2 Innokenty Smoktunovsky (1964) Brooding, smouldering and exuding a Nureyev-like charisma

3 David Warner (1965) Frail, bedecked with a long scarf and acquired pop-star status as an epitome of 1960s youth

4 Derek Jacobi (1979) Defeated the elements at Kronborg Castle

5 Michael Pennington (1980) Dissected the text with postgraduate vigour

6 Jonathan Pryce (1980) Produced the Ghost’s voice from his innards

7 Stephen Dillane (1994) A sardonic, hawk-eyed joker who stripped to the buff

8 Kenneth Branagh (1996) Full of humour and buoyant athleticism

9 Angela Winkler (2000) The latest in a long line of female Hamlets, played with tenderness

10 Simon Russell Beale (2000) A perfect Hamlet for the age of irony, expressing disgust at the surrounding corruption

It is increasingly common to see women play men. Shakespeare, who wrote for an all-male theatre, offered his boy actors complex and demanding parts as Rosalind, Viola, Juliet or Cleopatra. But sexual politics have now opened the grand male roles to women too and Peake met the challenge with conviction. What many of her audience would not have known without recourse to the programme note was that, although modern women in the role had been relatively 
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uncommon, the tradition of actresses as Hamlet goes back to the late eighteenth century, when Sarah Siddons took the part. Some of the most famous Victorian Hamlets were women. There was then, as now, some resistance, if for slightly different reasons, but the Hamlets of Charlotte Cushman, Alice Marriott and Sarah Bernhardt were highly regarded by most critics.

The part was held to benefit from an injection of femininity. That view evolved from an understanding of the tragedy developed by the Romantics and still in evidence now, if only residually. Meanwhile, a new flexibility in our own understanding of gender roles expands the possibilities for Hamlet. In 2009 Blanca Portillo played the prince in modern dress in Madrid. Her androgynous Hamlet was athletic and vengeful, but torn between masculine and feminine identities. In this experimental production, Portillo delivered ‘To be or not to be’ naked, as she contemplated her own image in the water that formed a crucial part of the design (González 2014: 281). The story of Hamlet’s interpretation unfolds in line with the history of gender relations. Sarah Frankcom’s production of Maxine Peake’s Hamlet has its place in a continuing narrative that has also had implications for the perception of Gertrude and Ophelia, as well as Horatio.