Reading like an Editor: A Farewell Note Catherine Belling (bio) “Farewell” is the usual title for this genre, the final editorial from a departing editor, but I use it uncomfortably, wanting to say “Wait, I’m not going anywhere—and anyway I’ve already gone.” I stepped down as editor at the end of 2018, and I thank Anne Hudson Jones for serving as interim editor for 2019 and for steering the journal’s transition to some important changes, described in her own update in this issue. This also does not feel like a leave-taking, just returning to being a “normal” reader and, I hope, sometimes an author. I must admit, though, that it is with some relief that I step away from the work of reading like an editor. I found it difficult. I’ll try to explain. Reading has often been our subject in this journal, and two articles in this issue continue that thread. Matthew Rubery’s study of the ghastly condition called alexia—loss of the ability to read—serves as reminder of how remarkable humans are in our capacity to make life-preserving meaning out of marks we have the cognitive magic to use as signs. Without words written and read, meaning recorded at one time and retrieved at another, what would we be? Rubery describes several alexic people assiduously pretending to read, because “reader” and “person” have become inextricable for them. This anxious pseudo-lexia reminded me of another performance of reading that echoes in this issue. In his moving account of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Arthur Frank reveals a layering of the play’s potential effects on those who come to it vulnerable, needing vicarious compassion when sick at heart. Frank’s work made me think about my own recent experiences of reading needily, and I also remembered the deeply vulnerable Ophelia and her own act of reading at the center of the play. While Hamlet muses on whether to be or not to be, he is not alone on the stage. Polonius and Gertrude hide, spying, but Ophelia is there in the open, bait. She mustn’t look as if she’s lurking about, so her father tells her “Read [End Page 247] on this book.”1 Reading, he thinks, will make her look lonely, and that will impel Hamlet to confide in her. We, thanks to the soliloquy, can read Hamlet’s mind, but Ophelia waits in silent suspense, staring into her book. We could forget she’s there. He wrestles with his “dread of something after death” (3.1.86). She reads, until he notices her and breaks her heart. At least that’s all we can tell—but we might also imagine her finding in that unnamed book a story to sustain her through what is to come. I wondered where else reading appeared in the play, so I did a text search for “read.” I didn’t sort out the spaces precisely enough, which led to an ominous but fitting apopheny: the first several instances are all to the word dread. And then, increasingly, you have ready, leading to Hamlet’s final resigned step off the edge: “Readiness is all” (5.2.237). The lexicon seems to follow from apprehensive delay toward resolution to act, not impetuously, but in the acceptance that his story will not, in the end, be his to tell. But between dread and readiness (along with many people reading letters that were not intended for them) are two performances of reading—Ophelia’s and also Hamlet’s own. More parental spying: “But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading,” says his mother (2.2.183–84). Polonius rudely interrupts—“What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet protects his mind by eliding the meaning in his reading (pretended or real): “Words, words, words” (2.2.208–10). Like Ophelia’s, his book remains as closed to us as it is to the paranoid parents. This deflection makes Hamlet outwardly invulnerable; his reading protects him until he’s ready to decide. Reading as an editor, I felt more like anxious Ophelia than antic Hamlet. This may seem paradoxical. The reading to which an editor...