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Overview
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.
Synopsis
Bob Smith grew up in a town named for Shakespeare's birthplace: Stratford, Connecticut. His troubled childhood was spent in a struggle to help his devastated parents care for his severely retarded sister. But at age ten, Smith stumbled onto a line from The Merchant of Venice: "In sooth I know not why I am so sad." In the language of Shakespeare, he had found a window through which to view the world.
When he was a teenager, the American Shakespeare Festival moved into Stratford and Smith became Hamlet's dresser. As he watched the plays from backstage, his life's passion took shape. "I was a lonely, screwed-up kid, but the circus had come to town," Smith writes. "It had put up its strange tent, and I was being seduced to run away with it." A few years later, he left home to travel with the Shakespeare Festival, and in the decades since, without a college credit to his name, he has taught the plays in universities and acting schools and prisons. For the past several years, he has probed the texts with thousands of the elderly in senior centers all over Manhattan. Here, in gorgeous, tender, and lyrical prose, Smith tells the story of a life shaped by poetry. Melding tragedy and comedy, he gracefully weaves together the stories of his bittersweet childhood, his poignant experiences with the old people, and dozens of illuminating passages and scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Throughout, Bob's sweet, tortured sister plays both the beautiful Ophelia and the ghost to Bob's Hamlet, haunting the book with heartrending power.Hamlet's Dresser is a redemptive memoir of a man made whole by art and an intimate encounter with the plays and sonnets that will make readers fall in love with Shakespeare again or for the first time.
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. (June 4) Forecast: The inspirational element of Smith's triumph over hardship via art and literature, along with his heartfelt writing, should lift sales above those of the myriad similar books on the market. Smith's volunteer and teaching work with seniors and youth, in which he uses Shakespeare's timeless words, will draw readers who love "feel-good" stories. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New WritersThere are times in everyone's life when they need a hand; we all face difficult moments when we reach out to family, friends, or loved ones for support. For Bob Smith, a boy growing up in trying circumstances in Stratford, Connecticut, in the 1940s and '50s, the hand was William Shakespeare's. The legendary playwright (who toiled in a different Stratford entirely) and his plays became a support system for Bob, who -- in addition to the usual obstacles faced by youngsters -- felt somehow responsible for his beloved younger sister Carolyn's mental retardation. Now in his 60s, Smith looks back on his life in Hamlet's Dresser, one of the most beautifully written and unforgettable memoirs in some time.
Smith takes the reader through a variety of different periods in his life: his youth, as his overmatched parents try to deal with their beautiful yet frustratingly difficult daughter (with Carolyn unable to control her bodily functions, brother Bob assumes responsibility as full-time caregiver, despite his youth); adolescence, as Bob's love of Shakespeare's plays leads to a dream job as costume dresser to actors performing with the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford; and the present-day Bob, who spends his time selflessly teaching elderly students to enjoy "the Shakespeare." All of it is presented in a beautifully evocative manner.
But it is Smith's writing about his intense -- and troubled -- relationship with Carolyn that makes the book so emotionally powerful. It's difficult to really understand how hard it must have been for a boy to take care of someone so mentally challenged that she, at one point, literally spent years standing next to the family's refrigerator, unwilling to move or go to sleep. But Bob loves Carolyn, so he does what he can. When it's time for him to leave home to start his own life, a difficult decision must be made about Carolyn's future, and the reader will be riveted to the page.
When he needed help, Bob Smith was, essentially, saved by Shakespeare. It's not hard to imagine that the readers of Hamlet's Dresser might find a savior of sorts in Bob Smith. (Nicholas Sinisi)
From Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Bob Smith's unforgettable memoir reads like a novel. His story slips gracefully through time, moving from his lonely childhood with a severely retarded sister, through an adolescence spent acquiring what would become a lifelong love of Shakespeare, to his present, as a man finding himself through his work with the elderly.
In a disheartening childhood with a distant father and a clingy, terrified mother, Smith vows never to leave his lovely, uncomprehending sister. For years, he is both her caretaker and her companion, until the need to live his own life becomes a pull too strong to resist. Slowly, Smith drifts away from his family and into a theatrical world inhabited by actors and extras who, like him, are sustained by the wonder of language. But when he finally leaves his sister for good, Smith experiences an emptiness that he finds mirrored in the Shakespearean tragedies, a melancholy that continues to haunt him. Ultimately, it is through sharing his passion for Shakespeare with others that Smith begins to find healing and redemption.
For all of its darkness, Hamlet's Dresser is a story imbued with hope. Smith shares priceless memories of some of Hollywood's grandest luminaries, as well as moments of heartbreaking beauty and clarity among the "old people" who have touched his soul. Perhaps, with the telling of his story, Bob Smith will finally "get to be the happy kid [he] never was." (Summer 2002 Selection)