amlet was favored. Today the image has changed again, once again more
masculine. Ophelia continues to be a stumbling block; she is too sappy
for modem women's tastes. Gertrude, especially if she is in on the
murder of her first husband--and I do not quite see how she cannot
be--suits feminists better. Likewise, the role has undergone the
elocution of nineteenth-century England (from Cockney Edmund Kean
to naff Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree), has been declaimed as the
outpourings of a sensitive soul by Sir John Gielgud, intoned by
Maurice Evans (whom Stella Adler described as the "leading cantor
of Shakespeare" in his day but who botched it up for a GI Hamlet),
played as Oedipal fixation by Lord Olivier (Gielgud praised him but
said that "it is still my part"), presented as youthful
