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Rating: 
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...
Rating: 
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.
Rating: 
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.
Rating: 
Summary: "Puckish" is not the word for it.
Review: W.H. Auden's "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. Instead, this book reads like a distasteful joke, a collection of essays written by an industrious but hopelessly lost undergraduate. Like Aristotle's works, this is a compilation of students' lecture notes, so we're not entirely sure what we've got is accurate. (I'm giving Auden the benefit of the doubt, here.) Auden's take on "Hamlet," for 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" (159, 162). If you've seen the Kenneth Branagh version of "Hamlet," you have a feel for how silly that first remark is. And, if Hamlet, who refuses to "cast to earth" his mourning clothes in defiance of everybody; pursues and speaks with his father's ghost against his friends' pleading then furiously resolves to avenge his murdered father; conceives of the mousetrap play "to catch the conscience of the king"; vitriolically berates his mother (in Act three Scene four) immediately after slaying Polonius; foils the deadly scheme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while successfully engineering their deaths; out-fences Laertes and at last succeeds in slaying the "adulterate and incestuous" Claudius -- if Hamlet is not an "active" character in this play, then please tell me, who is? 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" (162). Do the math, Mr. Auden. It is unclear from the ghost's remarks if Hamlet's mother had an extramarital affair with the fratricide. If she *did*, that implicates her in the death of Hamlet's father, and the subsequent moral poisoning of the entire country. Further, her marriage to her brother-in-law, within the context of the play, clearly is scandalous: "incestuous." Also, her decision to marry while still in mourning led to Hamlet's not becoming King. That strikes me as "in all proportion." (For brevity, I won't bother refuting Auden's remarks about the 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" (163). You really have to wonder at this point whether Auden was sober when he delivered these lectures. Or had he merely forgotten what this play was about since reading it as an Oxford undergraduate? (Presumably, Auden would have considered anyone profoundly moved by his own "Funeral Blues" as similarly "obscene," "repressed" and "silly.") Let's see here. Ophelia is totally 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 do all they can to impress upon her that this man with whom she is so desperately in love 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, she learns Hamlet has slain her father. Wouldn't you surmise that this "silly, repressed girl" is distinctly under the impression that her soul mate (Hamlet) has murdered her father out of frustrated love -- the love her father repeatedly frustrated and profaned -- leading to madness, and that somehow she is to blame? Furthermore, isn't it clear that Ophelia can never marry Hamlet, the slayer of her father, now? And isn't her "following" Hamlet in madness an awful testimony of the power of cynicism and lies to destroy a woman's heart? Clearly you don't think this way if you are W.H. Auden. Auden's gummy reasoning is not confined solely to his assessment of "Hamlet." "The Taming of the Shrew" Auden calls "the only play of Shakespeare's that is a complete failure" (63). Auden's remarks on "Othello" are plain obtuse, e.g., "It's easy for us to see that Othello and Desdemona should not have married, but he [Othello] never does" (205). I would never buy this book. It's all well and good to be a sardonic Oxonian, but this is just plain travesty.
Rating:
Summary: "Puckish" is not the word for it.
Review: W.H. Auden's "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. Instead, this book reads like a distasteful joke, a collection of essays written by an industrious but hopelessly lost undergraduate. Like Aristotle's works, this is a compilation of students' lecture notes, so we're not entirely sure what we've got is accurate. (I'm giving Auden the benefit of the doubt, here.) Auden's take on "Hamlet," for 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" (159, 162). If you've seen the Kenneth Branagh version of "Hamlet," you have a feel for how silly that first remark is. And, if Hamlet, who refuses to "cast to earth" his mourning clothes in defiance of everybody; pursues and speaks with his father's ghost against his friends' pleading then furiously resolves to avenge his murdered father; conceives of the mousetrap play "to catch the conscience of the king"; vitriolically berates his mother (in Act three Scene four) immediately after slaying Polonius; foils the deadly scheme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while successfully engineering their deaths; out-fences Laertes and at last succeeds in slaying the "adulterate and incestuous" Claudius -- if Hamlet is not an "active" character in this play, then please tell me, who is? 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" (162). Do the math, Mr. Auden. It is unclear from the ghost's remarks if Hamlet's mother had an extramarital affair with the fratricide. If she *did*, that implicates her in the death of Hamlet's father, and the subsequent moral poisoning of the entire country. Further, her marriage to her brother-in-law, within the context of the play, clearly is scandalous: "incestuous." Also, her decision to marry while still in mourning led to Hamlet's not becoming King. That strikes me as "in all proportion." (For brevity, I won't bother refuting Auden's remarks about the 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" (163). You really have to wonder at this point whether Auden was sober when he delivered these lectures. Or had he merely forgotten what this play was about since reading it as an Oxford undergraduate? (Presumably, Auden would have considered anyone profoundly moved by his own "Funeral Blues" as similarly "obscene," "repressed" and "silly.") Let's see here. Ophelia is totally 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 do all they can to impress upon her that this man with whom she is so desperately in love 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, she learns Hamlet has slain her father. Wouldn't you surmise that this "silly, repressed girl" is distinctly under the impression that her soul mate (Hamlet) has murdered her father out of frustrated love -- the love her father repeatedly frustrated and profaned -- leading to madness, and that somehow she is to blame? Furthermore, isn't it clear that Ophelia can never marry Hamlet, the slayer of her father, now? And isn't her "following" Hamlet in madness an awful testimony of the power of cynicism and lies to destroy a woman's heart? Clearly you don't think this way if you are W.H. Auden. Auden's gummy reasoning is not confined solely to his assessment of "Hamlet." "The Taming of the Shrew" Auden calls "the only play of Shakespeare's that is a complete failure" (63). Auden's remarks on "Othello" are plain obtuse, e.g., "It's easy for us to see that Othello and Desdemona should not have married, but he [Othello] never does" (205). I would never buy this book. It's all well and good to be a sardonic Oxonian, but this is just plain travesty.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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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