Peter Brook's thought concerning King Lear [From 'King Lear;A Director's View'. serves as a nice encapsulation of some the qualities of a great text, in this case, King Lear;
I think if you approach a very great work, you have to see that there is one danger that is there in front of every director, which is to try to bring to this work your point of view, because unless you're very stupid, you're bound to see that your point of view can't be very broad. Each person's point of view is very limited and it shrinks the more you say that's what I believe, that's what I think, this is my conception, until really that becomes something so narrow. Most of the play is destroyed by you making your own idea into a sort of sledgehammer that breaks into the play. If you approach a play like King Lear saying, I have a feeling, I have a point of view that draws me towards this play, I am now, with the help of all the actors, trying to discover what this play is about for us today, that happens automatically because you're not suddenly going back into the past and working with a group of actors who died several hundred years ago.
In the case of Lear, the starting point is that Lear is not the story of one man, it is called King Lear because he has a central role, but King Lear is a very rich, complicated, dense, complex myth. It is a myth in the sense that like any great legend the start is not something that you have to justify psychologically. A king calls together his three daughters and says, "I am going to divide my kingdom". This is the beginning of a irresistibly strong story which touches anybody because it's about real things, about fathers and children, property, power and possession. Those all come out of something which you know you can take anywhere in the world - assemble a group of children; go into Africa and assemble a group of grown-ups; go into Tibet and assemble a group of Lamas and you say "I am going to tell you a story". You don't justify it, you don't have to explain it, because it's an old story so it happened some time long ago. "A king called together his three daughters" and already you know that everyone is listening and wants you to go on. "The king said 'I am going to divide my kingdom into three'". At that moment you have a hundred per cent attention of your audience. It is riveting - why? Because it's a myth. What does a myth mean? A myth means that something profound in human experience is capsulated in a little situation that needs no justification, it is there and you're with it. Now what is very special about Shakespeare is that in Lear and in several others plays - Hamlet is another obvious case - Shakespeare took an old story which came from far, far back and which could be told and was still being told, in the very simple way that I started telling you about the king and his daughters. Shakespeare, without tampering with this, brought something that belonged to his time, to the Renaissance, to a new way of looking at the world-which-was, he gave the characters a humanity, a contradictory humanity, that isn't there in any old myth. When the myth says they're three daughters, that's one, two, and three, and they're very simple characters.
In the original story of Hamlet, there is a young man who hears that his father has been murdered. A young man - it's enough for a storyteller. Shakespeare, with this whole richness of Renaissance interest in what human beings are, took this mythic basis and then extended it. He took Goneril and instead of making her just the evil daughter, which she would be in a folk tale, in a fairy story, he makes her into a unique human being. As the play develops you find all the contradictions, including the qualities, of this daughter, who still behaves from our point of view in an unforgivable way, but you see that she is a human being who has for herself her own deep justification, which makes the tragedy all the closer to us because we see how easily we can justify to ourselves and to others everything that we do. The more that you enter into the play, the more you're forced to respect that there are all the time two levels in the play, one level is the development of the characters and that already prevents you having a point of view, because if you say for instance - I've often quoted this - if you say King Lear was a silly old idiot otherwise we wouldn't have done something so stupid as to divide his kingdom - you're finished, you can't do the play any longer, because if you look honestly and attentively and in a sensitive way at what's written, you see he isn't a silly old fool. [...] Beside him you see all the other characters and it's only by rehearsing and playing that you find this more and more intricate criss-crossing of relationships which slowly opens until you see that the play is not just King Lear, it is a whole in which Edmund doesn't exist without Edgar, and Edgar doesn't exist without Kent, and Kent doesn't exist without Regan, and so on and so forth. Then you even see that the two husbands - at first sight they just seem two dull parts for small actors - and then you see they exist in their own right and the difference between Albany and Cornwall is extraordinarily dense, as the nature of their marriages is dense.
Basically there are two levels, on one hand there is completely realistic action happening in places - in the film, for instance, it was very important for us to make real walls and real fires so that you could feel the reality of being indoors and the reality of being turned out into an icy landscape. The reality of the characters is what gives them their psychological density and gives their actions a reality. At the same time, under all this, is what inspired Shakespeare in the first place, which is something he didn't invent but that ancient fundamental myth about human life. That is why, in the verse, in the music of a play, something is psychologically true and then goes beyond individual psychology. It is at the same time a metaphysical play in the sense that every myth is metaphysical, in the sense that it talks about something beyond anything that can be analysed and capsulated in normal, everyday terms. The great quality of the play is that the two are balanced. This is a quality that you find in Homer, that you find in Greek tragedy. The plays get lost if you tip them too far into making them so mythic that the everyday reality goes, or making them so everyday that the mythic element goes. Shakespeare, line after line, preserves the two and the difficult, daunting and magnificent task for anyone who tries to work on these plays is all the time to recognise that you're failing your obligation if you betraying either one of those two aspects and that is a terrifying challenge. That doesn't mean that one can meet it, but the more you recognise it, the more you find the interest and the courage to go on exploring.