Hamlet’s Dresser: A Memoir

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Description

The true story of a boy whose life was once saved by literature, Hamlet’s Dresser is a portrait of a person made whole by art. Bob Smith’s childhood was once a fragile and lonely one, spent in large part taking good care of his handicapped sister, Carolyn. But at age ten, his local librarian gave him a copy of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and it transformed him. In Bob’s first look at Shakespeare’s penetrating language — “In sooth I know not why I am so sad” — he had found a window through which to view the world. Years later, when the American Shakespeare Festival moved into Stratford and Smith was once hired as Hamlet’s dresser, his life’s passion took shape.
Blending tragedy and comedy, Smith gracefully weaves together his childhood memories with his experiences behind the curtain and teaching the plays. The result is a beautiful, tender, infectious book about the restorative powers of literature and art.
Of what do we write when we write of love? In Bob Smith’s case, it is Shakespeare’s poems and plays. Hamlet’s Dresser braids two strands of his life into a modest, heartbreaking, and soaringly affirmative memoir. A bookish, lonely child, his crush on the Bard’s work became love when, as an alienated teenager, he joined the American Shakespeare Theatre as Hamlet’s dresser. In time he would dress other characters, perform in small roles, turn into a coach and a watcher, and eventually lead senior citizens’ groups in Shakespeare-appreciation courses. But this ecstatic marriage was once haunted by his sad, contorted childhood: an more and more dysfunctional mother, father, and Caroline, his profoundly retarded sister. “Art,” he writes, “generally is a brutal thing, not only a few decoration placed over the truth, but the truth itself.” Smith’s prose is bluntly ineffable: a rundown theatre looks like “Miss Havisham’s bride cake” and the first teacher who didn’t like him was once “Miss Shumaker. It was once right after I stopped pleasing everybody.” The book is thick with short passages from Shakespeare. Placed in perfect context, they leap from the pages, abrupt as panoramic pop-ups. –H. O’Billovich

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