Lectures on Shakespeare

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by W. H. Auden,

Edited by Arthur Kirsch

Princeton University Press

Due/Published January 2001, 452 pages, cloth

ISBN 0691057303

"W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden has announced that in his course . . . he proposes to read all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order." The New York Times reported this item on September 27, 1946, giving notice of a rare opportunity to hear Auden comment on one of the greatest poets of all time. Published here for the first time, these lectures now make Auden's thoughts on Shakespeare available widely.

Reconstructed by Kirsch from the notes of students who attended, primarily Alan Ansen, who became Auden's secretary and friend, the lectures offer insight into Shakespeare's plays as well as the sonnets. A remarkable lecturer, Auden could inspire his listeners to great feats of recall and dictation. In these lectures, we hear Auden alluding to authors from Homer, Dante, and St. Augustine to Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and T. S. Eliot, drawing upon the full range of European literature and opera, and referring to the day's newspapers and magazines, movies and cartoons. The result is an extended instance of the "live conversation" that Auden believed criticism to be. Notably a conversation between Auden's thought and the work of Shakespeare, these lectures are also a prelude to many ideas developed in Auden's later prose.

"What Auden has to say about Shakepeare's plays is almost always interesting, for two reasons. First, he knows how to praise or dissent, and to do so with much originality; secondly, he speaks of the ideas that were shaping his own thought and work at this important moment in his career, so that this book is as much a contribution to our understanding of Auden as it is to our appreciation of Shakespeare. It is beautifully edited and should interest all readers of Shakespeare and all admirers of Auden."--Frank Kermode

"Auden's lectures on Shakespeare are a marvelous blend of steady, patient intelligence and stunning insight--spirited, free-thinking, resourceful, unintimidated, liberated from the air of treacly piety, and very, very intelligent."--Stephen Greenblatt

Review

For over a year Auden lectured on nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets in a series that was a smash with students and represents one of the most interesting commentaries on the playwright’s work. Moreover, it is also a fascinating introduction to the major themes of Auden's thought. Like Shakespeare himself, as Auden would have it, the lectures refuse to take themselves too seriously and display creativity, playfulness and wit. However, this does not come at the expense of scholarly rigor or imagination. As Arthur Kirsch notes, Auden resisted a dogmatic or overly moralistic emphasis in his comments on Shakespeare. Auden focuses on Shakespeare’s treatment of characters through the perspective of “Christian Psychology,” looking at the role of sin and redemption in the plays with his own, somewhat skeptical, understanding of Freud. There is a great openness to Auden’s commentaries that recognizes the moral failings of the characters but retains, much like Shakespeare did, a sympathy for them. Auden also brings in a wide variety of other thinkers into his discussions, including Kierkegaard (in particular), T.S. Eliot, St. Augustine, Homer and others.

Stephen Greenblatt writes, “Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare are a marvelous blend of steady, patient intelligence and stunning insight -- spiritied, free-thinking, resourceful, unintimidated, liberated from the air of treacly piety, and very, very intelligent.”