In La Dame aux Camélias.
After Lysiane, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt gave a series of performances of La Dame aux Camélias and La Samaritaine. She then went to London in June on her annual visit, playing Phèdre, Adrienne Lecouvreur, D’Annunzio’s Spring Morning’s Dream. July, August, and September she spent at Belle-Isle-en-Mer. On the 28th October, 1898, she produced M. Mendès’ Médée. It was a dead failure, in spite of all the great tragedienne’s efforts. The unsatisfactory receipts obliged her to fall back on La Dame aux Camélias, of which she gave a few performances before leaving for Italy and the south of France on a tour she had been obliged to postpone a week before.
This brings us to the beginning of the year 1899. The Renaissance theatre had been prospering for five years. In it, as we have seen, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt had successively performed Les Rois, La Dame aux Camélias, Phèdre, Izeïl, Fédora, La Femme de Claude, Gismonda, Magda, Amphitryon, L’Infidèle, La Princesse Lointaine, Lorenzaccio, La Tosca, La Samaritaine, Les Mauvais Bergers, La Ville Morte, Lysiane, and Médée. The plays in which she did not appear were Amants, La Figurante, La Meute, Snobs, and Affranchie. Notwithstanding the success achieved, there was a feeling of restriction. The field of action was too limited. In spite of perfect prodigies of ingenuity, and the unsparing efforts of all Mme. Bernhardt’s co-workers, great spectacular effects were impossible. Many new plays which the great artiste would have wished to produce could not be mounted satisfactorily at the Renaissance, and had to be left to rival theatres. The Théâtre des Nations, vacated by the removal of the Opéra Comique to its new quarters, tempted her, the 1900 Universal Exhibition being at hand. She applied to the Municipal Council for the theatre, and obtained it. She opened on the 21st January with a revival of La Tosca. On the 8th March she reproduced Feuillet’s Dalila, and, on the 25th, Rostand’s Samaritaine, which seems to have taken the place of the Dame aux Camélias as general stand-by.
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance at the Théâtre des Nations marks the commencement of a new era in her artistic career. I have already said that the history of the arts affords no parallel to the life of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, and I maintain that we can only bow with respect before the incomparable expenditure of vital energy which she has lavished throughout thirty years of intense and varied activity.
SARAH BERNHARDT’S ‘HAMLET’
Madame Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance in a new French adaptation of Hamlet took place on Saturday, May 20. Her enterprise was distinctly a bold one. The series of performances would necessarily have to cease after June 6, in consequence of the actress’ engagement to appear in London on the 8th. The play could hardly be expected to prove a success from the purely financial point of view. As one critic remarks, it is impossible to make Hamlet Parisian. Moreover, the production of M. Jean Aicard’s version of Othello at the Comédie Française, a splendidly-mounted and finely-acted play, might fairly be thought to have taken off the edge of the public appetite for Shakespearian revivals in Paris. These considerations, however, did not deter Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. No one could ever accuse her of wanting the courage of her opinions. She made up her mind that Hamlet was a part for her to play, and she played it. She was not the first French actress to make the attempt. Mme. Judith and Mme. Lerou had both played the Prince of Denmark with a fair amount of success, and much curiosity was felt as to Mme. Sarah Bernhardt’s interpretation of the character. She had already given something like a foretaste of Hamlet in Lorenzaccio, and there are one or two weird incidents in her own career. She has been identified as the actress whom Edmond de Goncourt shows us, in Faustine, watching at a death-bed with professional curiosity, and afterwards utilizing the experience on the stage. Be this as it may, there is a touch of Hamlet’s melancholy philosophy about her daily contact with her own coffin.
The Queen, Mlle. Marcya. Hamlet, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt.
The translation of Hamlet has often tempted French literary skill. Dumas and Victor Hugo, each with the assistance of a collaborator, at different times rendered the play in French verse. The adaptation by MM. Samson and Cressonnois, in which Mme. Sarah Bernhardt appeared as Ophelia, was also entirely in verse. Then M. Theodore Reinach translated Shakespeare’s verse into verse and prose into prose. The latest adaptation, carried out by MM. Morand and Schwob for Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, is wholly in prose, and is perhaps the most literal reproduction of the original ever attempted in France. It is so literal that in many cases the English word is used in preference to what might not be a close or satisfactory equivalent in French. Even Victor Hugo’s version, which was accused of being more Shakespearian than Shakespeare, did not go as far as this in the effort for exactitude. As M. Henry Fouquier observes—