ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the representation of the actress and states of madness in nineteenth-century fiction and stories of real-life actresses. It shows how the character of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet became a means of working through ideas about nerves, emotion and on and off-stage selves in stories of actresses undone by lost love or the demands of their profession. In the 1890s, Mrs Patrick Campbell offered a more challenging interpretation of mental illness and its treatment when she played a starkly depressed Ophelia, shocking audiences and inspiring critics. I examine the innovation of Campbell’s reading and show how it can be interpreted as a response to the actress’s own recent ‘nervous breakdown’ and, more significantly, her treatment in a psychiatric asylum, treatment Campbell figured as more unsettling than the illness it was designed to cure.
