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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 820
EAN: 9780691102825
ISBN: 0691102821
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 488
Publication Date: 2002-09-09
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press

After transplanting himself from England to the United States in 1939, W.H. Auden immediately became a kind of academic knight-errant, teaching at five different schools in as many years. Little evidence survives of most of these gigs. But in 1946, Auden gave a course on Shakespeare at Manhattan's New School, and luckily, several of the students attending took maniacally assiduous notes. Now Arthur Kirsch has collated the whole batch--and, one assumes, done some major nip-and-tuck work on this textual nightmare. The result is an insightful, eccentric, and perhaps essential slice of Bardolatry, which tells us as much about Auden as his subject.

Nobody can accuse Auden of parroting the party line on this greatest of English writers. In one of the nuttier moments in the lecture series, in fact, he expressed his distaste for The Merry Wives of Windsor by declining to say a word about it--instead he simply played a recording of Verdi's Falstaff for the perplexed audience. Elsewhere his tendency was to view Shakespeare's creations as flesh-and-blood characters rather than poetic constructs: "If Antony and Cleopatra have a more tragic fate than we do, that is because they are far more successful than we are, not because they are essentially different." He's harder pressed to locate any success stories in Julius Ceasar: the protagonist strikes him as a fading despot, Octavius is "a very cold fish," and Cassius "a choleric man--a General Patton." And sometimes, as in this discussion of Falstaff's role in the double-decker Henry IV, Auden spins off his own freestanding riffs, which amount to short prose poems on Shakespearean themes:

A fat man looks like a cross between a very young child and a pregnant mother. The Greeks thought of Narcissus as a slender youth, but I think they were wrong. I see him as a middle-aged man with a corporation, for, however ashamed he may be of displaying it in public, in private a man with a belly loves it dearly--it may be an unprepossessing child to look at, but he's borne it all by himself.

Auden would return to the Bard's terrain many times in his career, most notably in "The Sea and the Mirror." But for sheer penetration and puckish humor, Lectures on Shakespeare is hard to beat, and demonstrates that for all their differences, both the speaker and his subject had a crucial thing in common--what Auden calls "a fabulously good taste for words." --James Marcus

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Quick and Collected
Review: What we read as Aristotle is actually nothing he wrote, but rather notes collected from students of his, compiled into something that looks like a lecture. This is exactly what we have here in the form on Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare. He gave a Shakespeare course at New College in New York one summer and this book is a transcription of some copious scribes and pupils. Let me say first that they are wonderful. Auden's insight is not only a poet's-though it is that-but a scholar's also, and one of such penetrating originality he makes these works appear sometimes without the heavy critical histories they worry under. This is aided by the fact that he reads all of Shakespeare's plays (one per week) for this course, even the lesser known ones, and also by the fact that the notes can't help but distill his lectures only into their most interesting points. As such, it seems that he effortlessly moves from one new vision to the next with a nonchalance that I can only assume is British, or else a character marking of someone so consistently called "Augustain." We know of Auden as a reader of Shakespeare primarily from his long poem about The Tempest, now we have another, more direct view of his reading.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Tabloid Shakespeare?
Review: WH Auden's poem Funeral Blues is arguably one of the most powerful poems of loss ever written - vide the last stanza:

"The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

One would expect Auden on Shakespeare to be a marvel. However, the views attributed to Auden in this book have a tabloid feel - or the feel of a collection of essays written by very industrious but hopelessly lost English undergraduates. One is left with the surmise (expressed by other reviewers) that because, like all of Aristotle's works, this is a compilation of lecture notes taken by students, what we may have here is a collection of views with which WH Auden would have taken very strong issue. The views attributed to Auden re Shakespeare's play Hamlet - universally agreed by literary scholars such as James Joyce, CS Lewis, Harold Bloom et alia to be Shakespeare's master work - are a good example:

1. "I would question whether anyone has succeeded in playing Hamlet without appearing ridiculous.... Hamlet, the one inactive character, is not well integrated into the play and not adequately motivated, though the active characters are excellent" (pages 159, 162).

If you've seen the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet, or are well read in Hamlet, you understand how inexplicable that first remark is. Next, Hamlet refuses to "cast to earth" his mourning clothes in defiance of accepted norms and the King's command; he pursues and speaks with his father's ghost against his friends' pleading, then resolves to avenge his murdered father; he conceives of the mousetrap play "to catch the conscience of the king"; he savagely berates his mother (Act III sc 4) after slaying Polonius; he foils the deadly scheme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern then engineers their deaths; he out-fences Laertes then successfuly avenges his father by slaying the "adulterate and incestuous" King Claudius. Hamlet does all these things - but we're to understand he is "the one INactive" character?

2. "The soliloquies of Hamlet as well as other plays of this period are *detachable* both from the character and the plays.... Hamlet's disgust and revulsion towards his mother, for example, seem out of all proportion to her actual behavior" (page 162).

Again, could Auden really have said this? Let's examine the play: The ghost of Hamlet's father implies that Hamlet's mother had an extramarital affair with the fratricidal Claudius. If true, the unforeseen consequences of that adultery implicate her both in the murder of Hamlet's father and the consequent moral poisoning of all Denmark. Further, her marriage to her brother-in-law in the medieval-Renaissance context of the play is a public scandal and "incestuous". Moreover, her decision to marry while still in mourning led to Hamlet's not becoming King. Do such unfortunate events justify Hamlet's anger with his mother - "in all proportion"? (For brevity, there's no need also refuting the similarly questionable remarks about the four soliloquies of Hamlet.)

3. "Ophelia is a silly, repressed girl and is obscene and embarrassing when she loses her mind over her father's death. But though her madness is very shocking and horrible, it is not well motivated" (page 163).

Had Auden forgotten what this play was about since reading it as an Oxford undergraduate - or was he misquoted? (Would Auden have considered anyone profoundly moved by his own Funeral Blues as similarly "obscene", "repressed", and "silly"? My guess is not.) As written, the play indicates Ophelia is desperately in love with Hamlet - the sort of transporting passion for which women have been known to give up empires and even their lives. Her father and brother both repeatedly impress upon Ophelia that this man she desperately loves is just flirting her to bed her, and that she certainly isn't good enough for him; she discovers Hamlet has apparently gone mad, presumably because of love for her - love thwarted by her father's cynicism; she is compelled - again by her father - to allow her intimate love letter from Hamlet to be read before the King and Queen; she is impressed - again by her father - into an attempt to entrap Hamlet, thus provoking his wounded rage; finally, Ophelia learns Hamlet has murdered her father. Isn't it logical this "silly, repressed girl" is under the horrible impression that her beloved Hamlet has murdered her father out of unrequited love - the love her father repeatedly frustrated - leading to Hamlet's madness, and that somehow she is therefore to blame? Isn't it clear Ophelia can now never marry Hamlet, her father's murderer? And isn't her "following" Hamlet in madness an awful testimony of the power of cynicism and lies to destroy a woman's heart? No, none of this is clear, apparently.

The specious reasoning attributed to Auden is not confined to assessments of Hamlet. The Taming of the Shrew Auden [?] calls "the only play of Shakespeare's that is a complete failure" (page 63). Auden's remarks [?] on Othello are plain odd, eg, "It's easy for us to see that Othello and Desdemona should not have married, but he [Othello] never does" (page 205). While WH Auden has been described as a sardonic Oxonian, it strains belief this book of redacted student lecture notes is a faithful representation of Auden's literary insight. At best, the views in this work are indefensible on purely literary grounds; at worst, what we may have here is a work of posthumous literary libel.

Not recommended for the reasons noted.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Auden's lectures are enjoyable conversations on the plays
Review: Reading each of Auden's lectures will not make you an expert on any aspect of the plays or poems - he doesn't aim to be comprehensive. Instead, Auden engages you in one or two key aspects from each play. Subsequently, the book could have been called "Conversations about Shakespeare."

Occasionally, as in "Julius Caesar" or "King Lear," Auden is direct and focused. Here you will get a good, general view of these plays. But more often he dives into a theme, leaving the specifics of the play far behind. Reading some lectures I would ask myself, "Is he going to talk about the play or is he going to stick with this?" In the lecture about "As You Like It," he goes on for the first seven pages about the pastoral play. You would think this would be annoying, but Auden's easy manner keeps you hooked. Then in the end you will have learned something new, something special to Auden's perspective.

Some of the themes can be pretty high brow, but usually the are educational and entertaining. And this off-the-beaten-path approach is what makes the lectures unique.

If you're looking for the exact historical context of a play or a lengthy essay about some character, read the introduction from a paperback copy of a play. Auden's lectures will teach you a little extra you won't find anywhere else.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: An astonishing piece of literary detective work
Review: Imagine trying to assemble lectures made close to 50 years ago from assorted notes and other papers. This is what Kirsch has managed to achieve in an excellent book that is superbly edited and written. W.H. Auden appears as a sensible and balanced critic of Shakespeare and his observations are always telling. I really like his chapter on Macbeth even though Auden claims that he has nothing to offer. I am just so pleased that Kirsch took the time to research and compile this book. An intense labour of love that will repay countless readings.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Refreshing but not as impressive as I thought it would be
Review: Although we should all be grateful to have WH Auden's thoughts on the Bard - and they are very novel observations - I can't help but feel slightly disappointed by this collection of lectures. It is amazing that his students took such diligent notes and that Arthur Kirsch managed to transcribe them so that we can almost feel Auden talking to us. However, I was forced to give it three stars because (and this is irrational) I just didn't feel like I connected with his ideas. His analysis of the characters is very modern and is definitely a new and refreshing perspective from what we all learned. His lecture on the Merchant of Venice, I thought, was the most interesting. However, I think that it was maybe a little too novel and provoking, a little too detached from the actual symbolism of the plays. I enjoyed this book, but I'm just not sure I have been convinced or particularly impressed with these lectures. Maybe it's just me...

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