ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Ambroise Thomas Hamlet is an important adaptation of William Shakespeare play—perhaps the only one from the nineteenth century that in some ways anticipated some of the twentieth-century readings of the play, while having its own performance tradition that continues to the day. It examines the critical and performance traditions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in France, focusing on the adaptations by Jean-Francois Ducis and Alexandre Dumas- Paul Meurice. The chapter shows how the adapters use Shakespeare’s play as the basis for making reforms in French drama. It explains how the process of intermedial adaptation, from spoken drama to sung drama, affects the structure and content of Thomas’s Hamlet. The chapter focuses on Ophelie’s mad scene from the opera—specifically, its gendering of madness, a subject that Elaine Showalter discusses in her study of representations of Ophelia.
