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. [Illustration: _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-- “Even in England, _Hamlet_ is never played in its entirety. MM. Morand-Schwob have reduced the original thirty-two scenes to fifteen, but they have shown all possible respect for Shakespeare’s masterpiece, and of all translations made for the stage theirs retains most of the colour of the original, which can never be followed sufficiently closely in verse.”