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(simplemente maria press) The Tragic History of Hamlet: An Artist’s Interpretation of the Classic Text by William Shakespeare. [By] Mary Heebner. Santa Barbara. 2008. 16” x 12” x 2”. 20 prints from original collage paintings, letterpress text. Watermarked paper with stencil and pulp-painting. John Balkwill of The Lumino Press, Santa Barbara, printed the text letterpress on the individual mingei paper folio sleeves, and on the handmade paper sheets, editioned by hand on a Vandercook UNI cylinder press, using Centaur typeface. He also laid out and printed the complete play in booklet form. Artist and bookmaker designed the clamshell box, which Balkwill built with black mohair over boards with a red leather spine. The cover paper of the clamshell box is from Cave Paper in Minneapolis, onto which the skull motif is debossed. Prints in brown handmade paper wrappers with a red trim in the box. Hand-stitched booklet with entire play Hamlet included in the box. It is hand-stitched with a cover of handmade amate paper, debossed with a hand-drawn ‘HAMLET’. One in an edition of 20 copies, signed by the artist, three of which are hors commerce. New.

Heebner writes: “In 2003 Josine Ianco-Starrels invited me to participate in an exhibit, “Shakespeare as Muse”, at Southern Oregon University Museum of Art. I had been working on a series of small figurative paintings that I sensed could become a part of a series with works by William Shakespeare as inspiration. These painting became the left panels of the original triptych collages of the Hamlet series from which twenty direct archival pigment prints were made on Somerset Velvet paper for this artist’s book.

“I made the pigmented flax and abaca two-sided chemises, the watermarked ‘Ophelia’ and HAMLET over beaten abaca sheets, and the individually pulp painted, and stenciled cotton and abaca sheets used for the title page, with papermakers Paul Wong, Steve Orlando and Moirin Reynolds at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York City in September, 2007.

I drew a version of the honeysuckle image from the Second Quarto title page, printed in 1604, and added to this a sketch of a skull that I used for the cover image and as the header on each of the folio text blocks. I drew an eye for the title page, beneath the stormy, moody pulp painting, denoting that this was my visual interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic text.

“… Source for the text is ‘The Globe Edition’ of the works of William Shakespeare, edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, electronically available through the University of Virginia Library.”

A powerful new interpretation of a great classic.

Related items: Artists' Books, Literature, Mary Heebner, simplemente maria press, William Shakespeare