Voice

I attended outdoor performances of Hamlet all through the summer of 1972. Those long days began deep in Brooklyn, a Central Park queue by the break of dawn, and paid dividends at dusk when James Earl Jones’s voice would become the Ghost.

One night, aged seven, I was invited backstage or rather under it. Stacy Keach was seated in isolation and they let me sit in the quiet with him. Act V hung in the air.

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Language

‘It wasn’t meant to be read;
that’s what the schools did.’
– my son Anton sixteen, sees the plays as performing art

I have not removed friction; I have shaped it.

William Shakespeare’s manuscripts are lost. What remains are words passed down by actors, prompters, compositors, and publishers. Every play, some more than others but each one to be sure, presented errors, contradictions and quandaries. And while many were resolved by editors in the twentieth century, some issues slipped by, while others were incompletely handled or misunderstood. We’ve gone back through these, inevitably leaving new problems of our own to bedevil us. Some plays had to be taken apart and reassembled.

Most important, I’ve restored the language to its ardent, breathless pulse.

I thank my son Anton for sitting with me these past three years, helping with all this, lending a strong opposing opinion when it mattered. This next generation is in a position to make Shakespeare their own. My daughter Nell, nineteen, joined us for The Tempest. Good times.

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Typography

A small system of glyphs is drawn from genuine period texts in the Shakespeare canon. I’ve been busy restoring the wild variety of quarto and folio spellings, and while these often increase character count, the glyphs we’re introducing decrease it for pacing. For example, thorn returns th to a single character, giving the page an older North European cast while trimming countless English words. The mind works while the eye skims.

Restoration extends beyond typography. In places, you gives way to thou and thee. What began as an ear for the sound also restored an older distinction: thou was familiar, you more formal. Language is funny that way.

Importantly, sentence structure came under review. Generally this review doesn’t impose punctuation it doesn’t find.

If you don’t see commas, it’s not an accident. If you don’t see commas it’s probably not an accident. The page becomes a current of speech, breathless indeed. The page becomes a current of speech breathless indeed.

þ, Þ
th → þ (them → þem)
Th → Þ (Them → Þem)

ē, ō
en → ē (then → þē)
om → ō (from → frō, whom → whō)

Y̆, ß, wc
You → Y̆
ss → ß (kiss → kiß, businesse → busineße)
which → wc

In other matters, we take liberties with the U and V, and the J and I. IVLIVS CAESAR does not live here, but JAGO (pronounced j’YA-go) does. I do not see Iago as an Italian name; rather, I hear something Iberian. The J is mine: a cue to the snappier sound I want.

We discard the long s that looks like an f, witness: ſ. We re-locate our friction as needs be.

We italicize Proper Names the way they once were in quartos and folios, leaning into these pleasant cues and anchors. No one does that anymore.

The Shakespeare I inherited from George Lyman Kittredge stabilized spellings and arguably reined in the gallop. This text needs to flow with the ayre.

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Pamphlets

My grandfather, a decoder with the Pacific Fleet and a professor emeritus of English at Rutgers–Newark, gave us Kittredge’s Shakespeare upon its publication in 1969. Over the years most of these paperbacks were lost, though I’ve recently re-assembled much of the collection second hand. I loved it because it showed each play as an identity within a framework where full-bodied characters burst from a single encompassing mind.

Shakespeare’s early modern English is surprisingly accessible; I wandered into this decades ago reading cheap, unannotated copies. From this arose an idea for a simple, lean pamphlet rolled up and stuffed in a jacket while riding the subway. The plays run in columns, as if it were newsprint: something Edwin Booth might have spotted in the Baltimore Sun.

An early edition of King Richard II in 2017 made clear that the work would require reassembly from the ground up.

GREGORY ANTHONY BITTAR 2026

Language from Love's Labour's Lost
Erik Hoffer Longshoreman Philosopher for Gregory Bittar 1969, by Antoun