The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928-1938 - Hardcover

Auden, W. H.; Isherwood, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691067406 ISBN 13: 9780691067407

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1988

Synopsis

In 1928 Stephen Spender hand-printed thirty copies of a small volume of poems by his friend W. H. Auden--the first published book by a man who was to become the dominant literary figure of his generation and one of the century's greatest poets. Sixty years later, Princeton University Press inaugurates an eight-volume edition of the complete works of Auden, which is intended to serve as the definitive text for all the works Auden published or intended to publish in the form in which he expected to see them printed: his plays and other drama, libretti, essays and reviews, and poems.

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden will provide a unique opportunity to solve the numerous textual problems connected with the severe revisions Auden made in his own works. The texts will be newly edited from Auden's manuscripts by Edward Mendelson, the literary executor of the Auden estate. As presented in this edition, they will be absolutely clean, with the notes appearing only at the ends of the volumes, along with variant readings from all published versions, as well as hitherto unpublished drafts or revisions. Also included will be introductions placing the works in the context of literary traditions and relating them to Auden's life and times.

As planned, the first volume of the series contains plays and other drama, and the second volume will include the libretti. The essays and reviews will appear in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes, and the seventh and eighth volumes will contain the poems.

Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928-1938

This volume contains Auden and Christopher Isherwood's dramatic extravaganzas The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F 6, and On the Frontier. It also includes the two versions of Paid on Both Sides--which are so different as to constitute two works--and Auden's satiric revue The Dance of Death. Two plays appear in print for the first time, Auden and Isherwood's The Enemies of a Bishop and Auden's The Chase. Also included are Auden's prose and verse written for documentary films, a cabaret sketch, and an unpublished radio script. Many of the texts include poems by the young Auden that have never been published before. The extensive historical and textual notes trace the complex history of the production and revision of these plays, including full texts of rewritten scenes.

During the years when these works were created, Auden moved from a "poetry of isolation" to more expansive and public writing. After he left Oxford at age twenty-one, during the summer of 1928, he wrote the tragicomic charade Paid on Both Sides. During the next ten years, until he left England for America, he created the increasingly ambitious works for stage, film, and broadcast that appear in this volume. The most important of these plays were written in collaboration with Isherwood. As the world political situation worsened, Isherwood and Auden's style combined the energy of popular entertainment with the urgency of sacramental ritual.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

W. H. Auden called opera the "last refuge of the High Style", and considered it the one art in which the grand manner survived the ironic levelings of modernity. He began writing libretti soon after he arrived in America in 1939 and abandoned his earlier attempts to write public, political drama. Opera gave him the opportunity to rise to the high style in public, not in an attempt to elevate his own status as a poet, but in service of the heroic voice of the singers. These works present their mythical actions with a direct intensity unlike anything in even his greatest poems. In this volume of Auden and Chester Kallman's libretti, extensive historical and textual notes trace the history of the production and revision of the works and provide full texts of early scenarios, as well as abandoned and rewritten scenes. Almost all the works included here were previously published in incomplete and often inaccessible editions - or were never published at all. The book prints for the first time the full text of Paul Bunyan, Auden's first libretto, which he wrote for music by Benjamin Britten. It also includes Auden and Kallman's The Rake's Progress, written for Igor Stravinsky, and Delia, written for Stravinsky but never set to music. The work continues with Auden and Kallman's two libretti written for music by Hans Werner Henze, Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids, and their adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost, composed by Nicolas Nabokov. It also contains their translation of The Magic Flute, with its scenes reordered for greater dramatic coherence and added dialogue for sharper mythical significance, and their antimasque, The Entertainment of the Senses, for music by John Gardner. Thebook contains two radio plays - The Dark Valley, a monologue written by Auden alone, and The Rocking Horse Winner, written with James Stern and based on a story by D. H. Lawrence. Also included are the unpublished masque that Auden wrote for Kallman's twenty-second birthday, the unpublished versions of The Duchess of Malfi that Auden prepared with Bertolt Brecht, scenarios for a film script and a libretto that were never completed, Auden's narrative for the medieval Play of Daniel, two narratives for documentary films, and his song lyrics written for Man of La Mancha before the producer decided to use a different lyricist.

About the Author:

Edward Mendelson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Early Auden (Viking). He is the editor of two volumes of Auden's poetry, Collected Poems (Random House) and The English Auden (Random House).

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0691067406
• ISBN 13: 9780691067407
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 720
• Editor: Mendelson Edward