Bookshelf.(Review)(Brief Article)

Tradition recommends that one study the Talmud not in private, but with a teacher-companion at one's side. A similar tradition has evolved with respect to the central works of the Western secular canon: In earlier generations, readers accompanied their experience of the plays and poems of Shakespeare with the commentaries of Mark Van Doren (Shakespeare) and Derek Traversi (An Approach to Shakespeare). In 1998, Harold Bloom-with his surprise blockbuster Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human-found the audience for this genre as large as ever.

Recent months have seen two valuable additions to the shelf of synoptic commentaries on the whole of Shakespeare. W. H. Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare (Princeton, 398 pp., $29.95) represents the reconstruction- from the notes taken by students and amanuenses-of a course of 28 lectures given by the great British poet in 1946-47 at New York's New School for Social Research. Auden examines Shakespeare's texts from the point of view of a working poet, and this keeps his erudition from succumbing to pedantry. (The dangers of the latter-that it will eclipse the reader's direct experience of the work-Auden illustrates with a joke from Britain's venerable humor magazine, Punch: Two professors of English are taking a springtime walk in the country. The first professor is moved to poetic rapture: "O cuckoo shall I call thee bird / Or but a wandering voice?" The second professor responds: "State the alternative preferred / With reasons for your choice.")

Auden's lectures can be read with profit not just as a commentary, but as an anthology of the best and most revelatory passages of Shakespeare. (A 15-page appendix lists all the passages Auden underlined in his copy of Shakespeare's complete works; to read through the underlinings of an insightful reader is an excellent way to deepen one's own second reading of a text.) Auden's personality is never far from view; he tosses off such memorable epigrams as, "No one was ever seduced by a beautiful poem, though a bad one may be effective on occasion." But as Shakespeare's interested fellow practitioner, he ...