Autobiographical Elements in Elizabeth Robins\u27 Review of Sarah Bernhardt\u27s Hamlet

This paper analyzes the review that the American actress in London, Elizabeth Robins, published in 1900 in response to seeing Bernhardt\u27s Hamlet. I will demonstrate how the essay reveals significant information about Robins\u27 career on the American stage, for she felt compelled to compare Bernhardt\u27s performance with details from Edmund Booth\u27s Hamlet, which Robins so very vividly remembered because she had such direct contact with his performances. Booth\u27s Hamlet, as Robins reveals in an unpublished autobiographical novel, was the inspiration and salvation for the young Robins. When she first earned her way into the bill-posters\u27 seats, at the top of the gallery to experience Booth\u27s Hamlet, she was struggling to justify the poverty she endured before she got her first stage role. Later, she performed in Booth\u27s productions, most regularly during his co-productions with the Boston Museum Theatre in the early 1880s and in his tour with Lawrence Barrett in 1887-1888. Unlike Bernhardt who acted into her later years, Robins--who had electrified London audiences with her performances of Ibsen\u27s Hedda Gabler and Hilda in The Master Builder--gradually gave up her career on the stage in order to write and eventually to lobby for women\u27s suffrage. Her unpublished stage fiction is a neglected aspect of her reputation. I elaborate upon the works only touched upon in my biography of Robins (Elizabeth Robins, 1862-1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist, University of Alabama Press, 1994). Robins\u27 fiction of stage life, especially her 1892 novella in which a leading British playwright searches for a performer with the talent of a younger Sarah Bernhardt, is a key to understanding both her relationship to the theatre and her emerging feminism. Life as the creator of Ibsen\u27s heroines did not fully satiate Robins\u27 talent. She not only has deep recall of Booth\u27s Hamlet and makes important contrasts; she hints at why acting is limiting to her own ambitions