If the producers of the Arkangel set of the complete plays of Shakespeare had set out to show The Merchant of Venice as the worst play ever written, they have succeeded.  The problem is not so much Shylock, as the boring ordinariness and vanity of the rest of them.  And W H Auden in his Lectures on Shakespeare does not help.  He says ‘The only racial remark in the play is made by Shylock, and the Christians refute it.  Religious differences in the play are treated frivolously: the question is not one of belief, but conformity.’  That is a false dilemma, and the whole play is riddled with expressions of contempt going both ways – and taking a pound of flesh by due process of law does not sound ‘frivolous’.

There is no doubt that Auden was very seriously bright.  I at first thought he could have made a brilliant advocate.  The lectures are full of lightning flashes.  But too often, the lightning hits the dunny.  And that is fatal in advocacy. 

And if he expressed his views on Desdemona to a modern U S audience now, they would burn the place down.

But here he is on the fall of Rome as shown in Julius Caesar.

It was a society doomed not by the evil passions of selfish individuals, because such passions always exist, but by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of coping with its situation, which is why the noble Brutus is even more at sea in the play than the unscrupulous and brutal Antony.

A failure of nerve led to the collapse of Europe in the 1930s, and threatens the U S now. 

After the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Antony’s funeral oration is probably the best-known speech in Shakespeare.  Antony is utterly unscrupulous, and the results are utterly brutal.  The two subsequent scenes in that play are in my view the best displays of just how vicious politics can get on our stage.  The first scene is a lynching.  The second is a Mafia like settlement of the death list compiled in the coldest blood by the winners.

(But when we come to Antony and Cleopatra – Auden’s favourite of these plays – Antony is a bored playboy, unable to break with his ‘Egyptian dish,’ and he is put away in straight sets by the man Gibbon described as a ‘crafty tyrant.’)

But his remarks on Prince Hal, later King Henry IV, really caught my eye.  He agrees with the observation of Falstaff that I do not think is sufficiently noticed: ‘Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.’

Hal has no self….He can be a continuous success because he can understand any situation, he can control himself, and he has physical and mental charm.  But he is a cold fish……The most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine. 

Whacko!  Prince Hal is all front – and nothing else.  Think of the seriously bad bastards in history, and then ask how apt that description might be for them.

Or try this for an exam question:

Sir John Falstaff is a ratbag, but if you want the real deal of the complete ratbag, go to Prince Hal.  Discuss.