false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg 235729 2 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.<p> 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 <I>The Merry Wives of Windsor</I> by declining to say a word about it--instead he simply played a recording of Verdi's <I>Falstaff</I> 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 <I>Julius Ceasar</I>: 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 <I>Henry IV</I>, Auden spins off his own freestanding riffs, which amount to short prose poems on Shakespearean themes: <blockquote> 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. </blockquote> 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, <I>Lectures on Shakespeare</I> 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." <I>--James Marcus</I> 1373448 9 9 2001 Lectures on Shakespeare (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions) total:28|5:18|4:2|3:5|2:3|1:0| 28 119 47 6 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 2 0 false Sat Jul 26 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jul 22 19:40:54 -0700 2008 Sat Jul 26 11:29:34 -0700 2008
Shakespeare critical essays vary widely. They can go from simple reflecti...more...]]> 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Mon Sep 21 23:33:45 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 21 23:39:06 -0700 2009 1383439 0691057303 9780691057309 2 1 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1183146155m/1383439.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1383439.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 3 0 false Sun Aug 12 21:09:11 -0700 2007 Sun Nov 23 14:18:13 -0800 2008 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 3 0 false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 29 18:08:21 -0700 2007 Thu Apr 03 05:32:51 -0700 2008 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Tue Jun 12 11:51:54 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 12 11:54:36 -0700 2007 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 2 0 false Sun Nov 02 11:54:48 -0800 2008 Sun Nov 02 11:55:40 -0800 2008 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Fri Dec 04 10:13:15 -0800 2009 Fri Dec 04 10:13:15 -0800 2009 1383439 0691057303 9780691057309 2 1 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1183146155m/1383439.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1383439.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Sat Nov 21 21:06:42 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 21 21:06:42 -0800 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Wed Nov 11 08:06:08 -0800 2009 Wed Nov 11 08:06:08 -0800 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Sun Nov 08 11:39:26 -0800 2009 Sun Nov 08 11:39:26 -0800 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Fri Nov 06 03:28:49 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 06 03:28:49 -0800 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Wed Aug 26 19:09:48 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 26 19:09:48 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Mon Jul 06 17:07:51 -0700 2009 Mon Jul 06 17:07:51 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Thu Jul 02 13:15:04 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 02 13:15:04 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Tue Jun 30 00:01:38 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 30 00:01:41 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 4 0 false Sat Jun 20 01:12:14 -0700 2009 Sat Jun 20 01:12:14 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Fri Jun 12 03:14:36 -0700 2009 Fri Jun 12 03:14:36 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 3 0 false Tue Jun 09 14:32:47 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 09 14:32:47 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 5 0 false Tue Jun 02 03:10:31 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 02 03:10:31 -0700 2009 235729 0691102821 9780691102825 26 5 4.25 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172979489m/235729.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235729.Lectures_on_Shakespeare 0 0 false Fri Apr 24 14:26:59 -0700 2009 Fri Apr 24 14:26:59 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=235729