A U D E N A N D

S H A K E S P E A R E

A R T H U R K I R S C H

Auden’s criticism is not especially well known, but he was as great

a critic as he was a poet, and his criticism of Shakespeare is re-
markable. He became interested in Shakespeare after his emigra-
tion from England to the United States in 1939. From 1942 to
1944, while teaching at Swarthmore College, he wrote The Sea
and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘‘The Tempest,’’ a
work in a mixture of verse and prose that constitutes one of the
most important twentieth-century interpretations of The Tempest
as well as an adaptation of it. In 1943, in the midst of writing the
work, he noted in a letter to a friend that he had, for the first time
in his life, ‘‘read through the whole of Shakespeare chronologi-
cally.’’ In 1946–47, he gave lectures – to an audience of five hun-
dred people – on all the plays and the sonnets, in chronological
order, in a yearlong course at the New School for Social Research
in New York. In the late 1950s, when he was Professor of Poetry at
Oxford, he lectured on the two Henry IV plays, The Merchant of
Venice, and Othello. The lectures at the New School have been
reconstructed and published in Lectures on Shakespeare (2000),
and those at Oxford were published as essays in The Dyer’s Hand
(1962), his major collection of critical essays. The Dyer’s Hand in

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addition includes an essay on music in Shakespeare, discussions of

King Lear and The Tempest, and a scattering of comments on a
number of other plays. He also wrote introductions to editions of
Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets, and discussed Shakespeare in a
number of articles and book reviews in various newspapers and
magazines.
Auden ignored critics of his own work (though he valued the
comments of friends) and had little use for literary criticism in
general. In a letter to The Nation praising James Agee’s movie
criticism, Auden remarked, ‘‘I am suspicious of criticism as the
literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, ped-
ants without insight, intellectuals without love’’; and in The Dyer’s
Hand he wrote, ‘‘There are people who are too intelligent to
become authors, but they do not become critics.’’ He remarked that
good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists because
poets and novelists learn to be humble in the face of their subject
matter, ‘‘which is life in general,’’ whereas critics must learn to be
humble to individual human beings, and that is much more di≈-
cult. ‘‘It is far easier to say – ‘Life is more important than anything I
can say about it’ – than to say – ‘Mr. A’s work is more important than
anything I can say about it.’ ’’
Auden’s own humility subsumed his poetry as well as his crit-
icism. He always insisted that ‘‘along with most human activities,’’
art ‘‘is, in the profoundest sense, frivolous.’’ In the final lecture of
his course at the New School, he especially praised Shakespeare
for increasingly suggesting, ‘‘as Theseus does in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, that ‘The best in this kind are but shadows,’ ’’ and
he expressed his irritation at ‘‘the determination of the very great-
est artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to
think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art
without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achieve-
ment of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too
seriously.’’
In his lectures and essays on Shakespeare, Auden followed no
critical school. In a review in 1940 of Cleanth Brooks’s Modern
Poetry and the Tradition, a canonical work of the New Criticism,
the school of literary studies that dominated American criticism
during the decades in which Auden wrote on Shakespeare, he
welcomed Brooks’s questioning of the assumptions of Romantic
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poetry, especially the elevation of emotion and numinous inspira-

tion at the expense of intellect and artifice, and he was sympa-
thetic to Brooks’s recognition of the value of wit and irony in
poetry. But he did not agree with the proscription of historical
context in Brooks’s criticism, arguing that ‘‘the Weltanschauung of
a poet is of importance in assessing his work,’’ and that ‘‘for the
literary critic, the validity of a poet’s beliefs depends upon their
power to coordinate his experience and the general experience of
his time.’’ He returned to these issues in an essay in The New York
Times Book Review (1955) in which he noted that the New Crit-
icism arose ‘‘as a corrective against . . . the attempt to explain
literary works in terms of the author’s psychology or the social life
of his age and the treatment of works as representative specimens
of their stylistic period without reference to their esthetic merit.’’
‘‘The former procedure,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is always in danger of forget-
ting that there is a text to read, the latter of forgetting that the
reader is alive in the present.’’ But he maintained that ‘‘a total
neglect of historical context is quite as mistaken as an exclusive
concentration upon it.’’
Auden also had no sympathy for the disposition of the New
Critics to treat texts as autonomous entities divorced from the
intentions of their authors. In his own criticism, he was always
extremely interested in the person behind a work, however much
he insisted that the correspondences between an author’s life and
his or her work are obscure and ultimately mysterious (he was
repeatedly amused by how critics could misconstrue the relation of
his own life to his works). ‘‘When we read a book,’’ he said, ‘‘it is as
if we were with a person. A book is not only the meaning of the
words inside it; it is the person who means them.’’ Auden’s crit-
icism is characteristically nourished by his response to both the
emotional and the intellectual personality of the artist he is con-
sidering. In much the same way that he always tried, where possi-
ble, to get to know the author who inhabited a work, Auden also
frequently referred to characters in literature as people, and a
focus on characterization informs all his Shakespearean criticism.
He often imagines and speaks of the characters in Shakespeare’s
plays, especially those in the comedies and histories, as people
whom one ‘‘might meet and have dinner with and talk to’’ (he
especially wanted to have dinner with Rosalind as well as with
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Benedick and Beatrice), rather than as purely fictional construc-

tions. He recognized, of course, that the life of Shakespeare’s char-
acters is defined by the text. He certainly was not interested in the
childhoods of Shakespeare’s heroines, and his understanding of
the modulations of Shakespeare’s characterizations was extremely
discriminating. He wrote of the movement toward the representa-
tion of characters as states of being rather than as individuals in
the later tragedies and last plays, for example, and he discussed the
necessary limits of characterization in farce. The actor in farce, he
said, ‘‘represents not a human being but a god who does not su√er,
so thoroughly humble or so proud that loss of dignity means
nothing to him. Custard pies thrown in his face or not being loved
are equally matters of indi√erence to him. The farce character has
no memory and no foreboding. He exists entirely in the moment.’’
Auden continues, ‘‘He is all body, but his body is heavy or light not
in its own right but as an expression of his spirit, as if an angel
should become incarnate. . . . It is fatal if a real individual is
introduced.’’ He saw that fatality in The Taming of the Shrew, in
which he felt there was ‘‘too much writing . . . for the limits of
farce.’’ Shakespeare, he said, was aware of the problem, intending
the Induction to suggest that ‘‘the action is a daydream of Christo-
pher Sly. But the play’s a bore. Either Petruchio should have been
timid and then got drunk and tamed Katharine as she wished, or,
after her beautiful speech, she should have picked up a stool and
hit him over the head.’’
As these statements suggest, a sophisticated literary compre-
hension of Shakespeare’s characterizations did not inhibit Auden
from responding to them with the same intellectual and emo-
tional faculties he used to respond to actual human beings. He was
happily free of the shibboleths of modern critical theory on this
subject and saw clearly, as most readers and certainly all the-
atergoers do, that we respond to Shakespeare’s characters at least
in part as we would to real people. He tries to get to know these
people, and the plots in which they act, by understanding their
social environment as well as their psychological makeups. He
wrote in an essay on The Merchant of Venice in The New York
Times in 1953, ‘‘Of all dramatists Shakespeare is, perhaps, the
most ‘lifelike.’ His plays may be in verse and, therefore, anything
but ‘naturalistic,’ yet no one else conveys so perfectly the double
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truth that, while each man is a unique individual responsible for

the choices he makes and not an impotent victim of circumstance,
at the same time we are all members one of another, mutually
dependent and mutually responsible. No man is what he is or
chooses what he chooses independently of the nature and choices
of those with whom he is associated.’’
Auden himself, paradoxically, usually felt like an outsider, partly
because of his homosexuality – during a period in which its practice
was a criminal o√ense – and partly because, although he had a gift
for friendship and took particular pride in his friendships, he
nonetheless could find it di≈cult to relate to people. His brother
John noted the ‘‘isolation and sadness which arose from his up-
rooted and solitary existence’’; he himself spoke more than once of
the ‘‘autistic’’ solitary games of his childhood (which were devoted
to the ‘‘fabrication’’ of imaginary lead mines); and near the end of
his life, in ‘‘Loneliness’’ (1971), he testified to the severity of his
feelings of isolation. He dealt with his loneliness, however, entirely
without self-pity. He was always, as he wrote, too ‘‘glad to be alive,’’
and the feeling of being an outsider clearly nourished his artistic
and critical gifts, including his uncompromising objectivity and his
prevailing sense of the comic. His criticism of Shakespeare is
especially distinguished by uniquely rich and penetrating inter-
pretations of Falsta√, Shylock, Iago, and Caliban, outsiders all. His
emigration was itself a creative response to his loneliness. He left
England to escape what he called the ‘‘su√ocating insular coziness’’
of English intellectual culture but also to embrace his isolation; as
he wrote to friends at the time, he wished, by coming to New York,
‘‘to live deliberately without roots.’’
Auden nevertheless did feel at home in the simultaneous pri-
vacy and community of Anglican worship – ‘‘In solitude, for com-
pany,’’ he wrote in ‘‘Lauds’’ – and his formal return in 1940 to the
Anglican faith, in which he had for a time ‘‘lost interest’’ but
which he had never really disavowed, crystallized both his psycho-
logical and social interests, and constituted the foundation of his
thought in his criticism of Shakespeare, as well as in his own
poetry. He was not interested in theological argument for its own
sake, however, and he had insistent religious doubts – ‘‘Our faith
well balanced by our doubt,’’ as he said in ‘‘New Year Letter’’ (1941).
His religious perspective was also usually comic, sometimes pro-
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vocatively so, and both his criticism and his verse were concerned
with the incarnations of faith in the ordinary lives of a wide range
of people, including non-Christians. He wrote that as opposed to
pagan literature, in which the artist was ‘‘confined to the over-life-
size, the melodramatic character and situation,’’ after the Incarna-
tion ‘‘any character or situation was artistically interesting that
could show spiritual growth or decay; what mattered was the
intensity of e√ort with relation to the capacity of a given character
to make it: Christianity introduced the tea-table into literature.’’
Religious, and specifically Christian, perspectives on Shake-
speare’s plays were not uncommon in academic scholarship in the
middle of the twentieth century, and they characterized T. S.
Eliot’s criticism of Shakespeare’s tragedies in its earlier decades,
but the di√erence between the generosity and inclusiveness of
Auden’s Christian approach to Shakespeare and the dogmatic nar-
rowness of the academy’s, or Eliot’s, is considerable. What interests
Eliot most about Shakespeare’s plays is their derivation from the
Stoic suppositions of Senecan drama, which he contrasts to the
Christian thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas that informs Dante’s
Divine Comedy. Eliot repeatedly insists that the dramatists made
poetry out of their philosophical assumptions, not that they them-
selves necessarily believed, or wished to represent, those assump-
tions in their works. Nonetheless, his interest is finally more in the
structure of belief that lies behind the characterizations in the
plays than in the dramatic vitality of the characters themselves,
and this philosophical bias governs his interpretation. Auden’s
interest is fundamentally di√erent: he talks of how Shakespeare’s
Christian assumptions informed his ‘‘understanding of psychol-
ogy,’’ and he discriminates the various ways this psychological,
rather than philosophical, understanding brings Shakespeare’s
characters to life.
In discussing King Lear in ‘‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of
Seneca,’’ for example, Eliot says that Gloucester’s cry, ‘‘As flies to
wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport’’ is
great poetry, ‘‘though the philosophy behind it is not great.’’ In
‘‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,’’ he maintains that ‘‘it must
a√ect our vision’’ of Dante and Shakespeare ‘‘and the use we make
of them’’ that behind the former is Aquinas and behind the latter
the lesser figure of Seneca, and he cites as evidence Edgar’s lines,
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‘‘Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming

hither,/Ripeness is all.’’ In a footnote to the citation, Eliot argues,
less circumspectly, that he ‘‘subscribes to the observation of [Pro-
fessor J. W.] Cunli√e’’ that ‘‘ ‘we have (in King Lear) Seneca’s
hopeless fatalism, not only in the catastrophe, but repeatedly
brought forward in the course of the play,’ ’’ and he again cites the
lines ‘‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.’’ Referring
especially to the essay on translations of Seneca, Auden remarked
in conversation that ‘‘for all Eliot’s talk about not trying to read
belief from works, he does it himself, using ‘Ripeness is all’ –
Edgar’s line – to adduce his thesis that the center of Shakespeare’s
philosophy is Stoicism. If one’s going to do that kind of thing at all,
you’ve got to take whole works and see what happens to characters
expressing given opinions.’’
Auden’s view of statements like Edgar’s in King Lear is more
aesthetically spacious than Eliot’s and enables him to bring to bear
a far richer Christian perspective on the professedly pagan world
of the tragedy. In his lecture on King Lear at the New School he
argued, ‘‘This is a profoundly unsuperstitious play. I do not agree
that it is a nihilistic or pessimistic one. Certain states of being –
reconciliation, forgiveness, devotion – are states of blessedness,
and they exist while other people – conventionally successful
people – are in states of misery and chaos.’’ The meaning of the
excruciating su√ering in King Lear has been debated by critics for
centuries, but this inclusive and strikingly unsentimental view of
it may be the most wise. It has a≈nities with Auden’s luminous
religious depiction in ‘‘Musée des Beaux Arts’’ of ‘‘the human
position’’ of su√ering in everyday life,

how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood.
....................................................
. . . even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
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Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the

torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Auden also illuminates other aspects of the play. Drawing on his

own experience writing opera libretti, he sees King Lear as crys-
tallizing Shakespeare’s turn toward opera and an operatic concep-
tion of character. ‘‘Lear, in the opening scene,’’ Auden says, ‘‘di-
vides up his kingdom like a birthday cake. It’s not historical, but
it’s the way we can all feel at certain times. Shakespeare tries to do
something for character development with Edgar becoming Poor
Tom, but it seems arbitrary. Shakespeare’s primary treatment of
character in the play is as it is in opera.’’ ‘‘The quality common to
all the great operatic roles,’’ Auden argues, ‘‘is that each of them is
a passionate and willful state of being, and in recompense for the
lack of psychological complexity, the composer presents the imme-
diate and simultaneous relation of these states to each other. The
crowning glory of opera is the big ensemble. The Fool, Edgar, and
the mad Lear compose such a big scene in King Lear. The ensem-
ble gives a picture of human nature, though the individual is
sacrificed.’’ Eliot’s response to the characters and rhetoric of the
play is to see their ultimate source in the bombast of Senecan
declamations. This may be historically correct, but the contempo-
rary analogy which Auden draws with the declamatory emotion of
operatic arias is both more sympathetic and more resonant, and it
better accounts for the power that readers and audiences have
found in the tragedy over the centuries. It also better illuminates
King Lear’s construction.
The one play on which Auden’s and Eliot’s judgments tend to
coincide is Hamlet. In his essay on the play in 1919, Eliot postu-
lated his celebrated notion of an author’s need for an ‘‘objective
correlative’’ in representing a particular emotion and argued that
Hamlet ‘‘is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, be-
cause it is in excess of the facts as they appear.’’ ‘‘Hamlet’s baΔe-
ment,’’ Eliot says, ‘‘at the absence of objective equivalent to his
feelings is a prolongation of the baΔement of his creator in the
face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the di≈culty that
his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not
an adequate equivalent for it,’’ and ‘‘nothing that Shakespeare can
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do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.’’ Hamlet’s madness
Eliot dismisses as ‘‘a form of emotional relief. In the character
Hamlet it is the bu√oonery of an emotion which can find no outlet
in action; in the dramatist it is the bu√oonery of an emotion which
he cannot express in art.’’ The excess of emotion in Hamlet would
be intelligible, Eliot adds, if he were an adolescent, but ‘‘the Ham-
let of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse.’’
Eliot famously labels the play ‘‘an artistic failure.’’
In ‘‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,’’ Eliot argues fur-
ther that Hamlet demonstrates the self-dramatization and au-
tarchic self-regard of the Senecan hero (especially in the posture
of dying) that in Christian terms is a manifestation of the ‘‘vice of
Pride.’’ He says that ‘‘Hamlet, who has made a pretty considerable
mess of things, and occasioned the death of at least three innocent
people, and two more insignificant ones, dies fairly well pleased
with himself,’’ and he cites as evidence Hamlet’s final speech:
Horatio, I am dead;
Thou liv’st; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
................................................
O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
In his lecture on the play at the New School, Auden agrees with
Eliot’s claim that Hamlet is an artistic failure; he says the play is
‘‘full of holes both in action and motivation’’; and with his own
distaste for self-pity, he shares Eliot’s lack of sympathy for Ham-
let’s apparent emotional self-indulgence and inaction – though he
is also interested in figuring out how Hamlet can, or should, be
played onstage. Like Eliot, Auden cites Hamlet’s last speech to
Horatio, saying it has ‘‘the same kind of vanity as a suicide note,’’
and he thoroughly disparages Hamlet’s self-absorption: ‘‘He de-
lays. The task is to choose oneself, to accept the now. Not to say,
‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/That ever/I was born to
set it right’ – ‘I would be all right if things were di√erent.’ . . . I
mustn’t say I can’t deal with life because my mother didn’t love me
or my mother loved me too much, or whatever it is. Hamlet could
either avenge his father promptly or he could say it isn’t my
business to judge other people, it is God’s business. He does nei-
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ther. Instead he finds the situation interesting and takes notes on

how ‘one may smile and smile, and be a villain.’ ’’ ‘‘Aversion,’’
Auden continues, ‘‘keeps one related but detached. Either hatred
or love means an alteration in situation. Why doesn’t he act? He
has to find an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ He lacks a basic
sense of a reason for existence at all. Hamlet lacks faith in God and
in himself. Consequently he must define his existence in terms of
others, e.g., I am the man whose mother married his uncle who
murdered his father. He would like to become what the Greek
tragic hero is, a creature of situation.’’ Hence, Auden continues,
Hamlet’s ‘‘inability to ‘act,’ i.e. play at possibilities. He is funda-
mentally bored, and for that reason he acts theatrically. . . . The
point about Hamlet is that he is an actor and you can’t act yourself.
You can only be yourself.’’ Auden concludes his lecture with a
quote from Kierkegaard: ‘‘Boredom is the demoniac side of pan-
theism. Pantheism is, in general, characterized by fullness; in the
case of boredom we find the precise opposite, since it is character-
ized by emptiness; but it is just this which makes boredom a
pantheistic conception. Boredom depends on the nothingness
which pervades reality; it causes a dizziness like that produced by
looking down into a yawning chasm, and this dizziness is infinite.’’
Both Eliot and Auden find Hamlet an untidy play. C. S. Lewis’s
definitive answer to Eliot, of course, was that ‘‘if this is a failure,
then failure is better than success. We want more of these ‘bad’
plays’’ – more plays, if he had been answering Auden, with ‘‘holes’’
in their action and characterization. But at base, both Eliot and
Auden are deploring what they see as Hamlet’s sin of presump-
tion – ‘‘The time is out of joint. O cursed spite/That ever I was
born to set it right’’ – and its manifestation in his self-pity and
emotional immoderation. Curiously, neither critic mentions Ham-
let’s explicit and contrary recognition in Act 5 of ‘‘a special provi-
dence in the fall of a sparrow,’’ with its reference to Matthew, and
of the ‘‘divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we
will,’’ nor the accompanying clear change in Hamlet’s state of
mind and behavior, including, symbolically, his dress, now no
longer disordered, but a simple sea gown. It is in Act 5, after his
return to Denmark, that the gravedigger identifies Hamlet’s age
as thirty, whereas in the first four acts he indeed behaves like an
adolescent, the age appropriate, as Barbara Everett has shown,
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both in Elizabethan times and now, to a university student. Eliot

mentions but dismisses the possibility of adolescence, Auden no-
tices that there seem to be two ages but does not know what to
make of them. Neither critic, finally, takes into consideration
Hamlet’s harrowing confrontation with mortality – in his encoun-
ters with the Ghost in the early acts of the play, as well as in the
grief and exponential sense of loss he su√ers in the death of his
father and in the loss, amounting to death, of his mother, of
Ophelia, and of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – all relationships
that, had they not been poisoned by a king who truly is ‘‘to blame,’’
as Laertes declares, might indeed have enabled him to ‘‘be’’ him-
self. The explanation of Hamlet’s emotions that Eliot was looking
for, I think, is his experience of grief, a universal human condition
in which one necessarily becomes vertiginously conscious of ‘‘the
nothingness that pervades reality’’; and it is fitting that Shake-
speare, and we, should see Hamlet as older in Act 5, when he has
emerged from his grief.
The other Shakespeare play for which Auden’s interpretation
coincides with Eliot’s, though only in part, is Othello. Eliot quotes
Othello’s last words, ‘‘Soft you! a word or two before you go . . . ,’’
and declares that Othello is ‘‘cheering himself up.’’ In his lecture
on Othello, Auden quotes Eliot’s judgment, agrees with it, and
declares categorically that ‘‘Othello learns nothing, remains in
defiance, and is damned.’’ Auden is similarly unsympathetic to
what he considers Othello’s unredemptive su√ering in his essay on
the play in The Dyer’s Hand. In both the lecture and the essay,
moreover, he refuses to credit the idealism, indeed scriptural ideal-
ism, in Desdemona’s love for Othello. He maintains that Desde-
mona’s ‘‘determination to marry Othello – it was she who virtually
did the proposing – seems the romantic crush of a silly schoolgirl
rather than a mature a√ection,’’ and he berates her for not being a
‘‘sensible wife.’’ This of a daughter who can say to her father, in a
speech that describes the very process by which a girl, with her
own mother as example, becomes a woman and a wife:

My noble father,
I do perceive here a divided duty.
To you I am bound for life and education;
My life and education both do learn me
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How to respect you: you are the lord of duty;

I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband;
And so much duty as my mother show’d
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor my lord.

Auden essentially sees Othello through Iago’s eyes, whereas the

genius of the play is its double focus, its representation of Desde-
mona’s and Iago’s visions of Othello at the same time.
The major part of Auden’s lecture and essay on Othello, how-
ever, in which he departs from Eliot is in his interpretation of Iago,
the outsider who is a villain but with whom his own experience
nonetheless enabled him to feel a decided a≈nity. His imaginative
sympathy with Iago deepens, if not supplants, Coleridge’s cele-
brated notion of Iago’s ‘‘motiveless malignancy.’’ Auden argues
that though we may pity Othello, we cannot respect him, and that
‘‘our aesthetic respect is reserved for Iago.’’ In his lecture on
Othello, he treats Iago as a diabolic figure, an ‘‘inverted saint,’’ as
well as an example of the conception of the acte gratuit that is
represented in the episode in the Confessions in which Saint Au-
gustine describes his theft, as an adolescent, of pears from an
orchard and explains that he stole for no other reason than the
doing of it, the doing of it, as Auden mordantly says, ‘‘not on a
motive of pleasure or pain, or of the rational and the irrational, but
just for the hell of it.’’ Auden also relates Iago to the conception of
perversity presented in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground,
our need to deny ‘‘the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heav-
ens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to
tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two
makes four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will
meant that!’’ In the lecture Auden treats the acte gratuit as funda-
mentally a manifestation of the Fall.
In his essay on Othello, Auden compares Iago successively to
a practical joker, a psychiatrist, and an experimental scientist.
Though the practical joker’s ‘‘jokes may be harmless in themselves
and extremely funny,’’ he says, ‘‘there is something slightly sinister
about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who
likes to play God behind the scenes’’: ‘‘In most cases, behind the
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practical joker’s contempt for others lies something else, a feeling

of self-insu≈ciency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and
desires of its own. . . . The only answer that any practical joker can
give to the question: ‘Why did you do this?’ is Iago’s: ‘Demand me
nothing. What you know, you know.’ ’’ Auden continues, ‘‘The
practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies
them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are
real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own.
His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely
dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity. Iago’s self-
description, I am not what I am, is correct and the negation of the
Divine I am that I am.’’
Auden then compares Iago to a scientist, saying that ‘‘Iago
treats Othello as an analyst treats a patient except that, of course,
his intention is to kill not to cure. Everything he says is designed to
bring to Othello’s consciousness what he has already guessed is
there.’’ Auden says further that ‘‘we cannot hiss at’’ Iago ‘‘when he
appears as we can hiss at the villain in a Western movie because
none of us can honestly say that he does not understand how such
a wicked person can exist. For is not Iago, the practical joker, a
parabolic figure for the autonomous pursuit of scientific knowl-
edge through experiment which we all, whether we are scientists
or not, take for granted as natural and right?’’ He adds that ‘‘to-
know in the scientific sense means, ultimately, to-have-power-
over’’ and to make it possible to ‘‘reduce human beings to the
status of things.’’ If a member of the audience at a performance of
Othello, Auden says, ‘‘were to interrupt the play’’ and ask Iago,
‘‘ ‘What are you doing?’ could not Iago answer with a boyish gig-
gle, ‘Nothing, I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really
like’?’’ Auden maintains that what makes it impossible for us to
condemn Iago ‘‘self-righteously’’ is that, ‘‘in our culture, we have
all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and
unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt
bomb the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food
and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is
not, but it is di≈cult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a
desire like any other, and to realize that correct knowledge and
truth are not identical.’’ ‘‘To apply a categorical imperative to
knowing,’’ Auden continues, ‘‘so that instead of asking, ‘What can I
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know?’ we ask, ‘What, at this moment, am I meant to know?’ – to

entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be
true for us is the knowledge we can live up to – that seems to all of
us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are we to say
to Iago – ‘No, you mustn’t.’ ’’ Auden had a particular curiosity
about practical jokes – in The Orators in the early 1930s he recom-
mended them as a way of counterattacking the philistine Estab-
lishment – and the unusual penetration of his interpretation of
Iago stems, in many ways, from that disposition, as well as from
his interest in science. He began his studies at Oxford in natural
sciences (and then politics, philosophy, and economics) before
switching to English, and Christopher Isherwood, his close friend
and collaborator in the thirties, stressed that to understand Auden
it was important, first of all, to recognize his scientific predilec-
tions. Clinical, Isherwood pointed out, was one of Auden’s favorite
words in those years.
Another character whom Auden treats as an outsider, and with
whom he identifies profoundly, is Falsta√. He claims that Falsta√
does not even belong in his play. At the start of his essay ‘‘The
Prince’s Dog’’ in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden writes, ‘‘At a perfor-
mance, my immediate reaction is to wonder what Falsta√ is doing
in this play at all . . . for the better we come to know Falsta√, the
clearer it becomes that the world of historical reality which a
Chronicle Play claims to imitate is not a world which he can
inhabit.’’ Falsta√ and Prince Hal, later Henry V, Auden notes in
his lecture on the Henry IV plays and Henry V, ‘‘are eternal
antitypes, sworn foes. Hal is the type who becomes a college presi-
dent, a government head, etc., and one hates their guts. On the
other side, we can’t govern ourselves. If Falsta√ were running the
world, it would be like the Balkans, of former and better days.’’
At the same time, he sees in Shakespeare’s characterization of
Falsta√ a compelling depiction of a state of innocence. ‘‘Once upon
a time,’’ he says in his essay, ‘‘we were all Falsta√s: then we became
social beings with super-egos. Most of us learn to accept this, but
there are some in whom the nostalgia for the state of innocent
self-importance is so strong that they refuse to accept adult life
and responsibilities and seek some means to become again the
Falsta√s they once were. The commonest technique adopted is the
bottle, and, curiously enough, the male drinker reveals his inten-
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tion by developing a drinker’s belly.’’ ‘‘If one visits a bathing

beach,’’ Auden writes, ‘‘one can observe that men and women grow
fat in di√erent ways. A fat woman exaggerates her femininity; her
breasts and buttocks enlarge till she comes to look like the Venus
of Willendorf. A fat man, on the other hand, looks like a cross
between a very young child and a pregnant mother. There have
been cultures in which obesity in women was considered the ideal
of sexual attraction, but in no culture, so far as I know, has a fat
man been considered more attractive than a thin one.’’ He then
remarks, ‘‘If my own weight and experience give me any authority,
I would say that fatness in the male is the physical expression of a
psychological wish to withdraw from sexual competition and, by
combining mother and child in his own person, to become emo-
tionally self-su≈cient,’’ and he adds, ‘‘the Greeks thought of Nar-
cissus 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 has borne it all by himself.’’ Auden does not sentimentalize
Falsta√ – he calls him ‘‘a fat, cowardly tosspot,’’ a character out of
opera bu√a – but at the same time he endorses Falsta√’s claim
that he is ‘‘the cause that wit is in other men’’; and he also says that
‘‘Falsta√’s verdict on the Prince strikes home: ‘Thou art essentially
mad without seeming so.’ ’’ Auden argues that Shakespeare has so
written Falsta√’s part ‘‘that it cannot be played unsympathetically.
A good actor can make us admire Prince Hal, but he cannot hope
to make us like him as much as even a second-rate actor will make
us like Falsta√. Sober reflection in the study may tell us that
Falsta√ is not, after all, a very admirable person, but Falsta√ on
the stage gives us no time for sober reflection.’’ He continues,
‘‘When Hal or the Chief Justice or any others indicate that they
are not bewitched by Falsta√, reason may tell us that they are in
the right, but we ourselves are already bewitched, so that their
disenchantment seems out of place, like the presence of teetotalers
at a drunken party.’’
Auden always found in the spirit of a party, of play, an essential
antidote to o≈cialdom and politics, as well as to human aggres-
sion, and it is the implications of the spirit of play in Falsta√ that
profoundly attract him. Auden remarks that Falsta√, with his
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‘‘gross paunch and red face,’’ is simultaneously a reminder of the

sickness in England’s body politic and, in his childlike innocence,
an image of an alternate and more gracious world: ‘‘Overtly Fal-
sta√ is a Lord of Misrule; parabolically, he is a comic symbol for
the supernatural order of Charity as contrasted with the temporal
order of Justice symbolized by Henry of Monmouth.’’ ‘‘Falsta√
never really does anything,’’ Auden notes, ‘‘but he never stops
talking, so that the impression he makes on the audience is not of
idleness but of infinite energy. He is never tired, never bored, and
until he is rejected he radiates happiness as Hal radiates power,
and this happiness without apparent cause, this untiring devotion
to making others laugh becomes a comic image for a love which is
absolutely self-giving.’’ Auden adds that laughter is disarming and
that ‘‘laughing and loving’’ have much in common, as the two
demonstrably did in his own sensibility and work. Many critics,
including William Empson, have found Auden’s praise of Falsta√
extravagant, if not outrageous, but the response over the centuries
of audiences in the theater supports Auden’s judgment rather than
theirs. Falsta√ appears to have been one of the two most popular
Shakespearean characters in Shakespeare’s own time – the other
was Hamlet – and his appeal remains similar in ours.
Auden is also drawn to Shylock as an outsider, but as a social
more than a religious outsider. ‘‘The question,’’ Auden says, ‘‘is not
one of belief, but of conformity,’’ a distinction that enables him to
understand The Merchant of Venice without the kind of Old Law
versus New Law argument that tends to bury the play in theologi-
cal discriminations and obscure its theatrical richness and poise.
The main opposition in the play, he argues, is between the frivo-
lousness of the exclusive Christian society and the seriousness of
the Jew. ‘‘Whenever a society is exclusive,’’ Auden argues in his
lecture on the play, ‘‘it needs something excluded and unaesthetic
to define it, like Shylock. . . . The people in The Merchant of Venice
are generous, and they behave well out of a sense of social superi-
ority. Outside of them is Shylock, but inside is melancholy and a
lack of serious responsibilities – which they’d have as farmers or
producers, but not as speculators. They are haunted by an anxiety
that it is not good sense for them to show.’’
In his essay on the play in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden focuses on
the equivocal attitudes toward usury in the Renaissance, which
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was condemned in the Scriptures and in the agrarian society of the

Middle Ages, but was accepted as a necessity in a mercantile
society such as Venice. Whatever Antonio’s moral attitude toward
Shylock’s moneylending may be, Auden says, he and other mer-
chants of Venice depend upon Shylock’s capital. Auden also argues
that however much Shylock may resemble the prosecuting devil in
medieval dramas in which Our Lady defends humankind, ‘‘the
comic Devil of the mystery play can appeal to logic, to the letter of
the law, but he cannot appeal to the heart or to the imagination,
and Shakespeare allows Shylock to do both.’’
Auden contends that Shylock nonetheless does ‘‘alienate our
sympathy, even though we can understand his wanting revenge,’’
in part because ‘‘he tries to play it safe and use the law, which is
universal, to exact a particular, personal revenge,’’ not because he
is a Jew. At the same time, Auden humorously compares Portia to a
‘‘shyster lawyer,’’ and says, ‘‘Hard cases make bad law.’’ In his essay,
he notes in addition that ‘‘if the wicked Shylock cannot enter the
fairy story world of Belmont, neither can the noble Antonio,
though his friend, Bassanio, can.’’ Auden suggests that Shakespeare
must have been familiar with the association of usury with sod-
omy found in Dante and elsewhere, and that ‘‘it can, therefore,
hardly be an accident that Shylock the usurer has as his antagonist
a man whose emotional life, though his conduct may be chaste, is
concentrated upon a member of his own sex.’’ In Il Pecorone,
Shakespeare’s source, the character corresponding to Antonio
marries when Bassanio does. Shakespeare, Auden points out, de-
liberately leaves him a bachelor, alone onstage at the end of the
play as the other characters exit arm in arm in marriage.
In comparing The Merchant of Venice and the Henry IV plays,
Auden argues that Shakespeare ‘‘intrudes Falsta√’’ into a historical
and political story with which his existence is incompatible, ‘‘and
thereby, consciously or unconsciously, achieves the e√ect of calling
in question the values of military glory and temporal justice as
embodied in Henry of Monmouth.’’ In The Merchant of Venice, he
continues, ‘‘he gives us a similar contrast – the romantic fairy story
world of Belmont is incompatible with the historical reality of
money-making Venice – but this time what is called in question is
the claim of Belmont to be the Great Good Place, the Earthly
Paradise. Watching Henry IV, we become convinced that our aes-
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thetic sympathy with Falsta√ is a profounder vision than our

ethical judgment which must side with Hal. Watching The Mer-
chant of Venice, on the other hand, we are compelled to acknowl-
edge that the attraction we naturally feel towards Belmont is
highly questionable.’’
Perhaps Auden’s most original response to Shakespeare was his
lecture on Antony and Cleopatra at the New School in 1947. He
begins by pointing out that ‘‘it won’t do as a movie at all. The play
is exclusively about human history and the e√ects of human will.
There is no background showing farmers ploughing fields, there
are no conflicts between human beings and nature, no storms. The
play is concerned with the desire for world power. Movies over-
emphasize particular localities and their uniqueness.’’ He notes
that ‘‘in a movie scene of Ventidius in Syria, for example, you
would see too much particular Syrian scenery. But what is impor-
tant is the contrast with the immediately preceding scene on
Pompey’s galley. A movie again would emphasize the particular
furnishings on the galley, but it doesn’t matter if it’s a galley or a
house. What matters is the view it presents of the lords of the
world in undress in contrast to the scene of Ventidius and his
troops guarding the frontier. Space is the prize, and not any par-
ticular space, but the whole space of civilization.’’
He describes how closely public and private life are interwoven
in the play, and how essential to Antony and Cleopatra’s love is their
worldly position. ‘‘Cleopatra is Egypt and Antony is one of the
rulers of the Roman empire, unlike Romeo and Juliet who are any
boy and any girl separated by a family feud. Two families having a
row over who borrowed the lawn mower would be interchangeable
with the provincial feud in the town of Verona.’’ ‘‘You cannot
imagine Antony and Cleopatra retiring to a cottage,’’ Auden says.
‘‘They need the fullest possible publicity and the maximum assis-
tance from good cooking, good clothes, good drink. . . . Antony and
Cleopatra don’t trust each other a yard. They know exactly what
will happen in the course of their a√air, and they therefore need
reassurance that they have feelings left. Indeed, publicity is espe-
cially important to Cleopatra to prove that she can still inspire
feelings in others, which is why she behaves so badly.’’
Auden points out that Cleopatra ‘‘has to make up very carefully
indeed’’ and that Antony ‘‘is putting on weight – he wears corsets,’’
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and he argues that though ‘‘the physical attraction between them

is real, both are getting on, and their lust is less a physical need
than a way of forgetting time and death.’’ The flaws in the great
tragic heroes, Auden notes, ‘‘malice and ambition in Richard III,
ignorance in Romeo and Juliet, melancholia in Hamlet, ambition
in Macbeth, paternalism and the demand for love in Lear, pride
in Coriolanus, the desire to be loved in Timon, and jealousy in
Othello,’’ are ‘‘pure states of being that have a certain amount of
police court cases or psychiatric clinics in them, but we are not
likely to imitate them.’’ ‘‘We may feel as they do on occasion,’’
Auden says, ‘‘but these people are really rather silly. We wouldn’t
murder a guest at a party, nor are we likely to run out of the house
in the middle of a storm. We think people are crazy to behave like
that. We read about such behavior in the papers.’’ But Antony and
Cleopatra’s flaw ‘‘is general and common to all of us all of the time:
worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and con-
versely, the fear of boredom, failure, being ridiculous, being on the
wrong side, dying. 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 di√erent. ‘Now is the time
when all the lights wax dim,’ as Herrick writes in ‘To Anthea.’ ’’
He continues, ‘‘We all reach a time when the god Hercules leaves
us. Every day we can get an obsession about people we don’t like
but for various reasons can’t leave. We all know about intrigues in
o≈ces, museums, literary life. Finally, we all grow old and die.
The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it.’’
At the end of the lecture, Auden asks, ‘‘Why is the weather so
good in Antony and Cleopatra? In other plays nature reflects vice
or hostility, but it is important in Antony and Cleopatra that the
world be made to seem infinitely desirable and precious. The
whole world of the play is bathed in brilliant light. In the last
plays the physical tempests stand for su√ering through which
people are redeemed. The tragedy in Antony and Cleopatra is the
refusal of su√ering.’’ Auden adds that ‘‘as Kafka remarks, ‘You can
hold back from the su√ering of the world, you have free permis-
sion to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature, but per-
haps this very holding back is the one su√ering you could have
avoided.’ ’’ The ‘‘splendor of the poetry,’’ Auden says, ‘‘expresses the
splendor of the world in this play, and the word ‘world’ is con-
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stantly repeated. ‘Com’st thou smiling from/The world’s great

snare uncaught?’ Cleopatra asks. But Antony is caught. What Cae-
sar calls Cleopatra’s ‘strong toil of grace’ is the world itself and in
one way or another it catches us all.’’ Auden concludes that ‘‘the
moral of the play is quite simple,’’ and it is ‘‘the same as that of
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, when Troilus looks down iron-
ically upon the world from the eighth sphere. Shakespeare pres-
ents it without faking – there are no sour grapes, no claims that
the world is not really glorious, but tawdry. You can’t suggest that
the world is destructive without showing it in all its seductive-
ness.’’ Auden’s interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra is strikingly
unsentimental, and moral without being moralistic. He admires
the poetic splendor of Antony and Cleopatra’s protests against
their mortality at the same time that he reveals their entirely
conscious exaggeration and their vanity. He sees the worldliness in
the play in traditional Christian terms, but those terms enlarge
the play as well as crystallize it. No critic of the play has under-
stood it with more penetrating clarity.
Auden, finally, also contributes profoundly to an understanding
of The Tempest. Auden lectured on the play, discussed it in two
critical essays, and adapted it in The Sea and the Mirror. In his
lecture at the New School, he says that ‘‘in The Tempest, Shake-
speare succeeds in writing myth,’’ and he quotes C. S. Lewis’s
remark that what ‘‘really delights and nourishes’’ us in a mythical
story is ‘‘a particular pattern of events, which would equally de-
light and nourish’’ if it had reached us through ‘‘some medium
which involved no words at all – say by a mime, or a film.’’ Auden
argues that ‘‘the great myths in the Christian period are Faust,
Don Quixote, Don Juan, the Wandering Jew’’ and that ‘‘among the
great modern myths are Sherlock Holmes and L’il Abner, neither
of which exhibits a talent for literary expression.’’ Auden notes
that ‘‘there are some famous passages of poetry in The Tempest,
including ‘Our revels now are ended’ and ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks,
standing lakes, and groves,’ but they are accidental. Antony and
Cleopatra and King Lear only exist in words. In The Tempest only
the wedding masque – which is very good, and apposite – and
possibly Ariel’s songs are dependent on poetry. Otherwise you
could put The Tempest in a comic strip.’’ Auden observes also that
myths inspire people ‘‘to go on for themselves. You can’t read Don
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Quixote without wanting to make up episodes that Cervantes, as it

were, forgot to tell us. The same is true of Sherlock Holmes.’’
Auden mentions Browning’s adaptation of The Tempest in Caliban
on Setebos and Ernest Renan’s in Caliban, and notes, ‘‘I’ve done
something with it myself.’’
In a discussion of The Tempest in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden
wrote that unlike the three other final plays, which ‘‘all end in a
blaze of forgiveness and love,’’ The Tempest is ‘‘a disquieting work’’
in which ‘‘both the repentance of the guilty and the pardon of the
injured seem more formal than real.’’ Alonso is the only one who
seems genuinely repentant, and ‘‘Prospero’s forgiving is more the
contemptuous pardon of a man who knows that he has his enemies
completely at his mercy than a heartfelt reconciliation.’’ Citing
Prospero’s description of Caliban,
a born devil on whose nature
Nurture can never stick, on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost,
as well as Caliban’s protest, ‘‘You taught me language, and my
profit on’t/Is I know how to curse,’’ Auden argues, ‘‘Shakespeare
has written Caliban’s part in such a way that, while we have to
admit that Caliban is both brutal and corrupt, a ‘lying slave’ who
can be prevented from doing mischief only ‘by stripes not kind-
ness,’ we cannot help feeling that Prospero is largely responsible
for his corruption, and that, in the debate between them, Caliban
has the best of the argument.’’ Auden adds, ‘‘One must admire
Prospero because of his talents and his strength; one cannot possi-
bly like him. He has the coldness of someone who has come to the
conclusion that human nature is not worth much, that human
relations are, at their best, pretty sorry a√airs. . . . One might
excuse him if he included himself in his critical skepticism but he
never does; it never occurs to him that he, too, might have erred
and be in need of pardon.’’ Auden concludes, ‘‘As a biological
organism Man is a natural creature subject to the necessities of
nature; as a being with consciousness and will, he is at the same
time a historical person with the freedom of the spirit. The Tem-
pest seems to me a manichean work, not because it shows the
relation of Nature to Spirit as one of conflict and hostility, which in
fallen man it is, but because it puts the blame for this upon Nature
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and makes the Spirit innocent.’’

In his adaptation of The Tempest in The Sea and the Mirror,
Auden endeavored to rectify what he saw as this Manichaean
opposition by diminishing both Prospero’s and Ariel’s roles and by
making Caliban, Shakespeare’s ‘‘salvage and deformed slave,’’ a
spokesman for art. He said in a letter that the work ‘‘is my Ars
Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to be Shake-
speare’s, i.e. I am attempting something which in a way is absurd,
to show in a work of art, the limitations of art.’’ The action of the
poem takes place after the curtain has dropped on a performance
of The Tempest. It opens with a verse preface entitled ‘‘The Stage
Manager to the Critics’’; Chapter I, ‘‘Prospero to Ariel,’’ also in
verse, is devoted to a beautiful and moving farewell by Prospero to
his art in which Auden sympathizes with Prospero (and especially
with his consciousness of the limits of art) more than his critical
discussions of him would lead one to expect; and the succeeding
chapter consists of speeches, in a dazzling array of di√erent verse
forms, by most of the other members of the cast. Chapter III,
‘‘Caliban to the Audience,’’ by far the longest in the work, is a prose
speech written in the elaborately mannered style of the later nov-
els of Henry James. It begins with Caliban asking Shakespeare, on
behalf of the audience, whether his definition of art as ‘‘ ‘a mirror
held up to nature’ ’’ does not indicate the ‘‘mutual reversal of value’’
between the real and the imagined, since on ‘‘the far side of the
mirror the general will to compose, to form at all costs a felicitous
pattern becomes the necessary cause of any particular e√ort to live
or act or love or triumph or vary, instead of being as, in so far as it
emerges at all, it is on this side, their accidental e√ect?’’ Caliban
asks Shakespeare how he could thus ‘‘be guilty of the incredible
unpardonable treachery’’ of introducing him into his play, ‘‘the one
creature’’ whom the Muse ‘‘will not under any circumstances
stand,’’ the child of ‘‘the unrectored chaos,’’ ‘‘the represented princi-
ple of not sympathising, not associating, not amusing.’’ He protests
also, ‘‘Is it possible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into
Ariel’s kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban’s?’’ In the
next section of the chapter, Caliban assumes his ‘‘o≈cially natural
role’’ to address those in the audience who wish to become writers.
He describes how the writers in the audience finally master Ariel
only to discover reflected in his eyes ‘‘a gibbering fist-clenched
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creature with which you are all too unfamiliar . . . the only subject
that you have, who is not a dream amenable to magic but the all
too solid flesh you must acknowledge as your own; at last you have
come face to face with me, and are appalled to learn how far I am
from being, in any sense, your dish.’’ In the final section of Chapter
III, Caliban tells the audience that he begins ‘‘to feel something of
the serio-comic embarrassment of the dedicated dramatist, who,
in representing to you your condition of estrangement from the
truth, is doomed to fail the more he succeeds, for the more truth-
fully he paints the condition, the less clearly can he indicate the
truth from which it is estranged.’’ Caliban finally resolves this
paradox by attempting to transcend it, by acknowledging ‘‘that
Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential
emphatic gulf of which our contrived fissures of mirror and pros-
cenium arch – we understand them at last – are feebly figurative
signs.’’ In the brief verse Postscript following Caliban’s speech that
concludes The Sea and the Mirror, the disembodied spirit Ariel
declares that he is ‘‘helplessly in love’’ with the earthly Caliban
and incomplete without him.
The dualities of nature and art Caliban describes in his long
prose speech are also represented in his style, in the deliberately
antithetical juxtaposition of the flesh he embodies with the intel-
lectual language he uses. Auden had played Caliban in a school
play, he associated him with Falsta√ in a draft of The Sea and the
Mirror, and he was particularly proud of the style of Caliban’s
speech. He wrote to his friend Theodore Spencer, ‘‘Caliban does
disturb me profoundly because he doesn’t fit in; it is exactly as if
one of the audience had walked onto the stage and insisted on
taking part in the action. I’ve tried to work for this e√ect in a non-
theatrical medium, by allowing the reader for the first two chap-
ters not to think of the theatre (by inversion, therefore, to be
witnessing a performance) and then suddenly wake him up in one
(again by inversion, introducing ‘real life’ into the imagined).’’
Auden said that ‘‘this is putting one’s head straight into the critics’
mouths, for most of them will spot the James pastiche, say this is a
piece of virtuosity, which it is, and unseemly levity or meaningless,
which it isn’t.’’ Auden argues that what he was looking for was ‘‘(a)
A freak ‘original’ style (Caliban’s contribution), (b) a style as ‘spir-
itual,’ as far removed from Nature, as possible (Ariel’s contribu-
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tion) and James seemed to fit the bill exactly, and not only for
these reasons, but also because he is the great representative in
English literature of what Shakespeare certainly was not, the ‘ded-
icated artist’ to whom art is religion. You cannot imagine him
saying ‘The best in this kind are but shadows’ or of busting his old
wand.’’ Auden adds, ‘‘I have, as you say, a dangerous fondness for
‘trucs’ [ways around things, poetic tricks]; I’ve tried to turn this to
advantage by selecting a subject where it is precisely the ‘truc’ that
is the subject; the serious matter being the fundamental frivolity
of art. I hope someone, besides yourself, will see this.’’
Auden considered Caliban’s speech his masterpiece, and his
depiction of Caliban, the quintessential outsider, suggests many of
the virtues of his general response to Shakespeare. He is richly
alive to what is anomalous in the plays. He loves Shakespeare
without idolizing him and is interested in appreciating and enjoy-
ing his works, not in asserting his critical superiority to them.
Translating the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote
into twentieth-century idiom, he continually relates the plays and
their characters to ordinary human experience and seeks to under-
stand them morally as well as aesthetically in those terms. Finally,
his criticism is animated by the force of his own poetic imagina-
tion. He re-creates the works that are his subjects and has the
capacity—amounting to genius—to see for himself and for us at
the same time.