Madness: Reading Hamlet in the Time of Covid-19 and Other Plagues

By Emily Martin with intrusions from the world around me and William Shakespeare Iowa City, Iowa: Emily Martin, 2022. Edition of 25.
Standard: 11 x 8”; 22 pages. Printed letterpress with polymer plates from Boxcar Press on Arches Text wove paper. Non-adhesive covers of flax and abaca papers made by Mary Hark for the outside and flax papers from the University of Iowa Center for the Book for the inside. Accordion structure. Removable spine to extend pages. Laid in cloth covered clamshell box with paper title on spine. Paper puppet inclusions printed on University of Iowa Center for the Book Chancery paper and costumed in papers of wheat straw, sisal, daylily fibers, and abaca paste papers made by Andrea Peterson. Signed and numbered by the artist.
Basic: 11 x 8”; 22 pages. Printed letterpress on an SP-15 Vandercook with polymer plates from Boxcar Press on Mohawk 80 lb text paper. Drawings of puppets from trace mono-printing printed directly on to the text sheets. Non-adhesive covers in two colors of Tiziano paper. Accordion structure. Removable spine to extend pages. Laid in an archival corrugated box. Signed and numbered by the artist.
Emily Martin: "’Madness’ was created during the pandemic and went through many forms before it became what you see here. It’s appearance and content are very much shaped by my time in isolation. Initially, I copied out the play ‘Hamlet’ by hand starting in March 2020 because I was too anxious to sit and read. I also was making paper puppets for companionship. The project kept changing as events swirled around me. I struggled to make sense of the project in a world gone crazy. The text is a crazy quilt arrangement of lines from ‘Hamlet’ and my writing on repeating themes of fear, disease, Black Lives Matter, Asian hate crimes, the insurrection, so much death and isolation.
"The background pattern is made up of my renderings of tears, drops of blood, Covid-19 particles and bullet holes.”
Text excerpt – Laertes (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3): “Be wary then; best safety lies in fear.” Emily Martin text: “In the quiet of isolation I hid in my studio, trying to ignore that I am living in a country that feels increasingly foreign to me. Who are these people? How can they believe all these lies? Has it always been this way and I am just starting to notice?”
Text excerpt – Queen Gertrude (Hamlet, Act 3, scene 4): “O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!” Emily Martin text: “By the time this books is done, a million people will have died of Covid-19 in the U.S. More than 5 million world wide.”