I’ve returned to Cicley Berry’s writing recently, and wanted to register in a blog post how good it is. I mean ‘good’ as both impressively skillful but also ‘good’ as, well, wholesome: the analysis she provides to help actors read difficult texts is exactly the kind of thing that my own academic background has led me to accept as what criticism should be. Indeed, I wonder now whether she and Anne Barton ever talked much, and if they were ever recorded: the two women have a lot in common in terms of critical method as well as Shakespeare, since both of them pay a careful attention to every aspect of the text of a play, and use that as a foundation for their arguments.

Those arguments are, of course, very different: Berry wants to help actors to express their characters, and so the textual insights she offers are always framed as part of the make-up of a character, and this analysis is only part of an oeuvre that contains a great many other exercises for actors and directors.

That said, I will almost certainly be using some of Berry’s discussions of Hamlet and Macbeth in my close reading lectures next year. She has a talent for pointing out things that might go unnoticed by a student or by an actor. This means that my reading for research purposes has once again ended up with an idea for teaching, but – still – I guess that’s no bad thing.