Auden Country and the Search for the Perfect Play

Item: two reviews of Peter Brook's Hamlet--God knows it wasn't Shakespeare's--seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in April 2001 but reviewed many times over after its first Paris performances in December 2000. Paul Taylor in the Independent (London) remarks that "in this Hamlet, the relationship between the hero and the one friend who can pierce his loneliness is given exceptional prominence." Then, in the Times Literary Supplement (December 15, 2000) Ruth Morse says of Scott Handy's Horatio that "he has practically nothing to do, and there is little relationship between him and his friend and prince, played by Adrian Lester." Faced with these diametrically opposed reports, pointing to the strong probability that critics don't always see the same event when they think that's precisely what they're doing, what's a Broadway Baby to do?

Would it be helpful for still another critic--myself alone--to add that if Lester's Hamlet suffers from loneliness, surely it's the loneliness of the long-distance runner thrust inexplicably into a fifty-yard sprint? Forget the relationship with Horatio, there or not there according to which viewer is telling the tale: what matters are the relationships denied by Brook, not merely with Laertes, the family man in the beginning (he emerges in time for graveyard and duel toward the end), but also with Fortinbras, Osric, the soldiers on the ramparts, and the whole damned court. To put it another way: if Brook is right when he speaks, as he often does, of distilling a work to its essence (Carmen, for example), and if he truly thinks Hamlet has enough essence without history, politics, or all those other sons, then it's hardly surprising that one critic--Taylor--might mistake the actor's isolation as something like the character's loneliness. And to put it still another way: Brook may be right when he claims, in effect, that what we get in theater is only what we actually see, then it follows "as the night the day" (lines also missing from his version) that we're not seeing Hamlet in anything but a nutshell of finite space, which has to mean that we're not seeing Hamlet as dreamed by Shakespeare into an airtight structure (detours notwithstanding) that, like any rare perfection, is only as long as it has to be.

Am I correct, however, in seeing a perfect play? For T. S. Eliot, as we're often reminded, the play is an "artistic failure." W. H. Auden, in his Lectures on Shakespeare (transcribed from classroom notes taken by his eventual secretary, Alan Ansen, during the course Auden gave at the New School in 1946, and published by Princeton University Press in 2000 as "painstakingly reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch") takes a more roundabout view, curiously interested more in the poetry than the drama, unlike Eliot, who seems to be putting on his cassock whenever writing criticism, ever the clerical guardian of Christian truths found missing in the dramatic action created by an errant playwright-parishioner. Auden, surely no less Christian than Eliot, regards Shakespeare as a fellow technician, perhaps enacting a personal drama with Hamlet, wondering about the mirror held up to his own nature, "inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little." Meanwhile, he sees all kinds of non-existential problems haunting the playwright: "the relation between prose and verse in the plays," the problem of "developing a more flexible verse . . . experimenting with the caesura, the stop in the middle of the line, to develop a middle voice, a voice neither passionate nor prosaic." Beyond that, he finds Shakespeare "tired of writing comedy . . . probably bored because of his facility in the genre," yet not wanting to return to either "crude rhetoric" (as in King John and Richard III) or the "lyric and romantic rhetoric" given to Romeo, Juliet, and Richard II. He even sees Shakespeare developing Hamlet from earlier...