ABSTRACT
Elaine Showalter identifies a critical tradition that finds Hamlet’s female characters somehow lacking, and opposes against this a “feminist counterview” that seeks to redeem Ophelia as an “emblem of righteousness.” Edward Gordon Craig’s views are interesting in the regard as they blend the literary critical view with the view of a theater practitioner whose own mother had enacted Ophelia. In Craig’s own production, he made concerted efforts to convince his collaborator, the actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky, that Ophelia should not be presented as “beautiful, pure, noble, as is generally done,” but should be “stupid and beautiful at the same time.” The “great actress” in John Boaden mind was Sarah Siddons, who, in 1786, played Ophelia opposite J. P. Kemble’s Drury Lane Hamlet. The distinction between the madnesses of Hamlet and Ophelia is instructive, for it marks out a gendered trend in the discourse of sensibility.
