I'm still out there looking for an easy to understand guide to Shakespeare's plays - The Rough Guide is the best I've found. Ben Crystal, whose English language guides I love, has done a good job at making this introduction accessible and informative but I think the breadth of it is too wide for the brevity of the book.

A series of short books each with one of the various themes addressed here would have been a better option, although much more of a risk for the publisher. Crystal is excellent at mixing in modern cultural references to make even the most out-of-depth beginner feel comfortable, although there is the problem that this will quickly date the book.

I think this book is a missed opportunity given Ben Crystal's talents - let him do a series so that he doesn't need to rush off to the next thing after every two pages. ( )

There are LOTS of Shakespeare books out there but this one is one of the most easiest to read. Ben Crystal gives you the opportunity to study Shakespeare's work and realise that while it looks difficult, it is actually not that complicated when you begin to think about it a bit more.

This book reminds us that Shakespeare was no different than say a blogger or TV soap script writer of today. He wrote on demand and talked about the social issues of the day. The only difference between a Shakespeare script and a TV script is that some of the language is a bit old fashioned and some of the words are now out of use. Apart from that it's still the same kind of writing you'd expect to see today from elsewhere.

Crystal also reveals the clues that Shakespeare hid in his work, the "director's instructions" for how his actors should act out his work. This is absolutely fascinating but at the same time, it can get a bit difficult to follow and this point of the book is where you have to slow down and really concentrate!

Sprinked with bits of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets so you can put the theory into practise, this is a must-have for all Shakespeare fans. ( )

Shakespeare on Toast: A Delightful Holistic Introduction to Shakespeare

Told in bite-sized scenes, and arranged into five acts, Shakespeare on Toast gives a wholesome helping of Shakespeare in each take. The book ranges on comprehensive topics from history and setting to language (quite detailed for an introductory book) to a rather idiosyncratic analysis of an entire scene from Macbeth, as well as incidental factoids... such as the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently got his first role in an American film when his friend convinced the producers that he was a famous Shakespearean actor back in Austria. But, also mentioned in the same breath in the book's "opening scene," he's perhaps better known as a "Shakespearean actor" playing Hamlet in the 1993 movie Last Action Hero, wherein he blasts away at Polonius with an Uzi and decides "not to be" in a rather explosive way.

Throughout the volume, Ben Crystal gives several examples that Shakespeare is actually still quite alive. There's the hackneyed veneration he gets for inventing a plethora of words and sayings in modern English. There's the myriad modern incarnations in both everyday culture and other theatrical presentations. And also, Crystal weaves out an interesting allusion between jazz and Shakespeare's words, and even goes as far as to include figures of syllable-graphs, which visually show the variation in numbers of syllables per line, comparing it with the variations of a jazz master. By analyzing meter and language, Crystal suggests that Shakespeare is really quite with us--"directing from the grave," that verse (from the folios) is more like sheet music; thus lines with fewer syllables end with (musical) rests, where an actor pauses in speech and does a particular action associated with the line.

Also covered is the mystery of the man, his plays and sonnets, and his times. There's the assertion an actor would make that the Bard, were he alive now, would be more of a soap opera writer than a Nobel Prize laureate (or perhaps a soap-opera-writer-become-Nobel-Prize-laureate). Indeed, this is also supported by the fact that, unlike Ben Jonson and others, Shakespeare never made efforts to ensure the longevity of his plays (the good folio was apparently published by two of his actors [while Crystal did not mention this, but incidentally, I might ask might they be the real author(s)?], and the quartos by rival companies and others wishing for a bit of the pie through his fame), suggesting that perhaps he really did write his plays purely for his times and to earn a living.

Along with a review of many aspects relating to Shakespeare, though often told from a different perspective, the book is also filled with many interesting factoids. Some interesting ones include: The Elizabethan (and other earlier era) audiences were more gullible, and were more easily drawn into the world of the play (such that an audience member was so disgusted by Iago in a production of Othello in the 1800s that he shot him during the show!), whereas, nowadays, we take any spectacular sight to be CGI or just another special effect, and good acting to be just acting (and not a sign that a person really *is* like that). The tradition of richness in costume existed as early as then--when Phil Henslowe spent the equivalent of about $5000 (us dollars) on a fancy cloak. And also... when you read Shakespeare your Sylvian fissure "lights up like a Christmas tree." ( )