History from Wayne State College of Nebraska, and he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.