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    The Independent – Feature of Shakespeare on Toast

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    The Independent – 27th February 2009

    Two years before making his serious stage debut as Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Lenny Henry summed up his attitude to Shakespeare. “It seemed to me that Shakespeare was very much in the province of posh people,” he said on a Radio 4 series about the Bard. “I’m black, I’m from Dudley, I’m working class. Shakespeare’s not for people like us.”

    Some years ago at a somewhat posh literature festival in the provinces I heard the then artistic director of the Playhouse, Jude Kelly, explaining what she understood by the phrase People Like Us. “Us”, she explained in a put-on, posh-provincial accent, are the people who are supposed to go to the theatre and read Literature and attend books festivals in grand marquees in southern England. Whereas “Uz”, she said in proper Yorkshire, are the people the Playhouse wanted to welcome. This new Othello, in regional accents, by the director Barrie Rutter and the Halifax-based company Northern Broadsides, could make Lenny Henry the first famous Dudley Moor. It also fulfils Kelly’s remit of persuading People Like Uz into theatres – even if they are only on the stage.

    The other day I had the chance to talk to the actor and author Ben Crystal about Lenny, Willy and PLU, and unsurprisingly he agreed that Shakespeare is for people exactly like Uz. In his latest book, Shakespeare on Toast, Crystal tries his damnedest as an actor, scholar and Shakespeare’s biggest fan to demystify the Bard for doubting 21st-century theatre-phobics. Crystal is a fine actor and not exactly quintessentially highbrow, and his enthusiastic comparisons of Shakespeare’s Globe to “a modern football match” and his plays to “Elizabethan soap opera” will have shocked those among Us who want to keep the riff raff out of the stalls.

    They are fighting a losing battle, if they do. A week ago, Ben Crystal joined a mixed bunch of guests (Sir Ian McKellen, Ms Dynamite, the Booker Prize-winning writer Ben Okri…) at the Limehouse Youth Centre in East London to launch a project called Hip Hop Shakespeare, lead by the Mobo-winning artist Akala. The workshops were spawned by BBC Blast, whose tours saw some schools lying to students about what they were really going to see, so unpopular was the idea of poetry to the yoof.

    Akala broke the ice by reading out a selection of quotes, and asking his audience to guess which were Shakespeare, and which hip hop. Not everybody got it right; Sir Ian was certain that “I am reckless what I do/ To spite the world” was a hip hop lyric. (It is from Macbeth: “I am one, my liege,/ Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world/ Hath so incensed that I am reckless what I do/ To spite the world.”) Before long, a group of youngsters who are – in that dread acronym – Not in Employment, Education or Training, were rapping Sonnet 18. “They realise that if Shakespeare is attainable to them then how can a job not be attainable, how can anything not be?” Akala told me. “Because Shakespeare is the most unattainable thing they can think of. So we’ve started way out there.” One young woman, Lorianne, who attended earlier sessions, has been commissioned to write a play for the Young Vic.

    Over at the 100 year-old Poetry Society, the embracing of young poets is continuing with reckless abandon. Next week they launch the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, at the Sage Gateshead – and previous form suggests that a torrent of junior bards waits to be unleashed. One of last year’s winners, “I Talk Lyk Dis” by Chinedum Nwokonkor, is a witty, blunt and incisive answer to anyone who still thinks that poetry and language is not for the entertainment of “a boi from da street”.

    You heard it here first: the new Bard will be black, working-class and possibly even from Dudley. But maybe not an ageing comic. Says Lorianne: “Shakespeare would have been a rapper.”
    Katy Guest

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    The Bookbag Review of Shakespeare on Toast

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    The Bookbag

    Shakespeare on Toast claims to be for virtually everyone: those that are reading Shakespeare for the first time, occasionally finding him troublesome, think they know him backwards or have never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to.

    I am not certain where I am located in this classification: I certainly don’t claim to know Shakespeare backwards, but I have certainly set my feet (and more importantly, my ears and eyes) near his plays. I am mercifully unaffected by the pitfalls of the education system’s bardolatry as I went to school in Poland and we only did one Shakespeare play: Macbeth, and it was, of course, read and watched in (excellent) translation.

    My main problem with Shakespeare is connected with my problem of reading in English, and in particularly reading poetry in English, which is that anything pre-19th century seems to require so much effort from my brain’s language centres that understanding becomes strained and enjoyment dissolves in that strain. Shakespeare on stage is better – especially if I know the story or if I have the libretto (sorry, the script) handy. So I am in a bit of a dilemma here: I can either enjoy and appreciate Shakespeare in translation, and there are some fantastically brilliant Polish translations of his work, or I can struggle in the original with a hope that it will, eventually, become easier. I guess occasionally finding him troublesome just about covers it, then.

    I found Shakespeare on Toast enjoyable and quite illuminating: for a little while at the beginning I was worried, that, despite protestations to the contrary, some dumbing down, if not of the subject himself, then of the audience, will take place; but it was not the case. Crystal divides his book into five chapters (and calls them acts), dealing with progressively more interesting (and arguably more arcane) aspects of Shakespeare.

    The first three chapters (sorry, acts) are extremely accessible and deal with mostly basic stuff which many people will be at least vaguely familiar with. Crystal looks at the place of theatre in Elizabethean society, at the way plays were performed, from the physical space to astonishingly expensive costumes and lack of scenery; he presents the fascinating Shakespearean characters and shows – very convincingly – that the themes and stories of his plays are the fundamental stories of humanity, the ones that have been told and retold repeatedly and are still retold now, in EastEnders as much (if not more) as in modern film and theatre. He deals with the ‘Olde English’ issue as well, claiming that 95% of Shakespeare’s vocabulary is perfectly accessible to a modern reader and even providing a very useful list of ‘false friends’.

    The last two chapters concentrate on the very core of Shakespeare’s brilliance and importance – and the most powerful argument to why we should at least sometimes watch and read Shakespeare, and not always EastEnders – the poetry, and more specifically, Shakespeare’s revolutionary use and development of iambic pentameter. Sounds boring and dry? It isn’t, or at least it wasn’t for me. Crystal’s enthusiasm makes a surprisingly fascinating task of analysing the meter, counting feet and detecting ends of thoughts. Arcane and forbidding terms become clear and, hugely helped by Crystal’s background as both a linguist and an actor, come to life and start to make sense. He believes that Shakespeare always does things for a reason and, in the final chapter, puts his belief into action in a breathtaking analysis of one highly charged scene from Macbeth.

    I doubt whether this book will convince the genuinely bardophobic, despite references to Arnie and rap, but for all those who would like to deepen their limited appreciation, Shakespeare on Toast is an excellent dish indeed.

    Highly recommended.

    Magda Healey

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    NATE – Review of Shakespeare on Toast

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    NATE – National Association for the Teaching of English

    Ben Crystal will be known to many readers as the co-writer (with his father David Crystal) of Shakespeare’s Words and The Shakespeare Miscellany. In his latest book, he ‘knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of Shakespeare’ according to the jacket blurb ‘in a breezy, accessible introduction to the greatest writer of plays’. As an actor he has no truck with idea of studying Shakespeare’s drama as anything other than a plays in performance. Obvious, I know, but it still needs repeating.

    Ben (I can’t refer to him as Crystal when he’s written such a matey book and would be sure to call me Trev) has enthusiasm, knowledge and his very own style. His enthusiasm comes across in every chapter, imploring the reader – for example – not to be put off by difficult words. There are not that many and he’s counted them. (Mind you 5% of 900,000 is still a lot of words, Ben. I make it 45,000.) In succeeding sections and chapters (cutely called acts and scenes) he describes aspects of Shakespeare that have been perceived as difficult and explains why.

    I have a couple of quibbles about that part of his argument. One is that explaining why something is difficult doesn’t stop it being difficult, which was the book seems to imply. Secondly, I felt there was a little too much in the way of ‘Hey this isn’t really hard and anyway look what a cool dude the Bard was!’ (I paraphrase). I’m not sure I would want to plant the idea that Shakespeare isn’t difficult quite so much; it might just make students think about those difficulties once too often.

    Ben’s knowledge comes across naturally and without pretension. He brings the understanding of an actor together with the analysis of an academic and it works. The most effective sections, to me, are the two last ‘Acts’ (half the book) where he goes into considerable detail about Shakespeare’s use of metre. There are numerous fascinating examples which bring out facets of Macbeth, for instance, which I had never noticed or taken for granted. This kind of analysis in some writers’ hands could be deadly but here it works really well.

    As already hinted, Ben has his own very chummy, colloquial style which will make the book very readable for many people. It can pall a bit sometimes but perhaps I’m not his intended audience. Which is? Certainly most teachers at GCSE and A level (or equivalent) will find it useful. However, I don’t think it’s teachers that Ben is aiming it, but our students. Whether they will find it quite so attractive, I don’t know. Those who are already interested in Shakespeare, yes; those who are a bit iffy about him, perhaps; the rest, who knows? But do buy a few copies and try it out. Shakespeare on Toast may just cut the mustard.

    Trevor Millum

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    Libby Walkup Reviews Shakespeare on Toast

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    Libby Walkup

    The large second floor room was full for actor and author Ben Crystal (Shakespeare on Toast) and rightly so. His energetic talk brought life and meaning to his book, which is what he wanted to do with Shakespeare for the masses. An actor and teacher, he saw Will S’s words falling through the cracks in productions, so he brought his dad, a linguist, to decipher the Original Pronunciation or OP. This was a combination of three things, rhyme scheme, spelling and guess work. London in Elizabethan time was much more a melting pot of accents than the high brow proper English accent we see in productions of Shakespeare today. They would have also spoken much faster. A lot of the humor and feeling is lost in present day productions of Shakespeare because the pronunciation is wrong.

    Ben toured us around the globe drawing pictures with his arms, his gaze and imagination. He invited two volunteers to read a scene from Macbeth. With minor instruction and an explanation of how Will’s iambic pentameter worked and its intended use, the random selection from the audience had a successful mini acting lesson, and we heard it first, Ben Crystal is opening a production company. A company that will play Shakespeare with the proper pronunciation. He’s going to practice what he preaches and do the little work that needs to be done to keep Will in our pockets. Ben: To leave away after doing a Shakespeare play indifferent. If you can walk away without being touched to your core, is sinful.

    Ben’s book will be a good a read for those who want a reminder or are just starting out with the enjoyment of the greatest literary figure in British history. I know I will be revisiting the great works.
    Libby Walkup

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    HushHourHash Reviews Shakespeare on Toast

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    HushHourHash

    I was at Borders (Wheelock Place) recently and I was blissfully browsing when I came across a delightful book, “Shakespeare On Toast – Getting A Taste For The Bard” written by Ben Crystal. The size of the book, the paper stock and texture, and the irreverent cover design somehow reminded me of Stephen Fry’s book, “The Ode Less Travelled”, which had the noble intention of making poetry more accessible (such a short description doesn’t really do the book justice! I’ll try to review the book one day soon). “Shakespeare On Toast has a similar purpose, that of making the study of Shakespeare’s works more accessible and appealing to audiences who might otherwise be intimidated by the Literary God-like status of the bard. After 3 days of perusing its pages while walking out of school to the bus-stop and while traveling on the MRT, I think the book has certainly fulfilled its objectives.

    Author Ben Crystal is an actor and writer, and it says on the inside of the book jacket that he has co-written other books on Shakespeare (namely “Shakespeare’s Words” and The Shakespeare Miscellany”) with David Crystal. I’m guessing this is the same David Crystal who wrote “Rediscover Grammar” which I think was required reading for a grammar module in NUS. David Crystal has a very informal style of writing that aims to put readers at ease, and it seems Ben Crystal has that same gift (are they related?). Forget scholarly dissertations or technical analysis – the author makes his point in clear, concise English, with a generous helping of pop-culture references too.

    The book is separated into Acts and Scenes like a typical Shakespearean play. Each act or scene deals with different aspects of approaching a Shakespearean play, such as understanding the context of the plays and Elizabethan society, or appreciating Shakespeare’s mastery of the language and why so much would be lost if the plays were to be abridged or translated. He does however take pains to convince the reader that Shakespeare can be enjoyed in a variety of settings and mediums. He mentions a “Brazilian production of Romeo and Juliet that made me sob, a Slovakian production of The Merry Wives of Windsor that had me rolling in the aisles, and a Japanese Pericles that was one of the most heartbreaking pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen…”.

    The author’s own experience as an actor lends an authenticity to his voice, as he calls for us to appreciate the plays as they were meant to be viewed – in front of an audience, and certainly not through heavily annotated textbooks.

    I found Act 1 Scene 6 where he discusses why students find it hard to appreciate or relate to Shakespeare’s plays very useful, and I now realize I may have to approach teaching Shakespeare differently to maximise the students’ appreciation, understanding and enjoyment of the plays. Students may come to his plays with many preconceived ideas about Shakespeare, and this can be a barrier to enjoying or understanding the plays. One approach that may work, especially with 15-16 year olds, is to break down the plays to their simplest denominators first – a tale of greed, and jealousy, passionate love, betrayal, the fall of a great man …. and then work our way up. Although the lines are couched in elaborate poetry, it is the ideas which will resonate with the students first, because these are universal ideas. Crystal quotes Orson Welles: Shakespeare speaks to everyone. It is these fundamental ideas which make us able to relate to his plays, even though they were written for audiences 400 years ago. The last thing we should do I guess is to scare students by diving into the deep end immediately, floundering in the currents of Iambic Pentameter and soliloquies.

    I found the same bit of advice in an old book the Literature Mentor Teacher in my school lent me, “Teaching Shakespeare” by Veronica O’Brien. She suggested starting students off on more accessible plays like Merchant Of Venice or Julius Caesar. I’m actually thinking of doing that next year for my next batch of Secondary 3s who have never encountered Shakespeare before, since the play we’re studying for the ‘O’ Levels examination is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which may not be the best choice for an introduction to Shakespeare. The main issue though is time, and whether we can afford to ‘deviate’. Obvisouly, we couldn’t devote a whole term to another play as it would really set us back in terms of lesson hours. On the other hand, it may prove to be a worthwhile investment. Anybody out there have any thoughts on this?

    Oops, guess I kind of digressed there…back to “Shakespeare On Toast”! It’s a great book, light reading, “finishable” in a day or two, and (I know this is shallow) it just looks nice and cheery with its cover design. The size of the book makes it ideal for reading on the go. Ben Crystal has made it easier for readers new to Shakespeare to approach his plays, and he has also given possibly jaded Shakespeare teachers and students a light and breezy refresher course.

    hushhourhash

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    British Theatre Guide Review of Shakespeare on Toast

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    British Theatre Guide – January 2009

    He is hardly the first person to attempt it, but Ben Crystal does an excellent job of demystifying Shakespeare, perhaps unique in his desire to do so on behalf of the hip-hop generation.

    In addition to training as an actor, the author has studied English language and linguistics and already co-written a couple of books about the Bard, and, most usefully for these purposes, an analysis of Shakespeare’s Words.

    Like most of us, his initial introduction to the canon came about at school when the prospect of reading vast quantities of unintelligible words, seemingly written in a language very different from his own, proved terrifying.

    Having got over his own hang-ups, Crystal is now keen to help others to do the same, probably far less painfully. His main advantage is relative youth and an ability to talk directly to those in their teens and 20s, liberally dropping in contemporary cultural references from film, literature and music.

    These place William Shakespeare in a modern context as a kind of rather older brother to Miles Davis and Philip Glass but also and on the literary side, Charles Dickens and Ken Follett, with TV and film represented by Scarface and Friends and, dumbing down considerably further, Big Brother Live or EastEnders.

    If that makes the book sound lightweight, it is unfair, since perhaps the greatest value in what Ben Crystal offers is an intelligible explanation of both the background to the works and also the language and poetry. He is the first person who has made a decent fist of explaining the use of language and iambic pentameter to this reviewer.

    The book is set out in five acts and then divided up into scenes. The final act pulls apart and then puts back together the short scene following Macbeth’s murder of Duncan, putting into practice much of the theoretical information provided earlier in the book.

    If you want to help a younger friend or relative to get hooked on Shakespeare, you would do well to commend this competitively priced manual. Not only will it help them to appreciate perhaps the greatest writer of the last millennium but it will also give them a really good read.

    Philip Fisher

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    “Ben Crystal does an excellent job of demystifying Shakespeare” — British Theatre Guide

    The British Theatre Guide’s Philip Fisher on Shakespeare on Toast:

    If you want to help a younger friend or relative to get hooked on Shakespeare, you would do well to commend this competitively priced manual. Not only will it help them to appreciate perhaps the greatest writer of the last millennium but it will also give them a really good read.

    Click here to read more of the review…

    EssentialWriters.com Review of Shakespeare on Toast

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    EssentialWriters.com
    The Bath Literature Festival is well underway, attracting hordes of word-lovers and writers to the Georgian city. While poetry aficionados and perplexed tourists crowded into the innovative Poetry Taxi outside Bath Abbey, others, including EssentialWriters.com spent a lively lunchtime feasting on Shakespeare on Toast in the enthusiastic company of author and Shakespearean actor Ben Crystal.

    Ben opened the presentation with a reading that began in the stilted voice of an eleven-year-old, before exploding into a passion and fervour than made some audience members choke on their complimentary glass of Highland Park malt whisky.

    The son of language expert Professor David Crystal, Ben runs workshops for actors encouraging them to glean more meaning and power from the Bard’s words by using his original accent.

    Ben demonstrated this to his Bath Lit Fest audience, proclaiming a passage first with a posh Laurence-Olivier-esque delivery, and then in Shakespeare’s traditional voice – a peculiar blend of English West Country and Cockney with a trace of Irish.

    The result was astonishingly different, both de-sanitising the words and speeding them up. Indeed, according to Ben, through altering the pronunciation of many words, we’ve lost much of the meaning.
    He gave the example of a speech in As You Like It, in which a joke about ‘hours’ has lost its lewd undertones as the word no longer rhymes with ‘whores’.

    Context was just as important, as he described the setting of the Globe Theatre in London – the space the majority of the plays were written for.

    “The plays were performed at 2 O’clock in the afternoon – broad daylight – as it was too expensive to light the theatre with candles. This meant the actors could see the audience as clearly as they could be seen, and could share sections of the play with a single person. The plays were intended to be heard more than seen, however, as much of the stage was obstructed.”

    These elements influenced Shakespeare’s words as much as the playwriting conventions of the day, the main of which was the iambic pentameter, demonstrated by Ben and two talented volunteers, who he encouraged with all the skill of a conductor.

    “I just don’t want anybody to not have the chance to appreciate Shakespeare,” Ben said, making some of us wish he would give up writing to become a full time lecturer – if only all teachers could convey a love of literature so contagiously!
    Judy Darley

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    Civilian Reader Reviews Shakespeare on Toast

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    Civilian Reader

    An enthusiast bursts the bubble of Shakespeare elitism, opening its doors to all

    Who’s afraid of William Shakespeare? Just about everyone. He wrote too much and what he wrote is inaccessible and elitist. This is wrong. Shakespeare on Toast knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of Shakespeare, and author Ben Crystal brings the Bard to life, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling and uplifting drama.

    Crystal romps through the facts about Shakespeare’s life in under fifteen pages and then dismisses them with a cool ‘I don’t care who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.’ He then launches into a pithy and witty account of what Elizabethan life was like, what it would have been like going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time, and why exactly he wrote in poetry anyway. The second half of the book covers how to read and understand Shakespeare’s language, explains how Shakespeare left clues for his actors within the text, and finishes with an in-depth examination of a scene from Macbeth. Crystal’s prose is peppered with humorous asides and pop culture, his use of dialogue from Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, or rap by Mos Def to explain about rhythm and metre. The structure of the book breaks it down into five easily digestible “Acts”, while the chapter titles are all fun and pertinent scene locations, e.g. “Act 2: Curtain Up, Scene 3, A galaxy far, far away”.

    The author is a trained actor who also studied Language and Linguistics at university, and obviously knows what he’s talking about. It is refreshing to have an actor’s perspective on Shakespeare, and makes a great change from dry academic books with too much emphasis on reading Shakespeare and not enough on actually watching him. As Crystal admits, the book is short, but it does exactly what it says on the label: offers the reluctant reader a way to crack the basics of the Bard. Crystal’s no-nonsense attitude and witty approach really make the book stand out, and he covers all the major things you need to understand and (whisper it) enjoy Shakespeare. I’d like to buy a copy for the last two Shakespeare-phobic directors I worked with.

    This should be required reading for actors, anyone doing English Literature at school or university, and the girls who spoiled the performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor I went to at the Globe this summer by whispering to each other that they couldn’t understand a word. Highly recommended, and not just by me but also by Judi Dench and Richard Eyre!

    Try this along with Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare and David Crystal’s Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language.

    Emma Newrick

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    Around the Globe Magazine Review of Shakespeare on Toast

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    Around the Globe Magazine – Autumn 2008

    If you’re a reader of Around the Globe, the chances are you’re not too scared of Shakespeare. But there are a lot of unfortunate Bardophobes out there, Ben Crystal tells us, and apparently his book is just the cure they need. At various points in Shakespeare on Toast Crystal reminds us that he used to be one of them – he “once wouldn’t be seen dead near a production of Shakespeare”. But now he’s seen the light, and, well, there’s no zealot like a convert…

    And this convert couldn’t be a more enthusiastic advocate for the greatness of Shakespeare, and for the idea that anyone is able to gain access to that greatness if only they know how. So Shakespeare on Toast begins at the beginning, with the basics, and an exhortation that we look at Shakespeare ‘with more of an Elizabethan head on our shoulders’. Crystal examines the experience of watching a play at the first Globe (he has acted at the new Globe himself). He introduces the First Folio and considers Shakespeare’s own reluctance to be published. He extracts character clues from the opening to Hamlet. He describes the relationships of Shakespeare’s stories to the originals they were based on. And then he ventures to tackle the scariest thing of all – all that ghastly, incomprehensible writing!

    As the self-appointed scourge of Bardophobia, Crystal seeks to demystify some of the most alarming aspects of Shakespeare (especially as perceived by those who developed their allergy at school): the iambic pentameter, all those difficult olde words, and so on. He shows how a heartbeat keeps iambic time, and uses well-chosen examples from plays and sonnets to teach us to read the metre (as it were).

    It’s all very personal – we find plenty of Crystal himself in his book, peppered with first-person references (‘…as my mother would say…’) – and friendly; and it’s full of imaginative and useful analogies. Elvis returning to Memphis; a Beatles cover version by Cher; buying a DVD; a prac-crit of Mos Def lyrics; the instruction manual to an aircraft engine; the birth of Google – and my favourite, the music of Miles Davis (explaining Shakespeare’s jazz variations on the ‘normal’ iambic pentameter theme). The analogies are often silly and often imprecise, but they are pitched perfectly to clarify rather than complicate, and to create satisfying ‘I’d not thought about it like that’ moments.

    Crystal is particularly eloquent on what makes Shakespeare’s characters human and remarkable, and it all – of course – comes down to the words. As the book develops, Crystal goes on to expound theories – some old, some new – about how you can read a text, what you can learn from it about the state of the speaking characters and their situations. As an actor, he is keen on the ‘directorial’ clues to be found in the writing, the clues that Shakespeare plants to guide his actors’ movement, gesture, delivery, breathing. By the book’s Fifth Act Crystal is zeroing in on a scene, with the reader now ready to be led through a passage from Macbeth in some detail, pressed to appreciate it through our guide’s closely-read interpretation, and encouraged to apply the same tools to other passages from Shakespeare. Look at the irregularities of metre; look for yous and thous; consider the context in which audiences first saw it. For the Macbeth scene he even plots a graph of line lengths, which sounds (and indeed is) incredibly nerdy, but is actually rather amazing, too.

    Shakespeare on Toast is reassuring, and appealing, and Crystal’s bounding enthusiasm is hard to resist. And while there are a few little theories one might contest or little facts that need correcting, these are petty flaws in a valuable book that does what it does very well. If, like Crystal, you’re a bit of a Shakespeare evangelist, you’ll want all your Shakespeare-resistant friends to read it. I’ll certainly be buying copies for mine.

    — Daniel Hahn

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