Reading Lens

Voice

I attended outdoor performances of Hamlet all through the summer of 1972. Those long days began in a Central Park queue at dawn, and paid dividends at dusk when James Earl Jones's voice would sensaround us as the Ghost.

One night, aged seven, I was invited backstage, or rather under it. Stacy Keach, our Hamlet, sat in the crook of the angle, and they let me sit in the quiet with him. Act V hung in the air.

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Glyphs

A small set of glyphs is used throughout to preserve sound and motion.

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

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

Y̆, ß
Y̆ → You
ß → sharp s (kiß → kiss, busineße → business)

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Language

I have not removed friction; I have shaped it.

William Shakespeare’s manuscripts are lost. What remains is not an author’s hand, but the work of actors, prompters, compositors, and publishers carried forward in print.

Across the quartos and folios, the language shifts. What survives is not a fixed text, but one in motion.

Sentences run on—almost breathless, as intended for actors upon a stage.

I thank my son Anton, who sits with me, listening, reading, and offering contemplation. My daughter Nell joined us for The Tempest. Good times.

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Pamphlets

My grandfather, Richard Alcock, Professor Emeritus of English at Rutgers–Newark, gave our family the Kittredge Shakespeare upon its publication in 1969. Over the years, most of these volumes disappeared, but in attempting to reacquire the set, I found myself wanting more.

The texts do not require explanation. They are less antiquated than is often supposed, and text kept lean has proven resilient.

From this arose the idea of a pamphlet suited to the pocket—whether for actors or those in transit. An early attempt at King Richard II in 2017, for family and friends, made clear that the work would require reassembly from the ground up.

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Tech Talk

I would like to thank Stéphane Ducasse and INRIA's wider Pharo Smalltalk team for providing a peerless iterative development environment.

Lastly, I thank Clifford Olds of the Art History Department. He allowed me to remain his distracted projectionist. He showed us how to show things.

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GREGORY ANTHONY BITTAR
30 April 2026

A passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost imagining ambition large enough for “whole volumes in folio,” set against a portrait painted and inscribed to the editor by Antoun Bittar in 1969. The image became less illustration than invocation: a private family object unexpectedly answering the scale of the work itself.