with a break in the intonation, that clearly said: “Yes, it is words, words, words, and all books and everything else in life and in the whole world is only words, words, words.” This delicate shadow, this adumbration of a hint was instantly seized by the audience from the gallery to the stalls; and the whole house cried: “Bravo! bravo!” It was a fine example of the receptivity, the flair, and the corporate intelligence of a good French audience.
Personally I think her Hamlet was one of the four greatest achievements of her career. I will come to the others later. Excepting Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet, it was the only intelligible Hamlet of our time. One great point of difference between this Hamlet and that of any other actors I have seen is, whereas most Hamlets seem isolated from the rest of the players, as if they were reciting something apart from the play and speaking to the audience, this Hamlet spoke to the other persons of the play, shared their life, their external life, however wide the spiritual gulf might be between them and Hamlet. This Hamlet was in Denmark; not in splendid isolation, on the boards, in order to show how well he could spout Shakespeare’s monologues, or that he was an interesting fellow.
Another point: her Hamlet is the only one I have seen in which there was real continuity, in which one scene seemed to have any connection with the preceding scenes.
She had already shown what she could do in the progression of a single scene by crescendo, diminuendo transition, and modulation, in the dialogue with Ophelia—“Get thee to a nunnery.” The transition between the tenderness of “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” and the brutality of “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough,” was made plausible by Hamlet catching sight of the King and Polonius in the arras—a piece of business recommended, I think, by Coleridge; but the naturalness and the progression of this scene were a marvel; the profound gravity and bitterness with which she spoke the words: “I am myself indifferent honest: but I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious.” One seemed to be overhearing Shakespeare himself in a confessional when she said that speech, and the cynicism of the final words of the scene were whispered and hissed with a withering, blighting bitterness, her voice sinking to a swift whisper, as though all the utterance of the body has been exhausted, and these words were the cry of a broken heart. But an example of what I mean by the continuity of the interpretation is when the play within the play is finished, when Hamlet breaks up the whole entertainment by his startling behaviour. In that scene Sarah Bernhardt was like a tiger; her glance transfixed and pierced through the King, and towards the end of the play within the play she crept across the stage and climbed up on to the high, raised, balconied dais on the right of the stage, from which he was looking on, and stared straight into his face with the accusing, questioning challenge of an avenging angel. But the point I want to make is this: when that scene is over, most players take the interview with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which follows immediately after it, as though nothing had happened. Not so Sarah Bernhardt; during the whole of this interview she played in a manner which let you see that Hamlet was still trembling with excitement from what had happened immediately before; and this not only brought out the irony and the point of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s flat conventionality, but gave the audience the sharp sensation that they were face to face with life itself. So was it throughout her Hamlet; each scene depended on all the others; and the various moods of the Dane succeeded one another, like clouds that chased one another but belonged to one sky, and not like separate slides of a magic lantern.