Ophelia and Gertrude are the chief female characters in Hamlet but many female actors have taken on the lead role itself including Asta Nielsen, Frances de la Tour and Maxine Peake
Main image: Cush Jumbo as Hamlet. Photograph: Dean Chalkley/Young Vic
Wed 29 May 2019 04.47 EDT First published on Fri 26 Sep 2014 02.00 EDT
The 18th-century actor Charlotte Charke played many male characters including Shakespeare’s troubled Prince of Denmark.
The French actor and theatre manager Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet on stage in Paris and London in 1899, and then in a 1900 film. She was the first female actor to play the part on film.
The Danish star Asta Nielsen also played Hamlet on screen. The silent film, made in Germany in 1920, was a box-office hit. Nielsen’s Hamlet was portrayed as a woman raised as a boy.
Frances de la Tour played Hamlet in a promenade production at the Half Moon theatre, London in 1979. ‘She is tough, abrasive, virile and impassioned,’ wrote Michael Billington of a production full of ‘bruising intimacy’.
Ruth Mitchell played Hamlet in The Roaring Girls Hamlet at the Warehouse theatre in Croydon in 1992. ‘Yes, the actors are all female,’ wrote Ian Shuttleworth in City Limits. ‘Yes, some of them play male parts in breeches and others in skirts (with no discernible basis for the differentiation). Big deal.’
Angela Winkler played Hamlet at the Edinburgh festival in 2000. ‘Winkler makes no obvious attempt to impersonate a man,’ wrote Michael Billington. ‘She does not adopt a surface maleness; instead she absorbs Hamlet’s emotions into her own personality.’
Maxine Peake won rave reviews as Hamlet at the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester in 2014. ‘She is a stripling prince, almost pre-sexual, who glides, without swagger and without girlishness,’ wrote Susannah Clapp.
Ruth Negga as Hamlet directed by Yaël Farber at Dublin theatre festival in 2018, with Owen Roe as Claudius. ‘Everything about this production feels freshly imagined,’ wrote Michael Billington
Tessa Parr as Hamlet at Leeds Playhouse in 2019. ‘Hamlet is allowed to be fully female,’ wrote Catherine Love. ‘There is no suggestion that Tessa Parr is playing the part of a man, and nor does her performance suggest the kind of androgyny embraced by Maxine Peake in the same role’
Cush Jumbo will play Hamlet at London’s Young Vic in 2020. ‘Shakespeare wrote no other male character like Hamlet,’ she says. ‘He wrote “a new man” and I think today we are still questioning what it is to be that man, to be any man in fact.’
