Painstakingly reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch from the notes of students who attended, primarily Alan Ansen, who became Auden’s secretary and friend, the lectures afford remarkable insights into Shakespeare’s plays as well as the sonnets.

A remarkable lecturer, Auden could inspire his listeners to great feats of recall and dictation. Consequently, the poet’s unique voice, often down to the precise details of his phrasing, speaks clearly and eloquently throughout this volume. In these lectures, we hear Auden alluding to authors from Homer, Dante, and St. Augustine to Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and T. S. Eliot, drawing upon the full range of European literature and opera, and referring to the day’s newspapers and magazines, movies and cartoons. The result is an extended instance of the “live conversation” that Auden believed criticism to be. Notably a conversation between Auden’s capacious thought and the work of Shakespeare, these lectures are also a prelude to many ideas developed in Auden’s later prose–a prose in which, one critic has remarked, “all the artists of the past are alive and talking among themselves.”

Reflecting the twentieth-century poet’s lifelong engagement with the crowning masterpieces of English literature, these lectures add immeasurably to both our understanding of Auden and our appreciation of Shakespeare.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Henry VI, Parts One, Two, and Three
Richard III 
The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Taming of the Shrew, King John, and Richard II
The Merchant of Venice
Sonnets
Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and Henry V
Much Ado About Nothing
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Twelfth Night
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida 
All’s Well That Ends Well 
Measure for Measure 
Othello 
Macbeth 
King Lear 
Antony and Cleopatra 
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens 
Pericles and Cymbeline
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
Concluding Lecture

APPENDIX I: Auden’s Saturday Discussion Classes
APPENDIX II: Fall Term Final Examination
APPENDIX III: Auden’s Markings in Kittredge