"We are all Hamlet and We are all Ophelia" : Discoveries from a gender non-traditional 'Hamlet'
by Ashley Griffin, Stage Directions
There is no female Hamlet.
Several years ago I was cast as Rosalind in a NY production of As You Like It. I love Shakespeare – I’ve been fortunate to have been exposed to his work from a young age. I made my Shakespeare debut at age eight playing Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I was a child actor in L.A. and was thrilled to have the opportunity to work on Shakespeare productions starting from such a young age.) But I’d been exposed to the Bard long before I performed in one of his works.
Midsummer had been my introduction (even before I was cast in the show) – my mom first read me the story from the Charles and Mary Anne Lamb book Tales From Shakespeare, we then read a kid’s version of the play, then the full play (with a dictionary close by) then either saw a live production or watched a film adaptation. We started with Midsummer and then made our way through the cannon, with the wonderful documentary Looking For Richard providing a brilliant introduction to the Histories.
So I’d been familiar with As You Like It for a long time. I even did a study of the play at my performing arts high school and had used Phoebe’s monologue for my college auditions (and to win the Chapman Shakespeare Competition – a comedy of errors story for another day).
The Shakespeare character I always related to the most was Hamlet.
The character of Hamlet deals with a lot of intense situations, experiences, and emotions but through it all, he actively analyzes, wonders at, and questions the human condition. He has a rich inner life. He thinks too much. He talks too much. He dreams. He is sad – and he can’t reach out to anyone for help but us, the audience. Hamlet is classified as a Tragedy.
In Shakespearean Parlance, a Tragedy is a story in which the main character is brought down by a fatal flaw. Othello is an easy example – the tragedy of a man brought down by his jealousy. Many have said (in large part thanks to Laurence Olivier) that Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who could not act. No offense to Olivier, but I disagree. Hamlet is one of the most active characters in the literary canon (the only thing he hesitates to do is kill his uncle, and that with very good reason.) He is by far the most active character I’ve ever played.
I believe Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who is too human.
When I got to college, once I’d performed the roles and monologues in class most practical for me to work on – studying the characters I would most likely be called in for and the monologues I should be able to pull out for an audition, I was left with extra time to fill. The teacher asked me what I would like to work on.
Hamlet was my immediate reply.
My teacher said that Ophelia’s monologues weren’t the best to use for auditions.
I agreed. But I didn’t want to work on Ophelia (although I love her and would love to play the role). I wanted to work on Hamlet.
“No.”
I was confused. I asked again, and again. Finally, my teacher told me the reason for their denial.
“You’ll never play it, so what’s the point?”
The point was that Hamlet expressed ideas and feelings I hadn’t seen expressed in any character, period, and certainly, any character I was likely to be cast as a 20-year-old girl. And I wanted to express and explore those things. They were in my heart.
“No. You’re a girl. You’ll never play it. So who cares?”
Cut to my being cast as Rosalind in As You Like It.
As You Like It is a fun play. It’s a Comedy A romcom, really. A close relation to my favorite Shakespearian Comedy, Twelfth Night. As You Like It tells the story of Rosalind – a young noblewoman whose father was usurped by her uncle. Though Rosalind has been allowed to stay in court for a time, her uncle eventually begins to distrust her and banishes her. Fleeing with her cousin, and close friend Celia, Rosalind disguises herself as a man and they go to the Forest of Arden where she gets up to all sorts of antics, mainly involving befriending her crush, Orlando and avoiding the advances of a shepherd girl (Phoebe). Eventually, all is put to right, Rosalind marries Orlando, and her father is restored to his throne.
The first thing everyone said to me when they found out I was playing Rosalind was:
“That’s awesome! You know, Rosalind is the female Hamlet…”
Really?
Now, to a degree, I see how that connection can be made. Rosalind speaks an enormous amount (she might have more lines than any other Shakespearian heroine…) she is witty, she is smart…but she is the lead in a romcom. She expounds beautifully on love and relationships but dealing with the human condition she is not.
The truth is there is no “female Hamlet” because there is no female lead of a Shakespearian Tragedy (Lady Macbeth comes the closest, but the show is still Macbeth’s, however important a role his wife plays…she gets the brilliant “Out, out damn spot”…but he’s still the one wondering about “Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow…”). The tragedies are what most interest me. What most excites me as a performer. I’m not really much of a romcom girl, personally… I was over the moon to be playing Rosalind, but the way everyone was talking about it started making me feel like I should just “be happy with what’s there for me” and “leave the deeper stuff to the guys…”
Then, around this time, I happened to encounter three things that had a strong impact on me.
The first was Emma Watson’s speech at the UN announcing her new He For She venture – which encouraged both men and women to dedicate themselves to gender equality, citing that gender inequality affects men just as much as it affects women, just in different ways. You can watch it here:
Emma Watson's “He For She” Speech at the UN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkjW9PZBRfk
The next was an article on a group of people in Albania known as “sworn virgins”. In certain small, patriarchal communities, when there are no male relatives to take care of a family, a woman can choose to live as a “sworn virgin” – dressing as a man, and never marrying, thereby receiving the rights from the community that would normally only be given to a man. These aren’t situations involving transgender individuals, they are cis women living as men so that they can have power and autonomy in their societies.
The third was a conversation with a male friend of mine. I was talking about how much I related to Hamlet, and how sad I was that I would never have the opportunity to explore a character I felt such a strong connection to. He shared that, actually, he felt a strong kinship with Ophelia, more than any other character in Hamlet.
This made me realize, that just as there is no female equivalent of Hamlet, there is no male equivalent of Ophelia – and I was frustrated at the thought that people are barred from exploring ideas, situations, and characters they connect to strongly. Now, there are times when identity (gender, race, etc.) is very important in casting decisions. But I wondered how much Hamlet being a man and Ophelia being a woman was truly important to the story of Hamlet.
So, I reread the play with that in mind.
And what I found, fascinated me. Pretty much all discussion of gender in the play involved gender-critical phrases being forced on characters, rather than those characters commenting on their own gender. And pretty much all discussions of gender play into ways in which gender is weaponized to manipulate, hurt, or control others. Early on Claudius says to Hamlet:
“Tis unmanly grief”
Claudius’s “magic bullet” shuts down Hamlet’s depression. The final upping the stakes of “Hey, Hamlet, stop being so mopey because it’s pissing all of us off and it’s not making the monarchy look good.”
Polonius calls Ophelia a:
“Green girl”
Another way of saying “Stop being such a stupid, weak woman and do what I tell you to do.”
And when I imagined a gender-reversed casting of Hamlet and Ophelia suddenly challenges with the text melted away. There are moments that can’t help but come across as misogynistic in Hamlet no matter how much back-bending the director does. But change the gender of the character saying it and
“Frailty thy name is woman”
Suddenly becomes SELF-directed – “Come on Hamlet, you need to SHUT DOWN all the things you’re feeling because it’s just causing problems.” Hamlet is taking the rhetoric of their society and directing it inwards, blaming their “badness” on the thing their society at large blames. In other words: “If I could just man up…”
Likewise, Ophelia is suddenly a vulnerable man who’s been bullied his whole life for being too sensitive. This becomes especially poignant when looking at how Hamlet mocks Ophelia in the players scene (basically calling Ophelia a “See You Next Tuesday”), and fascinating imagining a man as Ophelia in the mad scene – Ophelia’s “screw it, I’m going to express myself” attitude now potentially with an especially physically dangerous element, as well as a politically and emotionally dangerous one.
I outlined a concept for Hamlet in which Hamlet is a woman who has been raised as a man for succession purposes, Ophelia is a sensitive, bullied young man, and the other “contemporaries” of Hamlet are also gender reversed – Horatio became the only woman in the military and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were the “Queen Bees” of Whittenburg. (Other characters would be cast gender traditional.) This added layers to the storytelling – Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, represented someone outside the problems of Elsinore, someone who was fully integrated in their gender identity – a woman who was comfortable being herself in any circumstance, even a traditionally masculine one. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern represented the kind of woman Hamlet would never be able to be, whether they wanted to or not.
I pitched the concept to the same company that was putting on the As You Like It production I was in, and they loved it. They greenlit the show on the condition that I would direct, and play Hamlet.
That’s another article there…
The rehearsal and production experience of this Hamlet ended up being one of the most special theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. The initial production did so well that we came back the following year and the show is currently in talks to return. We ended up partnering with the He For She campaign, and did outreach to schools, both introducing students to Shakespeare and discussing the unique issues in our production.
The rehearsal process was fascinating. By the very nature of what we were doing we all had to have candid conversations about our experiences both with our own gender identity, and with our understanding of and thoughts about a gender identity opposite to our own – ultimately creating remarkable understanding and empathy. We had to teach each other about how we experienced gender.
My personal journey on the show was perhaps, in some ways, the most complex as I was playing a cis woman who had been forced to live her life as a man and learn to conform to societal expectations. But being a man was not inherent to her identity (though in an incredibly different way from Rosalind who only disguises herself as a man for a short time and isn’t always the best at it). I remember one day while rehearsing a scene I said “I don’t think I’m sitting right. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m sitting like a girl…” the men in the cast lovingly joined me in a discussion where we started analyzing our natural physical expression of basic things like sitting, standing, walking etc. What was unique to us, and what seemed to be similar between those of a certain gender identity. Why were those things similar? I watched the men in my cast break apart their own masculinity – what was inherent to their own identity, what were they discovering had been “put on them”, and ultimately watch them open themselves up to vulnerability all the while being a safe space for each other. When I was working on emotionally combative scenes, others in the company drew my attention to my natural inclination to pull things inwards – not that this is necessarily a “feminine” trait, but the men in the room pointed out that most men’s reaction is to act OUT rather than pull IN. Working against every personal instinct I had, I discovered what it was like to react to vulnerability by physicalizing anger, and putting my energy on the other person. Conversely, there were times when, as the character, I wanted to cry… and I had to repress it, because I knew I “wasn’t allowed” to show that kind of emotion.
Through the lens of this Hamlet I began to realize the myriad of ways gender expression manifests in everyday life – often unnoticed and unseen. When I was dressed as Hamlet – in a suit and tie, beautifully created “boy’s” wig and my chest bound I, personally, felt unattractive, unlike myself. But I felt powerful. People listened to me differently. I didn’t wear makeup for the show which started out being far more terrifying than it should have been, but ultimately felt liberating. I had pockets in all of my clothes. It took me half as long to get ready. I was able to be physically free. I found myself wanting to go on the attack whenever (in the context of a scene) someone questioned my masculinity. And I was secretly a bit jealous of the costumes the other women got to wear, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s freedom to be soft and gentle. At the end of the play, I found myself sword-fighting a man twice my size. I’m a good sword fighter and have had years of combat experience, but I was all too aware of the physical disadvantage I was at (if this had been a real fight) and how the actor had to pull back (it’s rare you would get a full out combat fight between a smaller girl and a larger guy in most other theatrical circumstance than what we were doing).
The men in the cast talked a lot about experiencing bullying they hadn’t realized was bullying. How many times they’d been told to “man up”.
I also thought a lot about an experience I had working on Rosalind and I talked to the Hamlet cast about it. When I did As You Like It, the cast decided to do an acting exercise combined with a cast bonding evening. The company dressed me as a man (wig, binding and all) and we went out to, of all places, a sports bar in Times Square.
I had the most startling experience. Walking down the street I passed by men. I saw how they checked out the women we were with. Then they made eye contact with me, nodded, and kept walking. And I suddenly realized that it was the first time I’d walked down the street since I was a child and wasn’t a little afraid of the men around me. I wasn’t looking around to see where the guys were, if they were looking at me, coming near me, or following me. I hadn’t realized that I was a little afraid every time I left my house. I looked up at the billboards and advertisements and was suddenly SO aware of how, for the first time, they were all aimed at “me” (at least the cis, straight male “me” I was currently pretending to be). There were a million men on the ads for T.V. shows I could imagine myself into. None of them were sexualized. Every woman I saw in an ad was there for my ”enjoyment”.
Every restaurant or bar we walked by had sports on the T.V. I was suddenly in a world that was made for “me”. I wondered what it would be like to walk down the street wearing whatever I wanted to wear and feel safe…to look around at ads and see myself represented in numerous characters…to walk past bars and see something I enjoyed on T.V. (nothing against sports, and not saying they’re not for women, I’m just not the biggest sports person and, stereotypically, they’re thought of as a “masculine” pastime)…
There were a lot of cool things we did within the Hamlet production, including interpretations of characters and moments. The “nunnery” scene, usually my least favorite in the show, became my favorite in this production – we staged it in a very unique way (that’s a dissertation in and of itself). At the end of the show, the ghosts of Hamlet and Ophelia are reunited. Our production was set “five minutes in the future” and we were wearing the same costume – jeans and a white shirt that would be normal apparel for anyone of any gender expression. Hamlet and Ophelia appeared to be a gay couple…or a trans couple…or a trans and cis couple…but in reality they were a straight couple. That moment encapsulated the whole point of the production:
We are all Hamlet, and we are all Ophelia.
We are all sensitive, and we are all strong.
It doesn’t matter what gender either of these roles are. This is a story about human beings.
At performances of Hamlet we met a lot of people who had surprising experiences… there were a lot of men who were crying after the show. They told us “I’m Ophelia…and I never realized…” There were a lot of women who felt empowered – they told us “I’m Hamlet, and I never realized that I could be. That I could have a stake in his story and relate to him so much.” Some people said, “I’ve never had the experience of realizing I could be anyone on that stage.”
We should all be able to tell the stories that are important to us. To articulate what’s in our hearts and souls. I was barred from even exploring the role of Hamlet…I went on to become the first person in history to be nominated for a major award for both playing and directing Hamlet. Never let someone tell you you can’t do something.
And we should all open ourselves up to exploring our identities – cis people have just as much of a relationship to gender as trans or non-binary people. And, if you are cis, there is no one prescribed, binary way that you have to express your identity.
Laura Crone does a great deep dive into the movie She’s the Man (a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night set in a contemporary high school.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y68Fc34aZM
Toward the end of the video, she says this:
“I have had, shall we say, a complicated relationship to my own gender. I definitely went through a long period where I felt like I sort of had to prove I was a girl, to myself and everyone around me, because I didn’t really feel connected to it but it seemed like if I weren’t enough of a girl that would be just one more irreparably weird thing about me and I had too many of those to deal with already. And then I kind of swung back the other way and went through a stage of being an absolutely insufferable NOLOG (Not Like Other Girls), and not just in the performative “pick-me” kind of way, like, in a way that went all the way down to my sense of self… One time I was at a college party and it got shut down by the RA so we were reconvening at an off-campus apartment, and I and a couple of my friends who lived in the dorm a block away stopped by home because, I mean, in my case, because I was wearing four-inch heels which were fine for popping across the street but not for trekking ten blocks uptown, and the one dude friend who was with us was like:
“OK, you’ve got ten minutes, if you’re not back down in the lobby at 10:15 I’m leaving without you.”
And I was like, “What are you talking about, it does not take that long to put on a change of shoes…”
And he was like, “Oh, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to them.”
And I was just like, yes, I did it! He doesn’t think of me as a girl!
And this is when I started learning about gender...That there could be multiple axes like identity and presentation and they didn’t have to align with one another…The possibility that I could be trans, was something that definitely existed for me…and I thought about it in relation to my understanding of myself a lot. I still do, just to kinda check in…But, it’s just never quite felt right…I know who I am….I’m not trans…(But) I know who I am because I have the tools to know that I could be someone else. I might not have actually tried living my life as that person, but I have sincerely questioned if I could be them…and I continue that questioning with a spirit of curiosity and with an open heart and mind and without fear…and that’s something absolutely everyone should have.”
We all have an equal claim on the human condition. It is a part of all of us. The pairing of representation with empathy cannot be overstated. We deserve to see our stories being told. Likewise, we need to be open to the fact that it is possible to see ourselves in stories that don’t obviously relate to or represent us. Don’t let anyone stop you from exploring what is in your heart and soul.