“Fatti monachella”. Ophelia in Nineteenth-Century Opera: the Libretti for Franco Faccio and Ambroise Thomas

Any operatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet could not help but assign the function of prima donna to the hapless Ophelia, a role which also offered a scene of madness destined to become one of opera’s main numbers. This is also the case, of course, with the two most important rewritings of the tragedy in this field, namely Arrigo Boito’s Scapigliatura-inspired Amleto for Franco Faccio (two versions: 1865 and 1871) and Michel Carré and Jules Barbier’s romantic Hamlet for Ambroise Thomas (1868) – two different visions, in which the female protagonist, while retaining to a good extent the character found in Shakespeare’s masterpiece, takes on different weight and nuances. KEYWORDS: Shakespeare; opera; Ophelia; Arrigo Boito; Ambroise Thomas; adaptation