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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Who's afraid of William Shakespeare? Just about everyone. He wrote too much and what he did write is inaccessible and elitist. Right? Wrong. "Shakespeare on Toast" knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of Shakespeare, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling and uplifting drama. Actor and author Ben Crystal brings the bright words and colourful characters of the world's greatest hack writer brilliantly to life, handing over the key to Shakespeare's plays, unlocking the so called difficult bits and, astonishingly, finding Shakespeare's own voice amid the poetry. Told in five fascinating Acts, "Shakespeare on Toast" sweeps the cobwebs from the Bard - from his language, his life, his time - revealing both the man and his work to be relevant, accessible and full of beans.
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Praise for Shakespeare on Toast
‘Ben Crystal’s witty and engaging book is a relaxed, user-friendly reminder that enjoying Shakespeare should be as easy as breathing.’ Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe
‘A brilliantly enjoyable, light-hearted look at Shakespeare which dispels the myths and makes him accessible to all. I love it!’ Judi Dench
‘Ben Crystal’s excellent book is an ideal way to gain an understanding of why Shakespeare is so brilliant and so enjoyable.’ Sir Richard Eyre
‘A masterclass for modern beginners and old hands alike.’ The Times
‘Humorous, unpretentious and fascinating.’ Independent on Sunday
‘A tasty snack with genius … Having Crystal as a companion through the stickier parts of Hamlet and Macbeth is like going to the theatre with an intelligent friend … Crystal tries his damnedest as an actor, scholar and Shakespeare’s biggest fan to demystify the Bard for doubting 21st-century theatre-phobics.’ Katy Guest, Independent
‘There are gems of close reading and theatrically focused attention throughout … Crystal ends up admirably succeeding in his ambition to provide a toolbox for getting to grips with Shakespeare’s plays.’ Steven Poole, Guardian
‘Remarkable … This book should be read.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘Ben Crystal is the Jamie Oliver of Shakespeare.’ BBC Radio 5
‘An exhilarating and impassioned introduction to Shakespeare’s plays.’ Shakespeare Bookshop Newsletter
‘A succulent slice of the Bard … Crystal wears his erudition lightly … Enormously enjoyable!’ Good Book Guide
‘Fascinating and wide-reaching.’ Linguist
‘Ben Crystal is a “restaurateur” par excellence for serving up a seemingly simple snack that actually has enough complexity to delight a gourmet.’ Times Educational Supplement
‘Insightful blasts of textual analysis’ Times Literary Supplement
‘An excellent introductory text.’ Glasgow Herald
‘Shakespeare on Toast is reassuring and appealing … you’ll want all your Shakespeare-resistant friends to read it.’ Around The Globe
‘Fascinating … 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.’ National Association for the Teaching of English, Classroom magazine
‘Fun and fascinating … 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”.’ School Librarian
‘An excellent dish indeed … Highly recommended.’ bookbag.co.uk
‘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.blogspot.com
‘Could Ben Crystal be the Simon Schama of literature? Crystal succeeds in providing a pacey, informative and accessible “manual” to Shakespeare.’ inthenews.co.uk
‘An enthusiast bursts the bubble of Shakespeare elitism, opening its doors to all … This should be required reading for actors, anyone doing English Literature at school or university. Highly recommended.’ civilian-reader.blogspot.com
‘[Shakespeare on Toast focuses] on the universality and time lessness of Shakespeare’s appeal by unravelling the poetry and its impact on our language, as well as the whole notion of what constitutes “entertainment” in our times.’ Publishing News
Printed edition first published in the UK in 2008 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]
This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012by Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84831-477-1 (ePub format)ISBN: 978-1-84831-478-8 (Adobe ebook format)
Text copyright © 2008, 2009, 2012 Ben CrystalThe author has asserted his moral rights
Extract from The Last Action Hero © 1993 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.All rights reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Extract from Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit © 2005 Aardman Animations Ltd.All rights reserved.
Lyrics from ‘Shakespeare’ reproduced by kind permission of Akala and Illa State Records.
Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce other copyright material.
Drawing on page 51 by Jim AlexanderGraph on page 217 by Nick Halliday
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typeset in Minion by Wayzgoose
Contents
Cover
Praise for Ben Crystal
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Prologue
Act 1: Setting the Scene
Scene 1: Hollywood
Scene 2: A Present-Day Street
Scene 3: A Library
Scene 4: Stratford-Upon-Avon
Scene 5: An Elizabethan Theatre
Scene 6: A Classroom
Scene 7: A Soap Opera Set
Act 2: Curtain Up
Scene 1: Mars, 23rd Century
Scene 2: The Globe, Bankside, 17th Century
Scene 3: A Galaxy Far, Far Away
Scene 4: A Room Full of Character
Scene 5: Venice, Verona, Vienna
Scene 6: The Mind of a 21st-Century Fellow
Scene 7: Walford, Home of the God of Love
Act 3: Listen Carefully
Scene 1: The Year 2001
Scene 2: A Library
Scene 3: 13th-Century England. A Field
Scene 4: A Christmas Tree, Liverpool
Act 4: Catch the Rhythm
Scene 1: Theatre Way, Wigan
Scene 2: A Kitchen, Baking Verse-Cake
Scene 3: A Cardiac Unit
Scene 4: A Maternity Ward
Scene 5: Breaking the law at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, London
Scene 6: A Kitchen: 154 Ways to Cook an Egg
Scene 7: An Orchestra Pit
Act 5: Enjoy the Play
Scene 1: A London Printers, 1622
Scene 2: A Graveyard
Scene 3: Backstage at Shakespeare’s Globe, 1599
Scene 4: Brooklyn, 1990
Scene 5: London, England, 1600s
Scene 6: The Mind of an Elizabethan, 1605
Scene 7: A Castle, Scotland, 11th Century
Scene 8: 221b Baker Street
Scene 9: The London Underground
Scene 10: Checklist
Epilogue
Props
Supporting Artists
Stage Management
Index
About the author
Ben Crystal is an actor and writer. He studied English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University before training at Drama Studio London. He has worked in TV, film and theatre, including the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe, London, and is a narrator for RNIB Talking Books, Channel 4 and the BBC. He co-wrote Shakespeare’s Words (Penguin 2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (Penguin 2005) with David Crystal, and regularly gives talks and workshops on Shakespeare.
He lives in London, and online at www.bencrystal.com
Prologue
Never, never, never, never, never.
King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3, line 306
That quote is one of the most stunning lines in Shakespeare, and after reading this book you’ll be able to give a number of very good reasons why this is true.
But first and foremost: this book is not a number of things.
This book is not a particularly ‘actorly’ book, full of stories of acting Shakespeare. There are plenty of other books out there full of fabulous anecdotes about acting Shakespeare.
Nor is this really a scholarly book, full of incredibly complicated analyses of structures and themes that may (or may not) be in Shakespeare’s plays. There are plenty of academic books already out there too.
When I began to write this book, I looked around to see if anyone else had already done a similar thing, and while there are plenty of quite tricky, advanced books on Shakespeare, and plenty of ‘Shakespeare Made Easy’-type books, there didn’t seem to be one that tried to make Shakespeare’s plays accessible without dumbing them down.
There are also dozens of ‘Introductions to Shakespeare’ available. I couldn’t find a single one that shows the reader how to make Shakespeare their own; that once read, has given them the ability to go to any Shakespeare play and feel comfortable reading or watching it.
This book is certainly not the only way into Shakespeare.
But it is quick, easy, straightforward, and good for you.
Just like beans on toast.
Act 1
Setting the Scene
Scene 1
Hollywood
Here’s a thing: Shakespeare is partly responsible for the film career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger got his first part in an American film (Hercules in New York) because Joe Weider, his friend and promoter, convinced the film’s producers that Arnie had been a great Shakespearian actor in Austria, which, of course, he hadn’t.
As it turns out, Weider’s claim didn’t end up being so far from the truth: in 1993, in the film The Last Action Hero, the world’s biggest fan of the world’s best action hero imagines Schwarzenegger as a Terminator-style Hamlet. The boy is watching Laurence Olivier in the 1948 Hamlet: Hamlet is about to kill Claudius – but hesitates, ponders the situation. ‘Don’t talk. Just do it!’ the boy mutters at the screen. Suddenly, the muscle-bound Schwarzenegger has replaced Olivier:
HAMLET: Hey Claudius? You killed my father … [He picks Claudius up] Big mistake! [He throws Claudius through a stained-glass window; Claudius’ body falls down a cliff]
NARRATOR: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and Hamlet is taking out the trash! [Multiple shots of Hamlet fighting and killing guards. He slices through a curtain with his sword to reveal Polonius standing behind it. Polonius pushes Hamlet’s sword aside]
POLONIUS: [smiling] Stay thy hand, fair prince.
HAMLET: Who said I’m fair? [He shoots Polonius with an Uzi. Multiple shots of Hamlet walking through Elsinore castle, shooting soldiers with his Uzi]
NARRATOR: No one is going to tell this sweet prince good night.
HAMLET: [cigar in his mouth] To be or not to be? [taking out his lighter] Not to be. [lights his cigar, castle explodes]
Schwarzenegger as Hamlet? Surprising, perhaps, but Shakespeare really does seem to get everywhere in this modern life. Slightly less surprising might be Shakespeare’s part in the budding career of the young Sir John Gielgud, who became one of the most acclaimed Shakespearian actors of the 20th century.
Gielgud’s first job as a professional actor was as a spear-carrier in a 1921 production of Henry V. One of the smallest parts in a play, a spear-carrier usually has very few lines (if any), and as the name suggests, the part requires the actor to stand still at the back of the stage, holding a spear/sword/bowl of fruit, look pretty, and bow. Not to be discouraged by his measly one line, the young actor continued acting, and eight years later Gielgud performed what many people say was the greatest Hamlet ever.
Hamlet is considered to be the most sought-after and the most elusive role for actors, and the play remains the most produced of Shakespeare’s works; countless productions, interpretations and re-interpretations have been dreamt up, trying to nail down The Definitive Hamlet. Schwarzenegger’s, though, is the only one to have thrown Claudius out of a window.
Talk about character assassination.
Scene 2
A present-day street
Shakespeare invented the word assassination, a Bard-fact that will always boggle my mind. The word assassin has an 8th-century Arabic origin, but assassination is all Shakespeare.
Even-handed, far-off, hot-blooded, schooldays, well-respected are Shakespeare’s too, as are useful, moonbeam and subcontract. If not for William S, we would be without laughing yourself into stitches, setting your teeth on edge, not sleeping a wink, being cruel only to be kind, and playing fast and loose, all adding to what turns out to be a very long list. In total, he introduced around 1,700 words and a horde of well-known phrases that we still use today.
Most of us would be happy if we added just one word to the language, never mind well over a thousand that last over 400 years.
Think (or Google) assassination and JFK comes up. Then, most likely, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Julius Caesar. Their assassins are just as infamous: John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Brutus et al. Not to mention Guy Fawkes, one of the best-known (although failed) assassins, who attempted to blow up King James I and Parliament in November 1605.
Shortly after Fawkes’ botched effort, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, partly, some think, in response to the civil unrest of the time. Macbeth is also the play in which he coined the word assassination.
Now, in the early 21st century, Shakespeare really is everywhere.
Elvis quotes him in his No. 1 hit ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ His plays are performed everywhere in countless languages. There have been productions using actors from all over the planet in the virtual computer world, Second Life. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007 (which runs for only 22 days) there were over 30 productions, either of his plays or that used his plays as a starting point. And he’s not just in theatres, of course.
Although the first film of a Shakespeare play (King Lear) was made way back in 1899, it’s probably Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet that has done more in recent times than anything else to make Shakespeare more of a household name.
With 725 films to his name in March 2009, this writer from a small Warwickshire town four centuries ago is far and away the most prolific writer of movies: in 2005 alone, there were sixteen films made of his plays (never mind the thousands of fridge magnets, mugs and soft toys of his likeness).
The only writers with more screen credits to their names aren’t writers of movies, but writers of soap operas. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say it, but it’s still true: if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing for the soaps rather than the movies or the theatre.
But more on that later.
Scene 3
A library
Despite this fame and apparent worldwide success, there’s something about Shakespeare that makes him inaccessible to many people. It seems that
The upshot of all this is that Shakespeare is often dumbed down and made ‘accessible’ by diluting, translating or rewriting his plays into modern English to try to draw people to his work. Either that or he’s ignored in a cocktail of panic and preconception that he’ll be too much hard work or just plain dull.
But Shakespeare is the man who made people believe there was an island owned by a magician (in The Tempest) and that statues could come to life by the power of love (in The Winter’s Tale).
He’s only Literature-with-a-capital-L until you put him back into context as an Elizabethan writer, not a 21stcentury idol. Then, once you discover the key to it all, reading Shakespeare’s poetry is a bit like following the clues in a Sherlock Holmes novel, or reading The Da Vinci Code: when you discover that he wrote his directions to his actors into the poetry, and work out how to decipher them, it all makes a lot more sense.
As for the words, well, admittedly, some of the words he uses might not have been in general use for a few hundred years, but a rather cooperative 95 per cent are words we know and use every day.
Hold that thought for a second: only 5 per cent of all the different words in all of Shakespeare’s plays will give you a hard time. That means there’s more contextual knowledge needed to watch an episode of the American political TV drama series The West Wing than there is to get through one of Shakespeare’s plays.
The problem is, many give up by the time they get to the words. Successfully vault the Long Jump of Literature, stumble over the Pit of Poetry, take a quick look at the actual words he used, and the slightly odd spellings slam the final nail in the coffin. Whichever play has been briefly picked up is left once more to gather dust.
This isn’t the way it has to be.
I’m going to show you how to read the instruction manual that is a Shakespeare play, because that’s what they all are. Manuals, written by Shakespeare, for his actors, on how to perform great stories. It’s the method that got me into the plays, and if it worked for me, who once wouldn’t be seen dead near a production of Shakespeare, it’ll work for you.
The key to it all is Theatre: both the space he wrote for and the event that the people were paying to see.
Scene 4
Stratford-upon-Avon
Context is everything, because no one knows who Shakespeare (the man) really was. Some of the very few absolute facts about the man himself that we know for definite are that
Add to that a few details of property we know he owned, of legal issues he was involved in, and half a dozen signatures. And that’s all we’ve got. But no manuscripts – with the exception of a small part of a play, Sir Thomas More, thought to be written by Shakespeare – no notes, or diaries. Nothing of consequence, in fact, that gives any indication as to what kind of man he was. Except his writing.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as far as we’re concerned. It doesn’t matter who Shakespeare might have been, because who he was isn’t as important to us as when he was and what he did. But because so little about the man has been discovered, his life has become a bit of an enigma. And this seems to make people doubt that he wrote the plays.
This is not a rare thing. Almost nothing is known about the legendary blues guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911–38). Many consider him to be the king of the Delta blues singers, yet there are only two photos of him in existence, almost nothing is known about his early life, there are varying stories surrounding his death (the most popular being that his whisky was poisoned by a jealous juke joint owner, who’d caught Johnson flirting with his wife), and there are three different ideas about where he’s buried. All we really have to go on are the 29 songs and a handful of alternative takes that he recorded. But he was so good, a legend has developed around him that he wasn’t able to play the guitar until he went to a crossroads at midnight and the devil tuned his guitar for him. Not happy with the idea that he could naturally be that talented, people developed a magical reason for his talent. Just like Shakespeare.
Because the plays are held in such high regard, it’s natural that we want to reveal the man behind them. So a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to divine the man from his work, to find out who he was and what made him tick, in order to shed more light on the plays.
A number of authorities on Shakespeare alive today think Shakespeare’s plays were written by ‘someone else’. There’s a comfort to be had from the idea that the mind behind greatness is regal, or rich – or better, a group of people. The contenders for authorship include Queen Elizabeth I, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Francis Bacon. A couple of these contenders were, categorically, dead while Shakespeare was still writing, but I’m really not going to get into all that.
But I’d say there’s a greater deal of comfort to be had from the idea that normal people can be geniuses. Can a desk clerk called Albert possibly be the father of the theory of relativity? Or a non-university-educated son of a glover be the world’s greatest playwright? Surely not. That would make these people human, take the sheen off the lustre of their greatness, and stop them from being accessible only to the great and the good.
Not surprisingly then, considering this great point of discussion among Bard-lovers, one of the most frequent questions I get asked when people discover I’m into Shakespeare is: Who do you think really wrote the plays? My answer is always the same:
I don’t care who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
There are 39 plays and 154 sonnets ascribed to someone called Shakespeare. I’d be the first to admit that some of the writing isn’t so hot, but most of it is absolutely jaw-droppingly, ground breakingly breathtaking, I mean really, really quite brilliant, and the plays are what bake my cake, not so much the man and his life.
With 39 known plays and a collection of sonnets, Shakespeare may not be the most prolific Elizabethan writer (Thomas Heywood, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, claimed to have a hand in over 200 works), but his plays were loved then, and 400 years on, whoever he was, he is now generally considered to be the greatest writer of the English language.
Beyond that, most of everything else ‘known’ about him is speculation, so I’m not going to discuss whether his birth and death dates are actually the same, where he might have gone during his ‘lost’ years, where he lived in London, whether or not he ate toast, and whether or not he was Catholic or Protestant, gay or straight. No one knows any of these things about him for sure, and we probably never will, but there are plenty of fascinating books out there that try to guess.
If some part of Shakespeare’s life is relevant, I’ll mention it, but I say again, a good solid part of Shakespeare’s life is a mystery to us. With the smattering of signatures and legal papers that we have, we actually know more about him than we do about many of his contemporaries, but that still isn’t very much to go on. Perhaps 90 per cent of his life is shrouded in mystery.
See, I just used the word ‘perhaps’. So much of this man is guesswork.
So instead, I’m going to concentrate on what Elizabethan life was like, what it would have been like going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time, how different an experience it would have been compared to our time, why Shakespeare wrote in poetry, and exactly why all of that is so very important in getting into his plays.
Scene 5
An Elizabethan theatre
While we may not know much about the man, we know quite a lot about the time he wrote in, and the plays themselves:
The plague (or the Black Death, to give its more fun title) hit London many times during Shakespeare’s life. When it hit, the playhouses and theatres were closed – the disease was so contagious and the audiences were packed in so tightly that the theatres would have been a real breeding ground for the plague to spread – and the demand for new plays disappeared overnight.
How much did it cost to go to the theatre in Elizabethan times?
A typical wage in 1594 was 8 old pence a day; in Shakespeare’s Globe you had the choice of several places to watch and hear a play.
Sunlit, rowdy, drunken, elaborately built places for the most part, the playhouses would have been a popular destination – a circular, hemmed-in, almost secret world away from the rest of the city – but more on this in Act 2 …
With the theatres closed, the theatre companies and the playwrights were out of work, and needing money (imagine the hordes of TV writers looking for work if TV was banned for two years …).
Theatre companies could make money by selling a printer manuscripts of the plays they’d performed, but printing was still a relatively new thing. William Caxton had brought the printing press to England only a hundred years beforehand, and the process was still fairly complicated. A page of text would be set using letter blocks, and it wasn’t unknown for the printer to run out of blocks or space, so spellings would vary depending on how many e’s he had to hand, as well as how much space was left on the page. Once set, the page would be pressed, then the blocks would be broken up and used to make another page. It would have been a loooong process.
Copyright law was a little different back then, and it worked like this: once a playwright had finished writing, he’d sell his play (and its copyright) to the theatre company for performance. The theatre company could then make money by selling the play to the printer, but the playwright wouldn’t see a single penny of that sale. Likewise, any money the printer made from sales of copies of that play would never be seen by the theatre company or the playwright.
In times of plague, with the theatres shut, selling plays to a printer was often a theatre company’s only way of making money. Playwrights, however, were left with the option of either trying to print unused manuscripts of their own, or writing poetry. Or, unthinkable though it might be, getting a proper job.
Change of hands
Selling unused manuscripts would have been hard – selling copies of plays that had been performed was hard enough – as there just wasn’t the demand. Paper was expensive, 80 per cent of Elizabethans couldn’t read, and, after all, plays were written to be performed, not read.
The lack of demand, the loss of the copyright, and the fact that more fame and money would come from performance, meant that even during plague epidemics, writers in Elizabethan times weren’t interested in having their plays printed – if there isn’t any money in it, what’s the point?
