ESSAYS AND LECTURES

Until 2000 Auden's major writings on Shakespeare appeared in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (1963) and in an introduction to the Signet Classics edition of the Sonnets (1964), which he collected in a second volume of essays, Forewords and Afterwords (1973). The essays in the section ‘The Shakespearian City’ in The Dyer's Hand deal primarily with Henry IV Parts I and II, The Merchant of Venice and Othello; ‘Balaam and His Ass’, on masters and servants, contains a substantial discussion of The Tempest; and a final sequence of essays, ‘Homage to Igor Stravinsky’, concludes with ‘Music in Shakespeare’ which considers several plays and pays attention to the songs in Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The title ‘The Shakespearian City’ presumably intends the whole order of civilisation and behaviour comprehended by the epithet ‘Shakespearian’, taking point from its tacit allusion to Augustine's The City of God, Augustine being a frequent source of reference in Auden's later criticism.

Most of the Shakespeare material in The Dyer's Hand had its origin in Auden's lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1961. This is apparent in the title ‘The Shakespearian City’ itself since, although Auden nowhere explicitly uses or explains it in the essays, he had entitled two of the lectures ‘The fallen city’ and ‘The alienated city’.