Customer Reviews

Lectures on Shakespeare

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Auden's lectures on Shakespeare may well have been lost forever were it not for Kirsch's diligence and care. The time and effort that must have gone into researching lectures given over 50 years ago, and not recorded by the lecturer himself, must have been staggering, but it has paid off. This book gives the reader a unique opportunity to better understand and enjoy two of the greatest writers in the English language. Kirsch's expertise and passion come across clearly as he frames the lectures brilliantly. Anyone with an interest in either Shakespeare or W.H. Auden will find this book interesting and illuminating.

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.

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.

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...

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.

How fortuitous we are to have such a book! I just happened to stumble upon it browsing a discount book store and it is now one of my most precious finds.

Who would have thought! W.H. Auden announces in "The New York Times" in late September, 1946, that he will offer a course on Shakespeare, lecturing once weekly, commencing in October and continuing through May, 1947.

The lectures were held at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village in the neighborhood where W. H. Auden lived. The lectures were enormously popular; tickets were sold at the door, and as many as 500 people attended, some coming quite a distance to hear the great poet speak.

Auden's material for these lectures is not available, but several students, one in particular, took very good notes, and the editor of this compilation, Arthur Kirsch, has done an outstanding job obtaining and editing the notes, making the collection a coherent, fascinating look at both W.H. Auden and Shakespeare.

Auden lectured on all the plays except "Titus Andronicus" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," as well as on the "Sonnets."

The essays vary in length, some very short, and some quite long. It would be interesting to know if the lectures themselves varied in length; if so, some lectures might have been quite short.

I would strongly recommend reading Auden's lecture notes after one has a good understanding of the play being considered. These are not Cliffs Notes. These are essays on Shakespeare's plays by one of literature's foremost poets and critics. Alongside similar works by Harold Bloom, these essays are absolutely superb.

Others have alluded to Auden's lecture on "The Merry Wives of Windsor." The student's notes - W. H. Auden's comments - are precious: "The Merry Wives of Windsor is a very dull play indeed. We can be grateful for its having been written, because it provided the occasion of Verdi's "Falstaff," a very great operatic masterpiece. Mr. Page, Shallow, Slender, and the Host disappear. I have nothing to say about Shakespeare's play, so let's hear Verdi."

I do not recommend this book and want to make very clear why.

WH Auden's poem Funeral Blues is arguably one of the most brilliant 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 Audenesque commentary on Shakespeare to be magisterial. But the views attributed to Auden in this book, which book in fact is stated to be a *compilation of lecture notes taken by students*, leave me with the impression that what we have here is seriously compromised material with which WH Auden himself might take strong issue.

I will confine this review to three points on Auden's [?] assessment of the play Hamlet (Shakespeare's master work), because this assessment characterizes all that seems askew with this book.

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 then pursues and speaks with his father's ghost against his friends' urgent pleading; he then resolves to avenge his murdered father, conceives of the mousetrap play "to catch the conscience of the king", savagely berates his mother (Act III sc 4) after slaying Polonius, foils the deadly scheme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, engineers their deaths, out-fences Laertes then climactically avenges his father by slaying the "adulterate and incestuous" King Claudius. Hamlet *does* all these things and these actions *all* involve activity on every plane - 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, is it conceivable WH Auden really could have said this? Let's examine the play: The ghost of Hamlet's father states that Hamlet's mother had an extramarital affair with her husband's brother, (the fratricidal Claudius), and that this moral lapse led directly to King Hamlet's death. The consequences of the queen's 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, I omit refuting the 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 herself to be humiliated by having her intimate love letter from Hamlet 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? 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.

For emphasis, the specious reasoning above - attributed to Auden - is not confined to assessments of Hamlet. The Taming of the Shrew is described as "the only play of Shakespeare's that is a complete failure" (page 63). Similarly odd are the remarks on Othello: "It's easy for us to see that Othello and Desdemona should not have married, but he [Othello] never does" (page 205).

WH Auden has been described as a sardonic Oxonian. So irony there may be. But it strains belief this book of redacted student lecture notes provides a faithful mirror of Auden's literary insight and genius, because the views expressed in this work appear indefensible on purely literary grounds.

Take it or leave it.