This is an extraordinary book and an extraordinary find. Auden, like Yeats and Eliot, published a few essays on Shakespeare in The Dyer's Hand and in Forewords and Afterwords but he destroyed the notes on which his lectures were delivered at the New School for Social Research in New York during 1946-47. These have now been reconstructed from notes taken by students in Auden's class, notably Alan Ansen, cross-referenced with the text Auden used and marked, Kittredge's edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (1936), now in the library of Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Prof Kirsch has done a job any Elizabethan theatrical "pirate" could be proud of. In effect he has allowed us to eavesdrop on the classroom, for in Auden's view "criticism is live conversation".
In a total of 30 lectures, Auden took his students through virtually all of the plays and the sonnets, omitting only Titus Andronicus and The Merry Wives of Windsor, summarising and expounding. His method was to take each play on its merits, in chronological order. He might have grouped them into histories, comedies and tragedies, but he chose instead to talk about the nature of comedy and tragedy as these came up. On such topics Auden is superb. A dramatist of sorts himself, he understood what worked on a stage, although oddly enough he had a poor view of both Hamlet and King Lear in this regard. He was not at ease with masterpieces. Macbeth, too, left him somewhat tongue-tied. But The Taming of the Shrew he saw as Shakespeare's only "complete failure", being a farce which goes beyond its limits. "Either Petruchio should have been timid and then got drunk and tamed Katherina as she wished, or, after her beautiful speech, she should have picked up a stool and hit him over the head." Perhaps Fiona Shaw may do that yet. He also had his favourites. The Winter's Tale was one of these and he read it within the framework of Christian psychology, a favourite theme of his, concluding, "Forgiveness is not in forgetting, but in remembering". But perhaps Antony and Cleopatra was the play he warmed to most. He saw its theme as obsessive middle-aged love and "worldliness". "Every day we can get an obsession about people we don't like but for various reasons can't leave", as we age and face death. "The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it." In all of the lectures he quoted liberally and took pains to analyse the language (he offered further lectures on the language to students taking the course for credit). A poet for Auden was one in love with language. "Language is a means of making human feeling, and patterns of human feeling, conscious." The construction of that sentence is a key to his procedure as lecturer: he keeps you waiting for the word "conscious" as he simultaneously brings about that state of new awareness. It is a technique of postponed enlightenment. Of course, nowadays we "problematise" the text rather than indicate the ground of its coherence. That is because we no longer believe that the ground is sacred. So much the worse for us, perhaps.
The time when these lectures were delivered, from October 1946 to May 1947, puts them into an interesting context. The war was over, the Cold War not yet begun, Auden was an American citizen and was moving away from his earlier Marxist views. For Brecht, Coriolanus was a play about class consciousness and class warfare. But Auden was ill-at-ease with all of that now, preferring to see the theme as the culpability of the "crowd". The crowd lacks memory. "When I was in Germany two years ago, civilians would say to me, `I was always against Hitler, I was forced', etc. This was not a lie in the ordinary sense of the word . . . Events had robbed them of their memory." Or again: "I dropped into a bar after I had been here for a week and wondered about the unaccompanied women I saw. I still wonder." The wonder colours his discussion of Shakespearean comedy.
For anyone who ever resolved in vain to sit down and read right through Shakespeare, this at last is the volume to help fulfil that resolution. But it is also a volume to place beside the family Shakespeare. In the best sense of the word, it is masterly.
Christopher Murray is associate professor of drama and theatre history at University College Dublin