Because it’s easy for Shakespeare plays to take over a bookshelf, I own only one paperback copy of each; the exception is my three Hamlets. Two are revenants of college and grad school courses, kept because I never got around to combining my marginal notes and contemporary to the years when I took the classes. The third is the outlier: a September 1964 “fifteenth printing” of the Folger Library’s General Reader’s Shakespeare edition. It was never a valuable book: its cover says it cost 45¢ when new, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates is the equivalent of $3.73 today.
The reason that I’ve kept it is because of the name, in blue ink and a confident Palmer-method trained hand, on the first page. I won’t include that name here, but it’s my mother’s unmarried name. In September of 1964, she was 17, and this was her copy for a high school senior-year English course in which she was studying Hamlet.
Or, perhaps, not studying Hamlet. Throughout the book are a number of marginal doodles of the letter combination CB, starting with shapeless monograms in Act I and evolving into a graphically appealing heart design by Act V. There is also, on the inside back cover, in that same Palmer style, the punning homophone “Isle of View.” Just once does a name appear instead of initials: “Chuck,” written inside a heart. I don’t know who Chuck B. is or was—he’s not my father in any event—and I’ve never asked her about it. But this window into the wandering mind of my high-school-aged mother finding a living boy more interesting than a dead Dane, holds a sort of magic for me.
For that reason, I chose to use this copy of Hamlet in my own senior-year English course, in 1986, when I was 17. My marginal notes are in pencil, rather than my mother’s blue ink, and printed rather than in Palmer-method cursive. We both clearly wanted to make sure we understood what the Ghost was telling Hamlet: “before he killed Hamlet, Claudius seduced Gertrude,” I wrote in the margins of I.v; on that same page, my mother has written in huge capital letters, “MURDER.” In V.ii, my mother has written, “All die”; in IV.iii, I’ve written, “we all die.” That fact seems to have impressed both 17 year olds. In places, I write back to my mother’s notes—or, more likely, indicate instances where my teacher’s interpretation didn’t quite match her teacher’s; to my mother’s indication that III.ii.281 is the “CLIMAX,” I’ve quibbled: “Or is it in III.iii?”
The cover of this Folger edition presents an image of Hamlet gazing at Yorick’s skull, the two heads and sets of eyes mirroring each other. (Even the ruff on Hamlet’s sleeve visually hints at a ruff around Yorick’s missing neck, echoing Hamlet’s own.) The image suggests the argument that the edition itself is making about why students should read Shakespeare: the encounter with the past is an act of interpretation in which we find ourselves. There’s a triteness to the point, but I think it’s why I’ve kept this volume: not for Shakespeare but for the girl that my mother was and the boy who wanted to understand her.
by Patrick O'Malley