Shakespeare on Toast

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Angel & North Interview

Sitting outside a café just off Old Street, Ben Crystal is interrupted every 30 seconds or so by a panoply of cars revving, motorbikes speeding and trucks beeping deafeningly as they reverse. Nothing, however, seems able to dispel Ben’s jubilant mood. He has a play, One Minute (at the time of writing taking place at N1’s Courtyard Theatre), on the go that he’s both producing and acting in, and a new book, Shakespeare on Toast, coming out.

The latter is his first book to be written solo, following the success of two other tomes on the Bard co-written with his father, David. As it turns out, the press night of his play and the publication of the book clash spectacularly, falling on exactly the same day. One must surely be enough, so is he close to breaking point? “It’s the most exciting thing in the world!” he exclaims to a surprised interviewer. “It’s all kicking off. Sometimes I feel like this is the day I’ve been working towards for the last ten years.”

Our pot of tea arrives. “I’ll be mother,” he quips, falsetto, and takes charge. With his languorous, theatrical body language and intense, grey-eyed gaze, Ben seems every inch the thespian. “I’ve always known that I wanted to be an actor,” he says, “but I knew the jobs would probably be thin on the ground. I’m good with words, so I thought writing or editing would be a good sort of back up career – and when I found this hole on the shelf, the urge to fill it was irresistible.”

His book is, for want of a better word, a Shakespearean manual, without any of the dry drudge that very word suggests. The style is chatty, but still manages to get across the deep love and passion he obviously feels for Shakespeare’s work. “There wasn’t this in-between that made Shakespeare accessible without dumbing him down,” he explains. “The book is about the way to get into Shakespeare through a lot of acting techniques that I’ve learnt – and if you can own these techniques, then you can go to any speech, any scene, any play and own Shakespeare for yourself.”

Some people may find having not one, but two careers on the go – neither of which are known for their stability – a little stressful, so does Ben? “It’s fabulous!” he exclaims again. “I couldn’t sit in an office for the rest of my life. This instability, this not knowing… I love it. It’s exhausting having all these balls in the air, but it’s brilliant too.” But how about the fear if ‘never being employed again’? It seems a shame to dampen his spirits, but isn’t that what all actors complain about? Of course, it doesn’t dampen his spirits at all. “Absolutely, of course there’s that, but I think when you feel that terror, that’s when you are really living.”

So what are the ultimate ambitions of a man as apparently fearless as Ben? This is the question that keeps him silent longest of all. “All I’ve ever wanted was to do good work with good people, who are passionate about what they are doing,” is his answer eventually. “And that’s all I’ve ever done, really. This is perfect. I couldn’t ask for anything more. My book is coming out and I’m going to act in a play that I really care about. Both of these projects are my babies – this is it really, this is the best.” It’s official: his optimistic outlook on life is sickening and you can’t even hate him for it. “I am absolutely sickening,” he agrees, gleefully.
— Emily Paine

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Interview with About.com’s Lee Jamieson
Ben Crystal is the author of Shakespeare on Toast (published by Icon Books), a new book that dispels the myth that Shakespeare is difficult. Here, he shares his thoughts about performing Shakespeare and reveals his top tips for first-time actors.

About.com: Is performing Shakespeare difficult?

Ben Crystal: Well, yes … and so it should be! These plays are over 400 years old. They contain cultural gags and references that are completely obscure to us. But they’re also hard to perform because Shakespeare was so darned good at tapping into the human heart – so, as an actor you can’t allow yourself to hold back. If you can’t go to the depths of your soul, explore the extremes of yourself, go to the bad place as Othello or Macbeth, then you shouldn’t be on the stage.

You have to think about the big speeches in Shakespeare as the most important things the character has ever said; they need to be spoken with your chest cut open, your heart bare, and with tremendous passion. You need to tear the words from the sky. If you don’t feel like you’ve run a marathon when you’re done, you’re not doing it right. It takes courage to open yourself up to an audience like that, letting them see your insides without desperately trying to show them – it takes practice.

About.com: What’s your advice to someone performing Shakespeare for the first time?

Ben Crystal: Don’t treat it lightly, but don’t treat it too seriously either. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s similar to the notion of having to act truthfully in a big space, which many actors struggle with. It’s a tricky balance, and Shakespeare asks you to deal with these huge ideas and emotions which all too often lead you into “over-acting” – stay away from big gestures and over-the-top characterizations.

A lot of what you need to know is on the page already. So it is tricky, and you have to work at it, but it’s also the best fun in the world. Enjoy it. Learn your lines so well you can go running or do the washing up while saying them. Only once they’re a deep part of you, can you start playing. A lot of people take Shakespeare’s plays far too seriously, and forget that important word: “play”. It’s a game, so enjoy it! You can’t “play” with your fellow actors if you’re trying to remember your lines.

About.com: Has Shakespeare left clues to actors in the text?

Ben Crystal: Yes, I think so. So does Peter Hall, Patrick Tucker, and a fair few others. Whether or not he actually did is always going to be up for debate. Going back to an original text like the First Folio will help. It’s the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, edited by two of his leading actors. They would have wanted to create a book on how to perform their colleague’s plays, not how to read them – 80% of Elizabethans couldn’t read! So the First Folio is as close to Shakespeare’s intended scripts as we can possibly get.

When modern editors of the plays are making a new edition, they go back to the First Folio and remove capitalized letters, change spellings and switch speeches between characters because they’re looking at the plays from a literary point of view, not a dramatic one. Bearing in mind that Shakespeare’s company would perform a new play every day, they simply wouldn’t have had much time to rehearse. Therefore, the theory goes that much of the stage direction is written into the text. Indeed, it is possible to work out where to stand, how fast to speak, and what your character’s state of mind is, all from the text.

About.com: How important is it to understand iambic pentameter before performing?

Ben Crystal: That depends on how much you respect the writer you’re working with. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are written in that particular rhythmical style, so to ignore it would be foolish. Iambic pentameter is the rhythm of our English language and of our bodies – a line of that poetry has the same rhythm as our heartbeat. A line of iambic pentameter fills the human lung perfectly, so it’s the rhythm of speech. One could say that it’s a very human sounding rhythm and Shakespeare used it to explore what it is to be human.

On a slightly less abstract note, iambic pentameter is a line of poetry with ten syllables, and all the even-numbered syllables have a slightly stronger stress. That’s a direction by itself – the stronger stresses usually fall on the important words.

About.com: So what about lines with less than ten syllables?

Ben Crystal: Well, either Shakespeare couldn’t count and was an idiot – or he was a genius and knew what he was doing. When there are less than ten syllables in a line, he’s giving the actor room to think. If the meter changes at any point, it’s a direction from Shakespeare to his actors about the character they’re playing. It sounds quite complicated, but actually, once you know what you’re looking for, it’s incredibly straightforward. Shakespeare knew that his actors would have had this rhythm flowing through their veins, and so would his audience. If he broke the rhythm, they’d feel it.

To not understand as an actor is to not understand 80% of the style Shakespeare wrote in, and the same amount again of what makes his writing so terrific.

Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal is published by Icon Books.

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The Times; Educational Supplement

‘Who’s afraid of William Shakespeare?’ asks the jacket cover of this little treasure rhetorically and concedes ‘just about everyone’. I remember Dame Helen Mirren claiming that “When you do Shakespeare they think you must be intelligent because they think you understand what you’re saying”, implying that even actors didn’t know what Shakespeare means half the time.

So Ben Crystal, also an actor, sets himself quite a challenge to convince us that Shakespeare is neither elitist nor inaccessible. As I don’t need persuading, I read the book with my sixth formers in mind – many of whom, sad to say, don’t like reading anything, let alone Shakespeare, despite having chosen literature as a specialism.

Shakespeare on Toast is set out like a 5-Act play, beginning with a prologue and ending with the ‘credits’ like ‘Supporting Artists’ and ‘Stage Management’. A nice little touch and one that ensures no chapter is too long, each ‘act’ being divided into ‘scenes’ like a Shakespeare play. Throughout, Crystal’s sense of humour pervades. Opening with the Lear line ‘Never, never, never, never, never’ [A3 Sc5 L306] he proceeds to tell us first what the book is not. Scene 1 made me think it might turn out to be a collection of amusing anecdotes as he tells the tale of Schwarzenegger playing Hamlet! Then Scene 2 reminded me that ‘Shakespeare invented the word assassination’, something I’ve read before, but my students probably haven’t. Likewise, the assertion that ‘if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing soaps’.

But very soon I found myself engrossed and actually learning interesting things. More than that, I was beginning to envisage work-sheets, Power Points and role-play activities that could breathe life into the text for students based on what Crystal was sharing.

His writing style is chatty and clear, easy enough for a bright year 8 or 9 to follow and any reasonably competent GCSE student with the desire should have no trouble. However, the book is one that both Literature and Drama students who are anything more than seat-warmers at AS and A-Level ought to read. It will certainly be on my students’ reading list and I’ve already recommended it to the librarian as well as our English Advisor.

So, what is it that makes Shakespeare on toast worth paying for? It is packed with anecdotes, many of which bring at least a smile to the face, all of which are interesting. And there are those bits of fascinating trivia that students should be gathering from somewhere that sometimes prove to be just the nugget you need to add an engaging touch to work. It also has a scattering of apt quotes by writers, producers and actors that are useful and informative.

Nonetheless, that’s what I expected. Act 2 is where the real action starts, with thorough, yet simple to follow explorations of contextual issues surrounding Shakespeare as performed: the stage, costumes, settings characters and language. In each case Crystal’s experience of the theatre and understanding of Shakespeare as a man working in theatre make sense of oddities that often alienate those who assume Shakespeare is too highbrow for them.

As in a real play, act 4 is where the action really hots up. Crystal discusses rhythm. I knew iambic pentameter closely resembles English speech patterns and the ‘de-DUM’ of the iamb is also like our heart-beat. But how well Crystal explains it and then enthuses, ‘What’s even more exciting is that Shakespeare used this very human-sounding poetry to explore what it is to be human.’ Wow – that’s it in a nutshell, just what I’ve spent decades trying to open doors in student minds to!

Act 5 brings it all together in a close analysis of a short section of Macbeth, where Crystal fully explains his theory that Shakespeare wrote his plays in such a way that the actors could quickly and easily work out how he wanted them to say the lines and where they needed to fill in with some acting. And consequently, if we read it correctly, we should be able to follow exactly what he meant, visualise and feel the emotions we’re meant to feel by not only making sense of the words but also using the rhythm.

The structure of a poem is the ‘body language’ that should support the meaning of the content – or makes us doubt it! That’s something I’ve always tried to excite my students about in poetry lessons. Seeing the same thing holding true in the Bard’s plays shouldn’t have come as a revelation, but it’s the detail that Crystal brings to the analysis that gives the ‘AHA!’ moment its momentum.

Even on toast the Bard is absolutely amazing and Ben Crystal is a ‘restaurateur’ par excellance for serving up a seemingly simple smack that actually has enough complexity to delight a gourmet.

He leaves us with a tip worth framing: ‘No matter how complicated, no matter how ostensibly random, how annoying, boring or just plain bad a scene or a line seems to be, there is always a reason for it being there. You just have to find out what it is. And I promise: the search is always worth it.’

Like Juliet I say, ‘Amen to that’
— Edna Hobbs

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The Times – Sept 20th, 2008

You gotta love a writer who opens his book with action hero lines and stage directions for Hamlet the Terminator (“shoots Polonius with an Uzi… lights his cigar, castle explodes”).

You can dismiss it as dumbed-down Shakespeare if you like, but Crystal starts and ends his short book of basic Shakespeare with the rule of thumb that the Bard never writes anything without a reason.

Neither does Crystal, whose lively, sometimes excitable, search for the reasons behind the words, lines, rhythms, allusions and stage directions adds up to a masterclass for modern beginners and old hands alike.

— Iain Finlayson

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The Shakespeare Bookshop

Ben Crystal will be familiar to readers as one half of the father and son double-act that brought us the brilliant Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion and The Shakespeare Miscellany. In Shakespeare on Toast he trades reference for irreverence with a much more personal book, aimed at encouraging both students who are new to Shakespeare and older Bardophobes haunted by the unpalatable version of Shakespeare they were served up at school (this last group, endearingly, includes Crystal’s Gran). Presented in five acts, it tackles in turn the Shakespeare myth; Elizabethan theatre and the world of the play; Shakespeare’s language; blank verse and iambic pentameter; and practical approaches to the text, concluding with a close reading of Act 2 Scene 2 from Macbeth. Keen-eyed readers will notice that some of the spangly bits from the Glossary and the Miscellany – the section on the Elizabethan theatre, for example, and areas of linguistic discussion such as false friends and Shakespeare’s use of the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘thou’ – have been recycled here but rightly so, as this is all useful stuff for the uninitiated.

In a recent radio interview, Crystal was introduced as ‘the Jamie Oliver of Shakespeare’. The comparison goes beyond the culinary metaphor of the title in conveying something of Crystal’s missionary zeal, his boundless enthusiasm for his subject, and a colloquial style – cheeky and unpretentious – that speaks directly to the young generation. Similarly, popular cultural references abound in the book – Eastenders and Corrie, The OC, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, rather brilliantly, Wallace & Gromit all get a mention. It’s not one for the serious-minded academic, then, but Crystal manages to be populist without dumbing down. The book may open with Schwarzenegger’s skit on Hamlet in ‘Last Action Hero’, but from there a chain of thoughts takes us neatly to Shakespeare’s coinage of the word ‘assassination’, to Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605, to a note on Macbeth, probably written the following year.

Indeed, for Crystal, the book is absolutely about not dumbing down, its aim rather to wean readers off the white bread sterility of ‘Shakespeare Made Easy’ for the real thing, Shakespeare wholemeal. His naked chef approach involves stripping away any academic pretensions or myths about Shakespeare’s life and getting back to the basics of blank verse;

“the foundation of it all… is poetry. Understand how iambic pentameter works and you can talk to Shakespeare. I mean it. You can have a conversation with him.”

Here, the author is indebted to Patrick Tucker ’s Secrets of Acting Shakespeare, which Crystal squarely acknowledges as unlocking Shakespeare for him. The idea that the First Folio – with its peculiar punctuation, half lines and capitalized words – is a Da Vinci Code of direction for the actor to decipher may be regarded with suspicion among academics (not least, Crystal wryly admits, ‘my Father the Linguist’) but Crystal the actor makes an exciting case for it in the practical masterclass that concludes the book.

I was reminded too of Dominic Dromgoole’s Will & Me. Like Dromgoole, Crystal is an unashamed Shakespeare fanatic, whose infectious enthusiasm leaps off the page. In Shakespeare on Toast he has written an exhilarating and impassioned introduction to Shakespeare’s plays, for students mainly but grandmothers too.

— Adam Sherratt

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The School Librarian

Crystal, who is both an actor and the co-writer of several books about Shakespeare’s language with his famous father David Crystal, has billed his latest book as ‘an instruction manual of Shakespeare’.

This fun and fascinating book reminded me in its style of a more sophisticated version of the ‘Horrible Histories’ in that it has the ability to both entertain and to inform in equal measure. One major advantage over the ‘Horrible Histories’ approach is that hits book has a very good index so it would be useful for the English teacher or student to dip into for help with particular areas.

For example, I found the explanation of the Bard’s use poetic form particularly well written and easy fir the novice to understand. It might be too quirky for the traditionalist but for any student struggling to understand Shakespeare’s work as a poet and dramatist, this would be a very good ‘instruction manual’ indeed. Crystal states that he wants to ‘make Shakespeare’s works accessible without dumbing them down’ and this he does admirably.
English staff would be delighted with Crystal’s practical suggestions to help the reader in deciphering and appreciating Shakespeare’s works as they stand rather than ‘in translation’. I would imagine that any reader using it to help with a specific concept would be hooked into reading it in its entirety… I certainly was!

Highly recommended for the school library (and to pass on to the English Department).

— Anne-Marie Tarter

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The Independent – 26th Sept, 2008

A tasty snack with genius.

The front cover of Ben Crystal’s new book makes daring claims. A glowing recommendation from Dame Judi Dench calls it “brilliantly enjoyable”. The title is explained inside: “[This book] is quick, easy, straightforward, and good for you. Just like beans on toast.” It is a good job the book is so compelling, or the author would look like a blinking idiot. All that glisters is not gold.

These last two expressions (Shakespeare’s, both) are among Crystal’s armoury in his valiant battle to demystify the Bard. He is a linguist and an actor, but most of all a fan. He is convincingly blown away by Shakespeare; he would just like everyone else to be, too.

This educated enthusiasm is Crystal’s greatest strength as a writer. In his previous books Shakespeare’s Words and The Shakespeare Miscellany, written with his linguist father, David Crystal, he proved that he is more than capable of deconstructing a text. Here, he constructs an argument out of convincing statistics (95 per cent of of Shakespeare’s words are perfectly understandable to a modern audience), historical background (Elizabethan audiences would have heckled the players), modern parallels (including Miles Davis and hip hop artist Mos Def) and theatrical anecdote (iambic pentameter is designed for the size of an actor’s lungs and his ability to memorise a script).

All of this is conveyed with a touching enthusiasm that borders on geekiness. And a thoughtful recap chapter on spondees and dactyls will thrill rusty English students. But who is likely to buy this book? Is Crystal preaching to the converted? Or at Bardophobes who are unlikely to pick it up? It would be a shame if they didn’t, because having Crystal as a companion through the stickier parts of Hamlet and Macbeth is like going to the theatre with an intelligent friend.

— Katy Guest

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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

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 – 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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