by Gregory Anthony Bittar, 2026

How does a grand, immersive, egotistical re-imagining of something as intrinsic and usual as Shakespeare get underway?

Open Air

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

below, þe Tragicall Historie of HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke.
The Ghost unveils himself to Hamlet.

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

below, þe Tragicall Historie of HAMLET, Prince of Denmarke.
Act V comes for Hamlet.

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 has been 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. While many were resolved by editors in the twentieth century, some slipped or were mishandled, and we’ve made our own errors.

Some plays had to be taken apart and reassembled. Most importantly, I’ve restored the language to its ardent piston pulse.

below, þe tragedie of ROMEO and JULIET.
Juliet exhales her breathless heart.

For anything you get, something must be given up. Compare with this, from Folger Shakespeare Library's edition of Romeo and Juliet.

I thank my son Anton for sitting these past three years, helping with all this, lending a strong opposing opinion when it mattered. My daughter Nell, nineteen, joined us for The Tempest. Good times.

below, Þe TEMPEST.
Ethereal Ariel appears to the shipwrecked Ferdinand in song, sent by banished magician Prospero; Prospero’s daughter Miranda has never seen another man, save bestial Caliban.

Typography

A small system of glyphs is drawn from 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 help control it, like cats controlling mice. For example, thorn reduces th to a single character. My mind works overtime for my tired eyes.

Restoration extends beyond typography. In places, you gives way to thou and thee. What began as an ear for sound also restored an older distinction: thou was less formal than you, surprisingly.

below, þe tragedie of OÞELLO, þe Moore of Venice.
Jago plants the seeds of doubt.

You may notice proper names of people, places, and notable things are italicized, as they were in Shakespeare’s day, in the quartos and folios. Italics lend clarity to the page, as visual anchors. I have been even more thorough about it because they look great to me. This is a practice long since discontinued.

We discard the long s that looks like an f, witness: ſ. No surprise there. We locate our friction where it can do useful work.

Sequence

It is critical to note that before digging in deep, I first assembled as best I could the running order of plays as per historical records, and edited them on that basis. This allowed our work to mature alongside his and to gain insight from the transitions.

Sequence also plays a role in the running order of stage directions and performance parts. This is a different approach from numbering each line, or numbering lines on a page.

Pamphlets

My grandfather, a decoder with the Pacific Fleet and professor emeritus of English at Rutgers–Newark, gave us Kittredge’s Shakespeare upon its publication in 1969. (I've revisited some of his writing in the Essays section.) Over the years most of these paperbacks were lost, though I’ve recently re-assembled all but Henry VI second hand. The covers had a colorful appeal to character and line, bounded by a quiet control, perhaps the poet’s. Somehow I got it into my mind that I wanted to start printing my own. Madness turns on such screws.

An early edition of King Richard II in 2017 made clear that this work would need reassembly from the ground up. I wanted the loose poetry. It speaks to me.

Shakespeare’s early modern English is surprisingly accessible. The English of 1600 would leave its imprint around the world. English from fifty to a hundred years before is quite a different matter. From this arose my idea for a simple, lean pamphlet rolled up and stuffed in a jacket for riding the subway or walking around town. My plays would run in columns, as newsprint: something Edwin Booth might have found in the Baltimore Sun. There is something nineteenth-century about newsprint, and about Shakespeare in America.

UNIX

It wasn’t too long before I found out, what people mean by down and out. — Robert Plant

It was going to make more sense to tackle the whole folio of forty-six plays in one go. Sure, I was trawling with an ungodly net, but I would not have to pass through the same ocean twice.

What’s to be afraid of? I knew I had vim. Twenty years earlier I had chosen vim as my text editor. Its elegant commands, paired with find and grep, give a giant microscope the precision of a laser scalpel.

Here I am, four years later, and I have more fish than mouths to feed, or rather the other way around.

King Richard II

You will notice that I indicate the speaker of the passage below as Bolingbroke, the man’s modern spelling, but immediately after, the text presents him as Bullingbrooke. He also appears as Bullinbrook, Bullinbroke, and later King Henry IV or Henrie IV. I used Henry for the labels.

Proper name instability is standard in texts of the period, even on neighboring lines. If you are a fan of analogue music, you may appreciate this as a positive good.

Incidentally, this was pianist Glenn Gould’s favorite play, I just found out. The man whose recording popularized J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which I will be speaking of later. You can read more about Glenn with respect to Shakespeare and Richard II in the Interpretations section.

below, þe life and deaþ of KING RICHARD þe Second.
This was the play, when I first encountered it in 1992, that showed me how deep Shakespeare’s book of work could go. Here, Anton’s drawing of a red eye is muted in the background, while rebel Bolingbroke, soon to be King Henry IV, condemns two men for having corrupted King Richard II.

Obsession

To live in Chaos, one must have friends. One must befriend details.

Peter Hurford’s 17-CD The Organ Works, of pieces attributed—even guardedly—to J.S. Bach, recorded in the world’s churches and cathedrals, their organs and spaces matched for timbre; Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: 15 hours of continuous musical drama in his bespoke theatre: Bayreuth Festspielhaus; Kurt Rodarmer's Goldberg Variations, played on a pair of matching commissioned classical and baritone classical guitars, for which he re-arranged the keyboard composition. I corresponded with him about that, and found a baritone for myself in North Carolina; it’s all over my recordings on this site. George Harrison championed that idea: baritone as a staple in modern rock; I think he was onto something. The Guitar and Bass Boutique, if I remember its name correctly, used to joke that I’d be the only baritonist in Manhattan.

I remembered paint falling in Michelangelo’s eyes under the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

I remember when I was very young, maybe less than five, seeing an outdoor performance of something like a pantomime in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Whatever its medieval matter may have been, I left feeling deputized to recorroborate the past.

above, LOVES LABOUR'S lost.
painting: Erik Hoffer Longshoreman Philosopher for Gregory Bittar, 1969 by Antoun

On: Why this came to be •
On: Room for Shakespeare publishing in the present day •
On: The Life of Shakespeare, part one: edge of town •
On: The Life of Shakespeare, part two: a star is born •
On: The Life of Shakespeare, part three: the mysteries •
On: The Life of Shakespeare, part four: haram, horum •
On: Shakespeare's Sources •
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