`Without Forgetting that Art is Frivolous'

That we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions seems to be the first principle of human psychology. The best among us are divided, dishonest and delusional by choice – often, if not always. We bolster the self at any cost. Shakespeare built a career on these truths. The best and most entertaining introductory guide to Shakespeare, after the plays and poems, of course, is W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Kirsch and published for the first time in 2000. He delivered the lectures in 1946-47 at the New School for Social Research, in New York City. Auden is the poet of the divided self, and he recognizes in Shakespeare a kindred poetic spirit. In addition, Auden was deeply immersed at the time in Kierkegaard, the most incisive psychologist.

Publication of the lectures is a literary miracle. None of Auden’s manuscripts survives. Kirsch reconstructed the lectures from painstaking notes kept by one of Auden’s students, Alan Ansen, who later became the poet’s secretary and friend. No one thought to record Auden on Shakespeare. When Lear calls man a “bare, forked animal,” he hints at our divided nature, and that is Auden’s starting point. Richard II, he writes, “is interested in the idea of kingship rather than in ruling. Like a writer of minor verse -- he is good at that – he is interested more in the idea than the act. He is good at presiding over a tournament, not at taking an action that means something, and his passion for ritual even embraces self-humiliation.”

All of us know such people, and some of us recognize ourselves in Auden’s analysis. Among bloggers, poets and self-styled bohemians, the type is common – “interested more in the idea than the act.” In his lecture on the play he most admired, Antony and Cleopatra, Auden writes:

“Antony and Cleopatra’s flaw, however, is general and common to all of us all of the time: worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and conversely, 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 different . . . Every day we get an obsession about people we don’t like but for various reasons can’t leave. We all know about intrigues in offices, museums, literary life. Finally, we all grow old and die. The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it.”

And in his Henry IV, Part 1 lecture, Auden approvingly quotes Falstaff on Hal: `Thou art essentially mad without seeming so,” and adds, “Hal is the type who becomes a college president, a government head, etc., and one hate their guts.” That must have gotten a good laugh at the New School, deep in the heart of Greenwich Village. In his concluding lecture, as an antidote to any suggestion of artistic smugness (on his part or Shakespeare’s), Auden says this:

“I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude toward his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest 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 achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.”

“Writer of minor verse,” indeed. To write is to juggle chutzpah and humility. Writing mirrors our divided human state, a recurrent theme for Auden, especially after his return to Christianity in the late thirties and early forties. In 1946, just months before he gave the Shakespeare lectures, Auden wrote “Under Which Lyre” as the Phi Beta Kappa Poem at Harvard. In it, he again links division with a Shakespeare allusion:

“Related by antithesis,
A compromise between us is
Impossible;
Respect perhaps but friendship never:
Falstaff the fool confronts forever
The prig Prince Hal.”