As I mentioned in a post at the beginning of this year, 2024 has been the year of Shakespeare, and I have been reading all of his works — the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. My friend Brenda is on the journey with me.
We're getting close to the end. Ten plays left as of this writing. I'd like to say that it has all been fantastic, enjoyable, amazing, but I can't. Some of it has been painful to read. The plots can be thin and overused. The characters can be flat.
But, there is also brilliance. Words and phrases and characters and descriptions. Jealousy, outrage, revenge, love, infatuation. I have favorites — The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, probably at the top of my list. More on that once the project is complete.
Meanwhile, I wanted to share some brilliance from one of the supplemental works we've been reading to bring clarity and perspective to Will's works. It's WH Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare. Below are a few excerpts:
Regarding Richard III, Auden says that the play concentrates on an individual character: the character of a villain. He goes on to say, "There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously, for its own sake." Auden makes a lot of distinctions, and I always find that they make me pause and reflect.
In his lecture about The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he closes with a provocative comment:
"It is harder for the guilty to admit guilt and accept forgiveness than for the innocent to forgive. Many promising reconciliations have been wrecked because both sides were ready to forgive, but neither side was ready to be forgiven."
Love's Labour's Lost is a play he thinks is "not the greatest of Shakespeare's plays," and I agree. One of the fascinating asides in his lecture is about sight:
"Sight is the most intellectual of the senses: you can see possibilities, your sight is under the control of your will, it is the organ of choice. Eve saw the apple was good to eat. The lower senses are innocent — guilt and love are conveyed by the eye. Sight is active, hearing obedient. Iconographically, the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation is represented as conceiving through the ear."
When discussing A Midsummer Night's Dream, Auden said the following about myth:
"Myths present an analogous fusion of accident and substance. The use of myths. A myth must have universal applicability, otherwise it becomes a private symbol, and the universal experience must be one to which the individual is related in a unique way — either intermittently, or happily or unhappily. There is no need for a myth on the law of gravity, since we all behave under its influence in the same way, but there is a need for a myth on the experience of falling in love, because its effects are unique."
About the Sonnets, he asks: "Why should so much poetry be written about sexual love and so little about eating — which is just as pleasurable and never lets you down — or about family affection, or about the love of mathematics?" Well...
He goes on to say, "Falling in love is the discovery of what "I exist" means."
It's not uncommon for Auden to go in a very unexpected direction. When discussing Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V, he decides to talk about fat...
"Why do people get fat? — because they eat humble pie as their food and swallow their pride as their drink. What does drink do? It destroys the sense of time and makes one childlike and able to return to the innocence one enjoyed before one had sex. Why do people get fat? "Getting the wind up": men imitate pregnancy in fatness, which is a symbol for the 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 pubic, 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."
So many nuggets like that one. Sometimes I just laugh out loud.
For Julius Caesar, Auden embarks on a discussion of groups:
"Julius Caesar begins with a crowd scene. First things in Shakespeare are always important. There are three types of groups of people: societies, communities, and crowds. A society is something I can belong to, a community is something I can join, a crowd is something I add to."
In his lecture on As You Like It, he quotes Goethe — "Es bidet tin Talent such in Der Still, / Sich pin Character in dem Strom Der Welt," talent builds itself in quietness, character in the stream of the world.
To read Shakespeare and have Auden in your ear is a wonderful experience. We've also been reading Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, which is more historical but also very illuminating.
Perhaps some of these quotes don't have the same effect unless you're engrossed as we are on this project of reading Shakespeare. But hopefully you'll find something here to make you stop and think. Auden does that to me over and over again.
More insights from reading Auden in an upcoming post.
