Hamlet, thy name is Woman | Sara Clark | TEDxCincinnatiWomen

Women have been playing Hamlet since the 1700s. So why does the choice to cast a female actor in Shakespeare’s largest role still matter today? Sara Clark is an actor, playing Hamlet as a woman at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company in 2020. She talks about how the decision to play the Bard’s most temperamentally capricious and preternaturally intelligent character as a woman can help us imagine a better world. Learn more at: https://cincyshakes.com

Sara Clark is a philomath and a storyteller, who believes wholeheartedly in curiosity, empathy, and the power of words. She is a resident actor, director, producer, teaching artist, and grants administrator with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, currently serving as its Associate Artistic Director. As a fourteen-year member of the CSC Resident Ensemble, she has racked up over 75 productions with CSC, tackling such roles as Rosalind, Juliet, Marc Antony, Elizabeth Bennet, Lady Macbeth, and in the spring of 2020, Hamlet. Sara is a Shakespeare mythbuster and loves teaching with CSC’s Shakespeare Summer Camp and Groundlings Program, a year-long Shakespeare intensive for high school students. She genuinely believes that one person talking to one person is the only thing that will ever change the world.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

When you're an actor

and someone offers you the opportunity
to play the largest role

in the most famous play

by the most popular dramatist
in the English language,

you say yes.

When you're a woman
and someone offers you that chance,

you say, Hell, yes!

(Laughter) (Cheers) (Applause)

And most people you encounter
are cool with that

probably because it's just
not that new of an idea.

Women have been playing Hamlet
since the 1700s,

but the question
you inevitably have to answer

is, Will you choose to play it
as a man or as a woman?

Now, both are valid
and both are interesting,

but there's something
important right now

in playing the character as a woman.

I mean, if you were
to present me with a character

who idolizes their father,

has a complicated relationship
with their mother,

needs to talk through every problem,

(Laughter)

struggles with impostor syndrome,

and takes the bulk
of a 3.5-hour play to do one thing,

I'd guess you were talking about a woman.

(Laughter) (Cheers)

But in searching for a real answer
to that implied question,

"Why does it matter now

to see Hamlet played
by a woman as a woman?"

we first have to go back a bit in time.

In Shakespeare's England,

the very concept
of equality between the sexes

would have been unthinkable
to most people.

England at the dawn of the 17th century
is a world that exists on the binary -

you're noble or you're common,

you're Protestant or you're Catholic,

you're a man or you're a woman.

And in Shakespeare's England,

a woman cannot vote in an election,

her income, her possessions, her property
are all legally her husband's.

She can be chastised
or beaten with impunity by her husband

as long as he does not actually kill her.

And it almost goes without saying
she cannot perform on stage.

So in a world in which
no two men are born equal,

how could we possibly conceive

that a woman might possess
the intelligence or complexity of thought

equal to that of a man?

Yet throughout the latter half
of the century,

a woman occupied the throne of England.

By the time she died in 1604,
Elizabeth I had ruled for over 40 years,

and it is in this world

ruled by a powerful
and rhetorically skilled female monarch

that young William Shakespeare
begins to write plays.

And the beautiful thing
about the Elizabethan theater

is that it is for everyone.

Everybody goes to the theater -

young, old, rich, poor,
noble, common, men, and women.

And young Will Shakespeare is no dummy;

he knows that half his audience
will be comprised of the fairer sex.

And so as he matures as a playwright,

he begins not only to write
some of the most fearless, resolute,

high-spirited and intelligent heroines
in the Western canon

but to continually blur the lines
between the masculine and the feminine,

thereby creating characters -
both male and female -

that refuse to be defined
by their archetype.

They're no longer a king,
a soldier, a lover, a shrew;

they are wonderfully, infuriatingly,
bafflingly, undeniably human.

Fast-forward 400 years.

Multiple waves of feminism
have washed over us:

voting rights, property rights,
reproductive rights,

female sexuality, family dynamics,

workplace inequality,
sexual harassment, intersectionality,

mansplaining, the Bechdel test,
The Female Gaze, MeToo;

and yet if life worked
like the modern American theater,

four out of five things
you would ever heard

would have been spoken by a man.

We tell ourselves
that we live in a modern world,

and we do,

and we don't,

because we still live in a world

in which our language,
our emotions, our professions

and our societal expectations

are gendered.

Despite all our strides forward,

women are still grossly
underrepresented in leadership

across business, technology, politics,
arts, and entertainment.

We might be able to conceive

that a woman could possess
the intelligence or complexity of thought

equal to that of a man,

but our reality doesn't yet
reflect that thinking.

So, how do we move
from conception to reality?

We have to be able to imagine it,

and there is no better place
to exercise our imagination

than in the theater.

In the prologue to Henry V,
Shakespeare implores his audience,

"Let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

For 'tis your thoughts
that now must deck our kings."

So why does it matter now

to see Hamlet played
by a woman as a woman?

It matters for the generation before me,

who for most of their formative years,

a woman could not sit on a jury,
apply for a credit card in her own name,

expect equal pay for equal work,
get an Ivy League education,

or report sexual harassment
in the workplace.

So what might it mean to them
to imagine Hamlet as a woman,

to watch her embark on vigilante justice,

share an alma mater with Martin Luther,

and be both the victim and the aggressor?

It matters for the generation after me,

who for most of their formative years
have lived in a world

where their privacy
is virtually non-existent,

rates of depression and anxiety
have skyrocketed,

and girls in particular feel
enormous pressure to be superhuman -

every opportunity
marred by self-criticism,

overthinking and fear of failure.

So what might it mean to them
to imagine Hamlet as a woman,

to see her walk through a world

where she is kept
under close surveillance,

battle with the extremes
of depression, anxiety and grief,

and spend most of her journey on a path

marked by self-criticism,
overthinking and fear of failure?

It matters because Shakespeare's
female characters are wonderful,

but there just aren't enough of them.

16% of the roles in the whole canon
are written as women.

In Hamlet, the two female characters,
Gertrude and Ophelia together

speak 9% of the play.

It matters because
at a sum total of 1,495 lines,

Hamlet is Shakespeare's
noisiest protagonist,

(Laughter)

and we still live in a world
that struggles to accept noisy women.

It matters that our daughters

can imagine a woman
saying those words

It matters that our sons

can imagine a woman
thinking those thoughts.

It matters that we take the opportunity
to imagine the way the world could be.

Thank you.

(Cheers) (Applause)