Ambo to “be a unit in the army of the other side,” presumably a political and social order opposite the fascism now established in the village. Though some argue that Sir Francis does not speak for a specific political doctrine, others such as John Fuller see his joining of the “other side” as an explicit reference to the Communist Party. His and Alan’s conversion represents, in any case, a move away from personal and political stagnation toward an active commitment to regeneration and change, an idea that Auden was working with in his poetry at the time.

Along with its explicit critique of fascist politics, the play makes a broader political statement on the entire capitalist system. The extent to which Auden embraced Marxism is not entirely clear, but he did for a time sympathize with many of its key tenets. His first play for the Group Theatre, The Dance of Death, is an avowedly political one, illustrating the decline and eventual death of the bourgeoisie. In The Dog Beneath the Skin, his intent is somewhat less overt, but the bulk of the play (and most of its vitality) comes in the quest scenes, which burlesque the moral and economic decay of European capitalism.

At the beginning of his quest, Alan is joined by a large dog that gives the play its title, provides much of its farcical humor, and, in the end, carries much of the play’s thematic weight. The dog, it turns out, is Sir Francis Crewe, the object of Alan’s quest. The missing heir of Pressan Ambo has been living in disguise for ten years among the villagers and is now Alan’s companion. In the middle section of the play, the two of them travel together, observing the corruption of the established social order, a corruption that had previously seduced and destroyed two young men from the village. Though Alan is temporarily lured toward decadence, he manages—with the help of his dog—to escape, having learned along the way the lessons that lead to his personal salvation.

The scenes that satirize capitalist decay borrow an array of theatrical devices from the popular stage. Using slapstick, farce, burlesque, cabaret songs, doggerel, and a host of other devices, Auden and Isherwood provide a kind of comic revue of modern political corruption and personal decadence. The loosely connected comic scenes are separated by a number of choral poems that develop in a more serious fashion the implications of the play’s high-spirited satire. The bulk of the satiric pieces are set in Ostnia, a decadent monarchy in Eastern Europe, and Westland, a fascist state with clear parallels to Nazi Germany. (Both of these nations reappear in the other Auden-Isherwood collaborations.) In Ostnia, Alan and the dog—accompanied by two journalists—witness a grotesquely comic execution of four workers accused of inciting revolution. The satiric point is unmistakable, as it is later in Westland, where the political system becomes an asylum that “the leader” rules by speaking to the inmates through a megaphone attached to his picture.

One of the most memorable sequences in the play occurs at the Ninevah Hotel, where Alan watches a cabaret act in the hotel restaurant, an act that, as John Fuller points out, “burlesques the sexual tyranny and . . . militant philistinism of the rich.” At the end of the first sketch, which includes a crude song performed by the Ninevah Girls, one of the wealthy hotel patrons selects a willing chorus girl and orders her cooked and prepared for his dinner. This satire of wealth and sexual domination is followed by another sketch, in which Destructive Desmond uses a penknife to destroy an original Rembrandt while “a piece of third-rate Victorian landscape painting” stands unharmed beside it. The wealthy patrons applaud ecstatically at this grand entertainment, asserting their aggressive distaste for high culture.

With their “brutal, noisy vulgarity and tasteless extravagance” (as the stage directions put it), the Ninevah Hotel scenes have a comic vitality that prevents the play’s didacticism from becoming ponderous. Finally, such scenes, with the chorus’s commentary, allow Auden and Isherwood to illustrate pointedly the essential decadence and egotism of modern people and their inability to love and sympathize with others. This theme, which is implicit throughout the play, becomes overt in a scene at Paradise Park, where Alan meets a poet who insists that he is “the only real person in the world,” a notion echoed later in the chorus’s warning to the audience: “Beware of yourself:/ Have you not heard your own heart whisper: ‘I am the nicest person in this room’?”

If the play finally has a significance beyond social satire, it lies in Auden’s suggestion that political solutions are useless without personal regeneration. At the end of the play, Sir Francis, who is back in Pressan Ambo and revealed as the missing heir, tells the gathered villagers that for ten years he had a “dog’s eye view” of them, “seeing people from underneath,” observing their essential hypocrisy and their lack of common human sympathy. After he, Alan, and a few converted villagers leave for the ill-defined “other side,” the chorus offers the audience a choice, suggesting that personal change must precede political action: “Choose therefore that you may recover: both your charity and your place/ Determining/ . . . Where grace may grow outward and be given praise.” As in much of Auden’s work of the 1930’s, the exact nature of the proposed solution to personal and political ills is clouded. At the time, Auden was a diagnostician, not a healer. The ending of The Dog Beneath the Skin gestures toward an ill-defined “love” that is “loath to enter.” Only in his later work, and after his return to Christianity, did Auden arrive at a less clouded notion of love as a means of personal and social redemption.

The Rake’s Progress

That notion of love is defined most clearly in the long poems that Auden wrote during the 1940’s, a time when his interest in stage drama subsided. Aside from Paul Bunyan, the brief libretto written for Britten in 1939, Auden did no writing for the stage until Stravinsky approached him in 1947 about the possibility of doing an opera based on William Hogarth’s series of engravings A Rake’s Progress. Auden agreed to the project and wrote with Chester Kallman the first of their several librettos. Auden saw in opera a logical fulfillment of his earlier interest in poetic drama. In a 1966 interview for the British Broadcasting Corporation, he suggested that “opera is the proper place for lyric theatre, rather than the spoken drama.” The “job of the librettist,” he wrote in Secondary Worlds, “is to furnish the composer with a plot, characters and words.” Clearly in a supporting role, the verbal text “is to be judged . . . by its success or failure in exciting the musical imagination of the composer.”

Though Auden tended to minimize the role of the librettist, his operatic works with Kallman have considerable merit apart from their musical settings. The Rake’s Progress is particularly well regarded both as a stage opera and as an independent poetic text. The libretto illustrates many of the central themes of Auden’s mature work and suggests that several of the techniques he and Isherwood used in the 1930’s plays were naturally suited for the operatic stage: the reliance on fable and myth, the use of overstatement and grand gesture, and the emphasis on idea and spectacle rather than character.

The libretto is essentially a moral fable, illustrating in religious terms the Fall and Redemption of humanity. Auden suggests that through an act of free will, humanity can choose selfless love (agape) and, in doing so, find grace and redemption. This theme is worked out in the fate of the opera’s hero, Tom Rakewell, described by Edward Callan as “an aesthetic personality who relies on fortune and believes in his own superior destiny.” Auden illustrates the folly of Tom’s egotism by giving him three wishes (after the pattern of the archetypal quest hero), each of which leads him further from Anne Truelove, the libretto’s symbolic embodiment of selfless love. Rakewell’s first wish (for money) is, like his other wishes, fulfilled by Nick Shadow, a satanic servant who secretly aims to damn Rakewell’s soul. Removed by his first wish from the redemptive powers of Anne’s love, Tom makes a second wish (for happiness), which leads him to an acte gratuit, an existential choice to marry Baba, a bearded lady from a fair; Shadow has convinced him that such an act could bring true happiness by freeing him from the demands of necessity. According to Fuller, Auden uses Rakewell’s absurd act as a critique of the existentialist view of free will; his marriage is “a grotesque parody of the true Christian choice” he will make later.

Tom’s final wish (to have a magical bread-making machine he has dreamed of) brings about his final ruin. Left at the mercy of Shadow, he is offered—in a Faustian scene—a last, yet apparently hopeless, chance for salvation. Recalling Anne’s love, he makes an irrational choice when Shadow asks him to name three cards: “I wish for nothing else./ Love, first and last, assume eternal reign;/ Renew my life, O Queen of Hearts, again.” The choice is, in effect, a leap of faith, a genuine acceptance of love. The memory of Anne thus saves Rakewell from damnation. Denied Rakewell’s soul, Shadow condemns him to madness, but in the concluding scene, Tom (imagining himself as Adonis) is symbolically redeemed from his suffering by Anne (as Venus) and dies reconciled to her.

In a sense, The Rake’s Progress is a thematic extension of the ideas raised by the Auden-Isherwood plays of the 1930’s. Auden’s Christianity, his embracing of agape, provides a new perspective on the personal and social ills diagnosed in The Dog Beneath the Skin. In the later work, Auden sees human failings in personal and religious terms; social and political malaise originates, he seems to suggest, by human imperfection, in humanity’s fallen nature. Only by appealing to powers outside themselves can humans find redemption.

Though W. H. Auden is not regarded as a major playwright, he and his collaborators produced a body of work that is recognized today as a significant contribution to modern drama and opera. His plays with Christopher Isherwood have survived as period pieces and are well regarded as experiments in poetic, didactic drama, written at a time when the English theater offered little more than uninspired naturalism. The Dog Beneath the Skin, probably the most lasting of the Auden-Isherwood collaborations, contains some of Auden’s finest verse written for the stage and, though often raw and uneven, remains engaging in its mixture of popular, high-spirited comedy and political satire. Michael Sidnell, while suggesting that personal and artistic difficulties kept Auden and Isherwood from fully committing themselves to the theater, argues, nevertheless, that they “were in advance of their time in using poetry, song, dance, and fable for serious dramatic purposes in a way that did not become common on the English stage until the late 1950’s, when the strong influence of Bertolt Brecht was belatedly felt.” Auden’s work for the operatic stage is more difficult to assess, partly because of the complex interdependence of the librettos and their musical settings. Auden saw the librettist’s role as clearly secondary to the composer’s, yet his librettos with Chester Kallman are regarded by some as significant dramatic and poetic texts in their own right. John Blair, for example, treating The Rake’s Progress as an “operatic poem,” suggests that the libretto can be “seen as an epitome of Auden’s mature poetic mode.” As opera, the Auden-Kallman collaborations have had mixed success; The Rake’s Progress (with music by Igor Stravinsky) is generally conceded to be their best, and, as Humphrey Carpenter points out, is apparently “one of the very few modern operas to become a permanent addition to the repertoire.” In the two years following its premiere, it was staged more than two hundred times.

Sources for Further Study

Buell, Frederick. W. H. Auden as a Social Poet. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. Arguing that Auden’s poetry is an ironic vision of social and moral responsibility, Buell focuses on the 1930’s, when Auden was forming his social views. Contains an interesting analysis of the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s ideas about theater on Auden, when he lived in Berlin. Contains footnotes and an index.

Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Carpenter had access to private and unpublished material in crafting this comprehensive and compelling critical biography of the poet. It is the key source to biographical detail with which an Auden researcher should begin to situate Auden’s poetry within his world and worldview.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. New York: Pantheon, 1996. This biography of Auden is also a history of some of the pressing and largely unresolved human and literary problems Auden faced in this lifetime.

Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Brings to bear a great deal of erudition, along with meticulous critical attention, and covers the plays and libretti as well as the poetry. In this sense, it is indispensable for those readers who want to take Auden seriously, and at his word, on the concern for “truth” in writing.

Gingerich, Martin E. W. H. Auden: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. An immensely useful and annotated compendium of criticism of Auden’s major poems through 1974. Auden’s students will find this work indispensable in tracing the reception and appreciation of Auden through his early years as a poet to his posthumous reputation.

Hecht, Anthony. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking Press, 1981. A brilliant synthesis of Auden’s intellectual development and emotional history to 1939. Traces themes back to childhood fantasies, which are the substance of Auden’s poetic self-analysis as symbols for public conditions in his time. The main movement of his art was from a private to a public language. Includes notes and index.

Mendelson, Edward. Later Auden. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999. In discussing the verse, Mendelson concentrates not only on major works but also praises less well known, later poems. This is a major study of a poet whose cries against social injustice resound far beyond his time and place.

Page, Norman. Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Examines the relationship between the poet Auden and Christopher Isherwood, looking at their friends and associates. Bibliography and index.

Smith, Stan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Replete with tools for further research, this is an excellent aid to any study of Auden’s life and work.

Smith, Stan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Replete with tools for further research, this is an excellent aid to any study of Auden’s life and work.

Spears, Monroe K., ed. Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. This early compendium of Auden’s criticism contains excellent exposition of well-known Auden poems and stands out for its inclusion of appreciations and contextualizations by Auden’s fellow poets, including Cleanth Brooks and Marianne Moore. Also included are seminal articles by American critics Edmund Wilson (“Auden in America”) and G. S. Fraser (“The Career of W. H. Auden”) that provide essential biographical backgrounds to Auden’s most productive periods of work.