The Quality of Mercy E-Book

Peter Brook

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

Seitenzahl: 104

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

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essays, Peter Brook debates such questions as who was the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays, why Shakespeare is never out of date, and how actors should approach Shakespeare's verse.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

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.

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 he lived with this ocean of information feeding the unformed stories swirling around in his head. It is not surprising that on the outside he was seen as a quiet man!

If a question of plagiarism were to arise amongst scholars, every don knows the hum of excited chatter that can delight the Senior Common Room. It is very strange that this has never led them to consider the most important vital factor in the Shakespeare story that his common room was the Theatre. Theatre is a community, and it is only within the life he lived day after day that all true investigation can start.

Who was this man, acting, rubbing shoulders in rehearsal, sitting for hours talking to all and sundry in the taverns without anyone suspecting he was a fake! An actor says to an author: ‘Can’t you change that line?’ or ‘This bit seems a bit long, couldn’t we cut it?’ or ‘I haven’t enough time for the costume change—could you write a soliloquy or a little scene on the forestage to help?’

Imagine a fake Shakespeare put on the spot. He has to rewrite and add a new scene. He ponders a while, works out how long it would take for a man on horseback to ride perhaps to Oxford or to York, wait for the secret writer to give him his papers and then to return. Shakespeare each time would have to hum and haw, then say, ‘This will take me five days.’ And nobody ever commented on this although it must have gone on year after year. No one smelt a rat amongst all those spiteful and jealous rivals? I’m sorry, academics—if you’d been part of any rehearsal process you would think differently. Even today, imagine a phoney writer. The cast would notice and gossip about the fact that every time you ask something, the author slips into the wings with his mobile phone.

As a manager, shrewd in business, Shakespeare often realised that his company could break up and salaries not be paid unless very rapidly he came up with a new hit. There is no document to show rewriting. In fact Ben Jonson underlines this. There were no plays waiting in drawers, unfinished, no writer’s block—no Beckett-like perfectionism, rewriting draft after draft. His brain never stopped, searching and experimenting. He was like Mozart. If something of him was needed urgently, he at once drew on all the material vibrating inside him.

The theatre lives and breathes in the present, not in libraries or archives. In theatre today, yesterday, anywhere in the world, the author is present as a living human being. Shakespeare could not have arrived on the day of performance and, handing out to the actors the words they had to say, expect them a few hours later to perform Hamlet or King Lear with no preparation, no practising, no working out entrances and exits and the cues for music and the climbing from one stage level to another. Could this have been done with no questioning, no discussion, no trials and errors?

There were practical decisions to be taken. It is sufficient to look at Peter Quince in rehearsals with Bottom and the so-called ‘mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Hamlet’s advice to the Players, to see concretely that, even if in Shakespeare’s era productions did not have the complications of the present day, they still weren’t haphazard happenings. They must have taken time, and there could not fail to have been questions, even disagreements, fired at the author—especially if he was also a member of the company well aware of the problems they had to resolve fast and together.

It is astonishing that in their search for evidence to support their theories, this fundamental aspect has been totally overlooked by so many scholars. Shakespeare was not a poet living on an island, he was writing for a community with a precarious way of life.

Apart from the actors, there were in the Globe, then as today, prompters and professional stage assistants doing the necessary functions under different names such as ‘stage keepers’—who were omnipresent in rehearsal and performance to open and close traverse curtains, to stock and give out the props, to ensure the actors were on time for their entries and above all to keep order on stage and in the crowd—and in all the battle scenes, where there was an ever-changing number of crowd performers to be kept under control. These stage keepers were known sometimes to air loudly their judgement of a play—just like the gallants sitting on the Blackfriars stage making smart witticisms at the expense of the performers, as did the courtiers when watching Pyramus and Thisbe.

It is strange, even surreal, to imagine that Shakespeare working year after year with such weary and disgruntled employees, never had his qualifications put into question. All the theories that do not take into account rehearsals and performances float in thin air. Of course, there are even today actors here and there who also have their pet theories. But they are few and far between.