The Quality of Mercy E-Book

Peter Brook

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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time - Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse.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

Leseprobe

Peter Brook

The Quality of Mercy

Reflections on Shakespeare

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Alas, Poor Yorick

or What if Shakespeare Fell Off the Wall?

I Was There

How Mercutio Got His Laugh

Baked in That Pie

Cooking Up Titus Andronicus

Who Holds the Scales?

or Measure Still for Measure

Nor Live So Long

On King Lear

The Hour Glass

Every Grain Helps

A Cook and a Concept

Dreaming the Dream

There Is a World Elsewhere

The Readiness Is All

The Quality of Mercy

On Prospero

Epilogue

A Chronology of Peter Brook’s Shakespeare Productions

Copyright Information

For Nina

With a plea for mercy for all I’ve put her through with my countless illegible corrections, arrows, cuts and transpositions. I never would have believed that such patience was possible.

With love and gratitude,

Peter

Introduction

This is not a scholastic work. I try not to lecture on Shakespeare. This is a series of impressions, experiences and temporary conclusions.

The uniqueness of Shakespeare is that while each production is obliged to find its own shapes and forms, the written words do not belong to the past. They are sources that can create and inhabit ever new forms.

There is no limit to what we can find in Shakespeare. This is why I try to follow his example and avoid pedantry.

In Africa there is a saying: ‘To be too serious is not very serious.’

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.