Erudition you can’t pray to match can be highly invigorating. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare is a master class by one master on another—cobbled together from students’ notes of his 1946 New School lectures, Auden works through the canon with wit, insight fueled by wide interests (Kant, opera, Bible verses), and lots of appreciation for characters as people upset by feelings and fate. Back-to-school reading for autodidacts everywhere. —Rosecrans Baldwin