In yesterday's post, I mentioned that a very important aspect of Shakespeare is the fact that the work has been both inspirational and educational to other writers. Not only the plays, but also the careers that allowed them to be written (by which I mean those of Shakespeare and his colleagues) are now touchstones for anyone involved with literature. Sometimes, it takes only a few well-chosen words to conjure up images of the Globe, the actors, the audience, which continue to symbolize human aspiration for truth, art and betterment of thinking. Here's an example from Auden's 1949 poem, "Memorial for the City":

Saints tamed, poets acclaimed the raging Herod of the will;

The groundlings wept as on a secular stage

The grand and the bad went to ruin in thundering verse;

Sundered by reason and treason the City

Found invisible ground for concord in measured sound,

While wood and stone learned the shameless

Games of man, to flatter, to show off, be pompous, to romp...

I wish I could find a link to the poem in its entirety; it's as powerful as this excerpt would suggest.

Another memorable moment in Antony and Cleopatra may have provided us with the nounal form of the word "haunt", as in "a place habitually frequented" (Merriam-Webster). It occurs when Antony, mistakenly believing that Cleopatra is dead, resolves himself to suicide and imagines an afterlife where only the surface details of existence will change, and that he and his queen will go on being the centers of attention that they were in this world. And perhaps even more famous than they were, because they will then be able to challenge all the lovers in history. (By the way, W.H. Auden in the 2002 publication of his Lectures on Shakespeare makes the interesting observation that this play is the only one of the major tragedies that is never struck with inclement weather. His reasoning is that we're meant to consider the world in all its beauty and splendour to better realize what the protagonists lose for love.) Here's the passage in question:

Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:

Dido and her AEneas shall want troops,

And all the haunt be ours.

The great poet W.H. Auden was also a very astute Shakespeare critic. (By the way, I use the term in its more useful sense, which refers to one who attempts to help the audience enjoy a work more clearly, not a thumbs-up/thumbs-down type of writer. The latter does not apply to people like Shakespeare. Northrop Frye said it best: "When a critic comes up against something the size of Shakespeare, it is the critic who is being judged".) When lecturing on King Lear, Auden noted that at this point in his career, Shakespeare was writing about states of mind rather than trying to create "believable" characters. In other words, we are not likely to meet someone like Lear, but we are likely to have instances arise where an emotionally-overcharged decision can have serious consequences. Another example: it's interesting how the character of Hamlet is someone with whom no one living has anything in common (a member of a ruling, not symbolic, royal family who sees a ghost and must revenge a murder - I've never met anyone in that position, anyway), and yet is one that has helped innumerable people understand their lives and the workings of their minds more clearly. Quite an achievement, that.