The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare by Peter Brook (review)

Peter Brook is a great director. Yet a paradox emerges at once from the chronology of his Shakespeare productions: he has never directed one of the history plays apart from his first professional production, King John, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (1945). Is there something about history itself that he finds constricting? It is not a question he addresses directly in these reflections. They are the musings of an Old Master that often illuminate in few words.

On the actors he has known, his perceptions can be striking. Gielgud was well known for his gaffes. Brook maintains that they come from the same source as his gift for verse speaking: “he was a unique neurological phenomenon. The movement of his tongue was an inseparable part of the movement of his thought” (88). There are fascinating anecdotes of Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the Titus Andronicus that toured Europe. Paul Scofield is the actor he most admires, above all in his “all-encompassing playing of Lear” (60). King Lear brings out the best in Brook’s judgments, starting from the assertion that Lear is no kind of dotard in the opening scene and that Goneril has a genuine grievance against a father who is ruining her household.

Brook scatters insights over the plays he has directed, most especially, and valuably, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and Hamlet. There is a fine explication of the passage beginning “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”. Love’s Labour’s Lost “introduced an enigmatic coexistence of light and dark … Lightness needs the shadow of darkness to make it real” (30). Of the many factors that determine the tragic protagonist, which may include the zodiacal: “The Greeks called it “‘destiny’”; the word today is ‘genetic’” (55). From first to last, what Brook returns to is words. “A word is like a glove … But life is given by the hand that fills it” (90).

What Brook rejects is worth recording here: “Any scene in Shakespeare can be vulgarised almost out of recognition with the wish to have a modern concept” (84). The director must strive towards quality and form, realising that “A play of Shakespeare’s must be played as one great sinuous phrase” (26). To achieve this phrase is the highest form of wisdom.