Lectures on Shakespeare Quotes

“In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout — and the same is true of life.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crim consciously, for its own sake.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“Richard III's monologue is not unlike Adolf Hitler's speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939, in its utter lack of self-deception. The lack of self-deception is striking because most of us invent plausible reasons for doing something we know is wrong. Milton describes such rationalization in Paradise Lost in Eve, both before she eats the fruit of the forbidden tree and afterwards, when she justifies inducing Adam to eat:
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.
(Pl, IX. 832-33)
Eve makes this profession of love for Adam at the moment when she is, in effect, planning to kill him.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“If desire were really one to one, self to self, there would never be a problem of infidelity, but desire will always, without confusion, demand a particular class, Caring for a unique object is an illusion, but the feeling must be unique, and though that feeling may not be natural, it is duty. You must love your neighbour like yourself, uniquely. From the personal point of view, sexual desire, because of its impersonal and unchanging character, is a comic contradiction. The relation between every pair of lovers is unique, but in bet they can only do what all mammals do. All the relation in friendship a relationship of spirit, can be unique. In sexual relationship love the only uniqueness can be fidelity.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“Any society is in danger of dismissing the virtue of another society because of its vices, and a democracy is always in danger of not paying enough attention to manners and forms.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“Dog bites man is not interesting, man bites dog is.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“In a tragic contradiction between the normal and the exceptional, there is suffering, in a comic contradiction, none.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“If people marry on the assumption that love must always overcome obstacles, they will either become unfaithful or they will make things difficult. The better you know someone, the better you can torture him: man and wife become each other's devils.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“In comedy, if fate is to appear comic, it must be arbitrary and appear to behave like a person, and the people who are subject to fate should not be responsible for what occurs. In tragedy fate is not an arbitrary person - it is we who are responsible, and we bring our fate upon ourselves. Where fate plays too large a role, however, the effect is not tragic but pathetic. The effect of Greek tragedy can seem pathetic to us just in this way. The Greeks naively argue that the sign of guilt is misfortune and that therefore if there is misfortune, then there must be guilt. Comic fate is arbitrary and does not involve real suffering - whatever suffering in is presented in comic must be temporary and imaginary.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“The songs celebrates the order of the nature. When the scene is nice, the emotion are nasty, when the scene is nasty, the emotion are nice.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare

“To God, the right kind of human life looks well-meant but incompetent. Zeal is more important than technique.”
― W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare