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In 1880, Sarah Bernhardt, whose acting career had already made her something of a superstar, completed a sculpture of the death of Ophelia. Then, six years later in a Paris theater, she fulfilled a long-held ambition of acting the part of Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. These two examples of her extraordinary creativity each made significant contributions to the afterlife of Ophelia and in particular to the cultural icon of the dead or dying Ophelia that is so familiar today. In art, though theater and film may be strongly influenced by art works depicting Ophelia, that afterlife can be virtually independent of Shakespeare, the lifeless or near lifeless body of Ophelia serving as a site of erotic desire and idealized feminine beauty (Rutter 1998, 301-13; Fraser 2000, 245-50, 253-55; Young 2000, 262-67; Romanska 2005b, 496-97).
A number of recent publications and art exhibitions have traced aspects of the ongoing fascination with the Ophelia phenomenon, a fascination that began in the eighteenth century and continues to capture the creative imagination of artists today. During the last few years, the constant reinvention of Shakespeare has extended the long-standing appropriation of the death of Ophelia deep into popular culture. As a result, depictions of Ophelia's last moments are ubiquitous within the twenty-first century world of electronic social-networking sites, video- and photo-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, vlogs, and folksonomies, often collectively referred to as Web 2.0. (Young 2009; Iyengar and Desmet 2012). What follows here will endeavor to show how Bernhardt's celebrity status almost certainly ensured that her two representations of Ophelia made significant contributions to the ongoing reinvention of the construct of Ophelia in both art and stage performance. I begin with Bernhardt's sculpture, but to place the work in as full a context as possible, I offer first a brief account of her work in this medium prior to the completion of Ophelia in 1880, together with some relevant contextual material concerning her seemingly obsessive fascination with death.
Sarah Bernhardt as Sculptor
Bernhardt's interest in sculpture appears to date from about 1869. Following the advice of the sculptor Roland Mathieu-Meusnier (another early influence was Jules Franceschi), who recognized her talent in modeling and urged her to continue, Bernhardt became so caught up in the creation of sculptures...