ABSTRACT
From “An Open Letter to William Shakespeare, or, As I Don’t Like It….”
I suppose that bit by bit I should have been preparing myself to realize that The Tempest was your gravest mistake. I, of course, had wrongly held that it was your finest play; I had imagined it to be a Faust in reverse, the last in your final cycle of plays about mercy and forgiveness, a play that is throughout its length a storm, reaching calm waters only in its final pages. I had felt that you were in your right mind when you made it hard, craggy and dramatic. I felt that it was no accident that in the three plots you contrast a lonely, truth-seeking Prospero with lords crude and murderous, with greedy and darkly wicked clowns. And I felt that you had not suddenly forgotten about the rules of play writing, such as the one of “making every character like someone or other in the audience,” but you had deliberately put your greatest masterpiece a little farther away from us onto a higher level. Now, after reading all the notices, I find that The Tempest is your worst play—the very worst, this time—and I must apologize to you for failing to disguise its weakness more thoroughly.
—Peter Brook 1