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Hamlet's Dresser: A Memoir

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Hamlet's Dresser is Bob Smith's memoir about his life going up with a severely retarded sister, a detached father, and overwrought mother. He tells of his escape of this environment and lonely childhood when he discovers the language and world of William Shakespeare.

It is not a book about Bob Smith's devotion to his sister, but his endeavor to escape the confines of his sister even though he loved her very much. The main aspect of the book was his intertwining of Shakespearian passages in describing his past life and his present life when he teaches the elderly the wonders of the Bard. This in itself really opens up so many facets of how he felt. He is the Hamlet of his life and his mother is Lady MacBeth with his sister being Ophelia.

Though his writing is rather florid at times, this is an amazing first book by Mr. Smith. Without the Shakespearian prose interspersed throughout the passages, it might have been just another memoir, but Mr. Smith has turned it into a book that flows. The reader can even start comparing aspects of their own life with Shakespeare just as the elderly do in his classes.

Read it and compare it with your own life.

A professor friend of mine recommended this book to me. She had read a review in the Washington Post. Normally, I nod politely at such recommendations and go about reading whatever else it is that was already on my wish list. But, for some reason, I went out and bought this book.
I read it on the plane and, to my great embarrassment, found that I had to put the book down in my lap several times and take deep breaths, lest the other passengers see the tears welling in my eyes.
Bob Smith is a man I didn't know of before picking up the book. I didn't expect to care about his memoir. What I found is that I ended up caring very deeply and simply could not put it down until I'd finished it. To say that it is a moving book is an understatement. Somehow, Mr. Smith touches on all of life and love and loss and hope and well --- humanity. Perhaps it is because he weaves into his tale the timeless wisdom found in Shakespeare. And he does so masterfully.
By reading this memoir, you will learn about life, yourself, Shakespeare, and what it means to be human.

Art convincingly engages life in this coming-of-age autobiography. Viewed from a half century's distance, the author vividly describes a boyhood and youth spent largely in Stratford, Connecticut. As though for counterpoint, he occasionally interrupts his primary account to relate his adult experiences with senior citizen groups as a Shakespeare expert. Much as the Bard's words sustained him through a difficult and painful youth, so too do they provide pleasure and consolation to the aging. Throughout, Smith complements his own words with appropriate passages from the plays and sonnets.
Central to Smith's narrative is his relationship with Carolyn, his profoundly disabled sister. Virtually incapable of speech, resistant to every attempt at toilet training, and prone to obsessive-compulsive behavior, her presence in the household takes a heavy toll on the other family members. Her mother retreats to the bedroom, her father mysteriously disappears every Tuesday and Bob, despite his great affection and concern, seeks solace in the library, museums, and the theater. As a fifth grader, he first encounters Shakespeare, whose eloquent language displaces the tense silence of his home. As he remarks: "Poetry became a beautiful place to hide from my life and my parents, a place I knew they'd never follow me to." (p. ll2)
The book's apt title relects Smith's initial involvement with an actual production when, as a sixteen year old, he becomes a dresser for the American Shakespeare Festival's "Hamlet." His fascination with the theater does not translate into serious aspirations as an actor. Rather, he elects to develop the stage management skills essential to the support of a successful production. As he admits in a brief backstage encounter with Katherine Hepburn, "I'm a watcher." Yet, as the mature narrator remarks, "Too much watching can make you passive and afraid. Ask Hamlet." (137)
After eighteen years of watching (and caring for) his sister, Smith witnesses his parents' decision to place her in an institution. His anguish finds expression in an emotional performance as the crown bearer in "Richard the Second." Some forty years will pass before the "coward brother" can summon the courage to visit the woman whom he feels he has foresaken and to whom this compelling memoir is dedicated

This is a wonderful book, written with great skill. The author looks back on his life and gains perspective and distance from it as he considers the language and stagecraft of Shakespeare. You could say that because of Shakespeare his life, particularly in early adulthood, becomes endurable. At the beginning of the book we see him as an inspired teacher bringing Shakespeare into the world of the elderly in New York, with spectacular success. He schedules with them a weekly seminar where the plays are discussed in detail, revealing themselves as relevant in unexpected and new ways. His new friends mysteriously cannot get enough of the language, the play experience, and discussing the issues with which the characters struggle. Their insights and enthusiasm startle and encourage him.

The authors skill with the elderly may be founded somehow in his childhood commitment to a beautiful but severely retarded younger sister to whom he is deeply attached. For different reasons his childhood is lonely and painful, but this only becomes clear very slowly. Gradually the reader perceives that the book is really about Smiths complex relationship with his sister. At a climax point of harrowing detail he breaks off and to bring us back to an amusing habit of someone in his senior citizens class, an actor preparing for a demanding scene, or fascinating details about (for example) Katharine Hepburns stage wardrobe. We see how the whole rich framework of the authors life is determined by his love of acting, actors and the Shakespeare stage.

Just how interesting could a memoir by someone whose (real!) name is Bob Smith ever be? As it turns out, Bob Smith is a fascinating man with a talent not often celebrated, but that is absolutely central to art: he is a supremely-gifted appreciator.

He loves painting and music and, centrally, Shakespeare. He never went to college, never wanted to learn to drive. Art museums and live theater are his ideas of heaven. He's done directing, acting, painting. But basically he loves being an audience, and feels it is his job to teach others how, as audience, to participate fully in Shakespeare's art. For him the Bard is redeeming, and is just the tonic for those that have to peel life down to its essentials - the old and the dying.

This is not a book that will teach you anything much about Shakespeare. True, chunks of his language punctuate the text, but Bob Smith is trying to talk about his own life. He tells his story in parallel threads - his present and his growing up.

There is a terrific sadness coupled with an almost manic energy and feeling running through this narrative. Paintings and Shakespeare started out as ways for Smith to escape the pain in his life, but quickly came to provide their own meaning, interest, and, primarily, joy.

Two or three centuries ago it was not uncommon for a person to have but one book - the Bible. He or she would read it daily, sometimes just for comfort, sometimes in bafflement, sometimes with understanding. It was vast and lasted a lifetime; its images and language permeated waking and sleeping. I don't doubt that Bob Smith reads the paper, devours an occasional trashy novel, and watches some television. But without his having explicitly said so, he leaves the definite impression that his central, focused, daily meditations are in the texts of Shakespeare. He has read them all many times, and still he finds and works new veins of meaning. What a glorious way to live, and how difficult, in the Age of Information.

BOB SMITH LOVES Shakespeare, loves words. He observes his mother in the chilly chiaroscuro of the front seat of the family Buick. In snow he stands waiting numb for number 23 cross-town.

Bob traverses New York to deliver his own-styled classes on Shakespeare to groups of seniors, making the bard relevant for them, making his words live and breath as he mines the entire oeuvre with its frequent references to their own life experiences and problems. While seniors nod in recognition, he reads from Henry V, `A good leg will fall, a stringent back will stoop, a black beard will turn white, a fair face will wither.`

While Smith tells of how he found his place in the sun, out of the sun, starting humbly as Hamlet`s dresser in Stratford, Connecticut, he uses quotes so proficiently, they never appear pretentious. He introduces us to his severely challenged younger sister, cleverly quoting the Queen`s speech from Hamlet concerning troubled Ophelia.

Remarkable for a young person, Smith devotes endless hours to his sister`s comfort. Coping with her brings powerful emotions to the beginning third of the book. His mother`s mind wanders too, so he dives into Macbeth: Not so sick, my Lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies.

In this memorable mélange, Smith reveals unusual portraits of theatre greats for whom he worked, including Katharine Hepburn, Bert Lahr, John Houseman, Robert Ryan. However, he returns frequently to etch for us another memorable picture of the elderly sinking into the farrago of old age, looking for and finding safety, acceptance and recognition in Smith`s unique propagations.

This memoir is incredibly heart felt, sensitive and beautiful. Interspersed with Shakespeare's words, and Smith's experiences sharing them with New York City's oldest people, as well as his experience with Shakespeare on stage is a pained and moving life.
This is a remarkable book for anyone who identifies with the social/communal feel of life in the theatre, or artists for that matter. As well, anybody who knows the outside of an easy going life, alienation, deep guilt, a stilted family life, and the strain and sublime beauty of mental retardation.
I feel thankful after reading this. Smith illuminates the simple beauty of a daily train ride into the city, the warmth and intensity of being an off stage dresser, the joy of being with young actors and artists, and the sweetness of giving to older folks, and finding out that they need vitality and art as much as anyone. Great for actors and theatre lovers!

I first learned about Hamlet's Dresser in a mini-review in the Weekend section of the Wall Street Journal. As a lover of Shakespeare, I was intrigued and bought the book. What I soon learned a few chapters in was that the book was much more than just about Shakespeare and the author's love for the Bard. It was a deeply moving story of a man who had to overcome difficult personal obstacles to lead a productive life that included the teaching of Shakespeare to diverse audiences. My 14 year old daughter also read the book and was as enthusiastic as I am about it. Hamlet's Dresser deserves to be widely reviewed and read.

The problem with a book like this is that it's hard to put down, so the experience of being engrossed in a moving story of a life being spent so well in the wake of so much pain is over all too quickly. It's a story that alternates between a psychically intensely painful childhood and the author's current life teaching Shakespeare to groups of deeply appreciative, passionate, sometimes dying, elderly people in senior citizen centers in New York City. The telling is full of the author's, and the author's parents', love for his severely disabled sister, and describes the struggle of a working class Irish family in the 1940s and '50s to deal with the wrenching, emotionally destructive situation, the life, acutely observed, of the extended family, and the author's introduction to Shakespeare through the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut where he lives, including the teenager's encounters with famous actors. This is a book that gets close to the heart of the beauty and pain of life, and with the author's familiarity with Shakespeare and his use of the relevant quotation, the reading is an overwhelming deeply-felt experience.

So little is known about William Shakespeare that we can only truly formulate the meaning of his plays through the filter of our own experiences. Even books that purport to be "biographies" can only offer their best guesses as to his life since all we basically have is his will and testament and the hearsay of other playwrights such as Ben Jonson. So I've never been one to read books about him or literary criticism after suffering through Harold Bloom's unenlightening Shakespeare. That is, until I came to this work. I was blown away by Hamlet's Dresser by Bob Smith.

Bob Smith's early life was pretty unhappy. His parents show very little caring for him. His sister was born handicapped and is the equivalent of a walking vegetable. He is an outcast at school because the other kids make fun of his sister and want nothing to do with him. He has no idea what to do with his life. Bob has all the pressure points that would drive him to suicide or at least a bitterness towards life. One thing saves him though. The discovery of Shakepeare's plays. In them, Smith finds a world that he can inhabit beyond the reach of his unhappy home life. His life reaches another turning point when a friend invites him to work at a Shakespeare festival where he becomes the dresser of the actor playing Hamlet. He later becomes a writer, a director, and teacher of Shakespeare to the masses without any formal degree.

This was a very passionate and honest account of one man's life. It was inspiring to me how he overcame so much loneliness and negativity to make his life amount to something. The account of his life is also interspersed with his present job, which consists of teaching Shakespeare to senior citizens. There is something very melancholy and mortal in that act because he remembers all those who have died in the course of his teaching. Not to say that this memoir is morbid. Far from it. I mean it more in the sense that it shows humility. Much like Shakespeare, Smith recognizes that Death settles all things and is one adventure we all share, so let go of the fear of it. It is a very Renaissance concept. I would recommend this work to any Shakespeare fan and any fan of good reading. I would also recommend Al Pacino's film Looking for Richard which this book reminded me of. In the sense that both are trying to bring a living Shakespeare to our age.