Product Description

The true story of a boy whose life was saved by literature, Hamlet's Dresser is a portrait of a person made whole by art. Bob Smith's childhood was a fragile and lonely one, spent largely caring for 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 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 backstage and teaching the plays. The result is a gorgeous, tender, infectious book about the restorative powers of literature and art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193501 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-28
• Released on: 2003-01-28
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .60 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
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, become a coach and a watcher, and eventually lead senior citizens' groups in Shakespeare-appreciation courses. But this ecstatic marriage was haunted by his sad, contorted childhood: an increasingly dysfunctional mother, a distant father, and Caroline, his profoundly retarded sister. "Art," he writes, "can be a brutal thing, not just some 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 "Miss Shumaker. It was 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

From Publishers Weekly
In this intimate, inspiring account, Smith concludes that words and ideas possess the ability to heal and transform a life no matter how dire and painful the circumstances, using his own difficult childhood and productive adulthood as proof. Here, the literary balm is the work of Shakespeare. The book opens with the death of one of the members of a group of seniors who gathered regularly in Manhattan to read the Bard's plays with Smith as their leader. Smith immediately shows his literary skill as he captures the humanity of his students. That sensitivity serves him well when he writes of his dysfunctional family (a traumatized mother, a distracted father and a disabled sister), revealing their shortcomings with clarity while seeking to understand his place in their lives and in the world. Smith adroitly assumes the role of observer and chronicler during his wry recollections of his topsy-turvy youth, while also examining how families can harm children emotionally with well-intended half-truths and neglect, as relatives make him feel he's somehow responsible for his sister's handicaps. Some of the most painful passages come during the unraveling of his mother's health while his father is at war, burdening young Smith further in caring for his increasingly troubled sister. Whether Smith is describing his alcoholic aunt, his spiteful grandmother or his aging students, his ability to juggle humor and pain never fails. Throughout this triumphant book, the shadow of Shakespeare looms, and Smith finds meaning in the plays to redeem his daily existence, eventually becoming Hamlet's dresser at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where he delights in the workings of theater and meeting Katharine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy and others. Veteran memoir readers will find this book absorbing, refreshing and touching.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Like the petals of daisies and long purples the maddeningly aggrieved Ophelia tore and shaped into a garland before she drowned, Smith's memoir tenderly breaks your heart into pieces and, with the sagacious insight derived from a lifetime of Shakespearean study and familial suffering, weaves it into a resplendent crown of joy. Smith grew up in Stratford, CT, and came of age during the 1950s. The two defining leitmotifs of his life, life with his profoundly retarded sister, Carolyn, and his head-over-heels love of Shakespeare that began when he discovered The Merchant of Venice in the fifth grade, constitute the material of this beautiful, sad, and wonderful story. The narrative gracefully oscillates between past and present, juxtaposing family stories and dynamics with teaching Shakespeare to the elderly in New York City. These observations are joined seamlessly with dead-on passages from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, with which Smith exhibits a preternatural familiarity. When he was a teenager, Smith became a dresser for the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, and his anecdotal tales of theater legends like John Houseman, Morris Carnovsky, Katharine Hepburn, and Bert Lahr are priceless. Smith is the teacher we all should have had to introduce us to Shakespeare. Fortunately, he has given us this bejeweled book. Recommended for all libraries.Barry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.