Cracking Shakespeare: A Hands-on Guide for Actors and Directors + Video by Kelly Hunter (review)

Kelly Hunter is an experienced Shakespearean actor, director, and teacher. She brings the fruits of this experience to this book, which is essentially a guide to understanding and acting Shakespeare. Having acted for prestigious theatres, as well as directed and taught across the United Kingdom and United States, Hunter demonstrates both a thorough knowledge of and a passion for Shakespeare. The book successfully provides information and exercises that are useful to actors, teachers, and directors that are new to Shakespeare. The text is enhanced with the inclusion of high-quality video links for many of the exercises that clearly depict how the exercise may play out. Throughout the book, Hunter forefronts the subjectivity of analyzing Shakespeare and encourages the reader to use her technique to interpret on their own.

Hunter structures Cracking Shakespeare as three parts. The first two are tips and examples for examining the text as an actor doing script-work. These sections also contain complementary written and vocal exercises. Part 3 provides exercises that are meant to be done on their feet with the text embodied by the actor and rehearsal techniques that a director may try. The benefit of this structure is to ground text-work in technique before applying it to the body. However, it might have been useful to the reader to have some of the active exercises of this part integrated throughout the book. I was grateful for access to the accompanying videos of the exercises; the written instructions were clear, but could have contained more information. Instead, the videos filled in the gaps.

Part 1, “Rhythm, Sound and Structure,” lays out the basics of Shakespeare’s texts. In the introduction, Hunter claims that the book tries to “demystify the rules of verse speaking,” and is largely successful in doing so (74). Iambic pentameter, rhythm (chapter 1), and sounds (chapter 2) of Shakespeare’s texts are clearly explained. She avoids using technical terms like score or scansion. Hunter’s prompts encourage actors to use, but avoid over-emphasizing, Shakespeare’s rhythm and wordplay in favor of an emotionally rich and natural performance. After presenting ways to approach those aspects of the text, she provides examples of her own analysis in each chapter. Chapter 3, on the emotional alphabet, was the most dense with Hunter’s analysis. In it, she goes through the consonants of the alphabet and assigns a word to that sound—for example, “B: The Bastard Sound”—then cites lines from Shakespeare’s text that contain that sound as a way to assign emotion to the sound. Hunter notes throughout that the process should be about discovering what is right for each actor, and that there is no one true way to interpret the text, including making your own emotional alphabet.

Part 2, “Words, Words, Words,” dives into the words of the text and the clues that they give an actor, not necessarily about meaning, but about a character’s emotional life. Hunter pulls out the specific words: eyes, mind, reason, and love (as well as associated words). She suggests, in three chapters that divide Shakespeare’s text into keywords (chapter 5), rhetoric (chapter 6), and verse and prose (chapter 7), that a focus on these words will illuminate the text. The section also highlights the ways that an actor can recognize Shakespearian rhetorical devices and wordplay and use them to enrich and inform their performances. The exercises in part 2 are laid out first for soliloquies (chapter 8), then scenes (chapter 9). The useful exercises for the soliloquies are simply repeated in Hunter’s approach to scenes. I wonder what additional exercises could have been shared that are unique to scenes and partner-work.

An element of the first two parts that I found particularly helpful as a director/educator was Hunter’s mention of the “heartbeat” of the text (often used when discussing the iamb), and then her extension of that to the “heart attack”—the moments...