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    The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare
    The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare
    The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare

    By Peter Brook

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    About this ebook

    In The Quality of Mercy, one of the world's most revered theatre directors reflects on a fascinating variety of Shakespearean topics.
    In this sequence of essays - all but one published here for the first time - Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse. He also revisits some of the plays which he has directed with notable brilliance, such as King Lear, Titus Andronicus and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
    Taken as a whole, this short but immensely wise book offers an illuminating and provocative insight into a great director's relationship with our greatest playwright.
    'This book is an invaluable gift from the greatest Shakespeare director of our time... Brook's genius, modesty and brilliance shine through on every page.' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
    'Exquisite... enthralling... This short, modest and brilliant book does more than many more grandiose tomes to renew the reader's fascination with the plays, and the theatre-goer's wonder at the extraordinary and diverse situations locked up inside the First Folio. It should be required reading at all universities and drama clubs' Guardian
    'This volume positively seethes and sparkles with ideas... provides not only acute insights into the texts, but intriguing details of performance history, and a few morsels of grand theatrical gossip' - Scotsman
    'Should be required reading for any aspiring young directors and actors but also all serious theatregoers... the writing is a model of clarity, the ideas challenging but sensible... it should be on every reader's bookshelf' - British Theatre Guide
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateApr 23, 2013
    ISBN9781780012247
    The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare

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      Book preview

      The Quality of Mercy - Peter Brook

      Alas, Poor Yorick

      or

      What if Shakespeare Fell Off the Wall?

      I was in Moscow giving a talk on Shakespeare for the Chekhov Festival. When I had finished a man got to his feet and, controlling his voice tense with anger, told the audience he was from one of the Islamic Republics in the South.

      ‘In our language,’ he said, ‘Shake means Sheikh and Pir means a Wise Man. For us there is no doubt—over the years we here have learned to read secret messages. This one is clear.’

      So I was very surprised when no one pointed out that Chekhov must have been a Czech.

      Since then, time and again, I have been told of still another claim to authorship of the Bard’s works. The latest came from Sicily. A scholar had discovered that a family had fled from Palermo to England because of the Inquisition. Their name was Crollolancia. It is obvious: crollo means shake and a lancia is a spear. Once again the code is clear.

      Some years ago, the most reputable of intellectual magazines asked a panel of scholars to explore the great question, ‘Who wrote Shakespeare?’ For some reason they approached me, and I wrote a very comic reductio ad absurdum of all the theories.

      The editor sent it back with a cold note saying that, although they had commissioned my piece, it was not possible to publish it as it was not worthy of the high academic level they expected of their contributors.

      What for them had been the last straw was my ending. I quoted a very distinguished English humorist from the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Beerbohm. His answer to the tortuous attempts to find hidden ciphers was to prove that the works of Tennyson had been written by Queen Victoria. To do so, he patiently scanned ‘In Memoriam’ line after line until he found one that he could reconstruct, using nothing but its letters. The result of his anagram was: ‘Alf didn’t write this I did Vic.’

      We can all agree on one thing, at least. Shakespeare was and is unique. He towers above all other dramatists, the combination of genetic elements—or planets if you prefer—that presided over his appearance in the womb is so bewildering that they can only come together once in several millennia. It used to be said that if a million monkeys tapped on a million typewriters for a million years, the complete works of Shakespeare would appear. Even this is not sure.

      Shakespeare touches on every facet of human existence. In each and all his plays the low—the filth, the stench, the misery of common existence—interweaves with the fine, the pure and the high. This shows itself in the characters he creates as much as in the words he writes. How could one brain encompass so vast a range? For a long time this question was enough to rule out a man of the people. Only someone of high birth and superior education could fit in the scale. The grammar-school lad from the country, even if gifted, could never leap over so many levels of experience.

      This might make sense if his were not a brain in a million.

      When we did research on the brain for a play, The Man Who, I met many phenomena. One aspect alone was the astonishing ability of many mnemonists. A typical case was a Liverpool taxi driver who had the entire layout of every Liverpool hotel room in his mind in vivid detail. So when he picked up clients at the airport he could advise them, ‘No, Room 204 is not what you’re looking for. The bed is too close to the window. Ask them to show you 319. Or even better, go to The Liverpool Arms and ask for Room 5—it’s just what you need.’ Such a prodigious memory did not come from higher education and in itself is not enough to write the works of Shakespeare. But he must have had an extraordinary capacity to receive and recall every sort of impression. A poet absorbs all he experiences, a poet of genius even more so; he filters it and has the unique capacity to relate apparently widely separate or contradictory impressions to one another.

      Today, the word ‘genius’ is very rarely used. But all talk about Shakespeare must start from the recognition that this is a case of genius, and at once all the old-fashioned social snobbery is blown away. Genius can arise in the humblest backgrounds. If we look at the lives of the saints, unlike Cardinals and theologians, most were of very ordinary origins. Jesus above all. No one doubts that Leonardo was truly Leonardo da Vinci, even though he was an illegitimate child from an Italian village. So why maintain that Shakespeare was a yokel? The level of education in Elizabethan times was remarkably high. There was a statutory principle that no country lad should be less qualified in classical knowledge than the sons of aristocracy. In the statute of the school in Stratford, it says: ‘All sorts of children to be taught, be their parents never so poor and the boys never so inapt.’ We can see the pleasure Shakespeare took in making fun of teachers. Classical information along with the pretentiousness of the pedants all entered into the vast storehouse of his brain.

      Devoted and diligent scholars have done a stupendous task of investigation. Above all, James Shapiro has done magnificent work in bringing to life the taste and the throb of the time. He convinces through such detailed research that for once theories are replaced with vibrant experience. So we can imagine the young man from the country on his first days in London, walking the noisy, bustling streets, sitting in the taverns and peering into the brothels, his eyes and ears wide open, receiving impressions of travellers’ tales, of rumours of palace intrigues, of religious quarrels, of elegant repartees and of violent obscenities. Given a unique avidity and power of receptivity, one single day—or, if you like, a week—could have given him more than enough material, social, political, intellectual, for a whole canon of plays. And in fact, year after year

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