'Art Must Be Giving Pleasure'

On May 14, 1947, after giving seven months of lectures on the sonnets and all but two of Shakespeare’s plays at the New School of Social Research in New York City, W.H. Auden delivered a concluding lecture. In it he roots Shakespeare’s vision in the notion of original sin and what he calls “man’s inveterate tendency to foster illusions, one of the worst of which is the illusion of being free of illusion.” Think of Timon, Iago and Lear. 

Auden notes Shakespeare’s evolving use of prose which “reacts back upon the verse.” He points out things I had never noticed: “In Hamlet, Hamlet speaks prose to others, verse to himself. . . . In King Lear, prose is used for madness.” Auden praises Shakespeare’s growing mastery of metaphor (another good reason for reading the plays serially), and cites the “extraordinary, kaleidoscopic sliding from one metaphor to another” in this passage from Act I, Scene 7 of Macbeth:

 

“[I]f the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success; that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases

We still have judgment here; that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice

To our own lips.”

 

Auden describes such “metaphorical license” as “a very dangerous practice for most writers,” but not for Shakespeare. This is how he closes his concluding lecture:

 

“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. When art takes itself too seriously, it tries to do more than it can. For secular art to exist, it’s highly advantageous to artists, whatever their belief, to support religion. When supernatural religion disappears, art becomes either magic that is run by authorities through force of fraud, or falsehood that becomes persecuted by science.

 

“But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.”

 

A week earlier, in his lecture on The Tempest, perhaps Shakespeare’s final play, Auden says:

 

“I don’t believe people die until they’ve done their work, and when they have, they die. There are surprisingly few incomplete works in art. People, as a rule, die when they wish to. It is not a shame that Mozart, Keats, Shelley died young; they’d finished  their work.”

 

Auden died half a century ago, on September 29, 1973, age sixty-six, and surely had not finished his work.

 

[See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]