Hamlet by William Shakespeare has been performed many times since the beginning of the 17th century.
French actress Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, in a publicity postcard from the end of the 19th century. Hamlet has been a popular breeches role.
Print of William Pelby playing Hamlet in an 1826 production at Drury Lane.
David Garrick as Hamlet in 1769. The iconographic hand gesture expresses his shock at the first sight of the ghost.
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, was an English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades. With Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, he gained his first paid acting work as a junior member of his cousin Phyllis Neilson-Terry's company in 1922. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), he worked in repertory theatre and in the West End before establishing himself at the Old Vic as an exponent of Shakespeare in 1929–31.
Gielgud as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, 1959
Centre: Marion, Kate and Ellen Terry and, far right, Fred Terry at Ellen's Silver Jubilee matinée, Drury Lane, 12 June 1906. Everyone shown was a member of the Terry family.
Noël Coward with Lilian Braithwaite, his, and later Gielgud's, co-star in The Vortex
The Old Vic (photographed in 2012), where Gielgud honed his skill as a Shakespearean
