Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose

The first incarnation of these notes was a fairly neat manuscript typed by Frye himself. The notes were then retyped by his secretary, Jane Widdicombe.1 On the first version Frye pencilled in corrections on his typescript and indicated with a marker where new pages were to begin; he corrected typos on the second version. The second typescript runs to 193 single-spaced pages. The precise date of the notes is uncertain, but they belong to the period following the invitation Frye received in 1973 to deliver the Norton Lectures. Most were doubtless written in 1974 and probably before June of that year, when Frye left for London and Oxford to write his lectures.

I have retained the order of the synopses as they were originally found in Frye’s files, though I have combined two sections on Heliodorus into one. Frye’s typescript required very little editing. I have expanded his numerous abbreviations, corrected typos, italicized titles of prose and dramatic texts, and changed his square brackets to braces ({ }). Everything within my own square brackets is an editorial addition. The headnote to each of the sections indicates the copy (often copies) of the texts in Frye’s own library and provides references to the places in Frye’s Collected Works where he mentions the text in question. For the stand-alone volumes in the Collected Works, I have also provided page references to the original editions of Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Code, and Words with Power.

For some of the passages that Frye quotes he inserted the page numbers from the edition he was using. When those references are missing, I have supplied the page numbers in square brackets. When the edition I cite is different from the one Frye used, or if I have not been able to determine the edition he was reading, I have cited an edition to which I had access. These editions are recorded in the headnotes. Frye’s own page references are either within parentheses or are not enclosed at all.

The typescript for these notes is in the Northrop Frye Fonds of the Victoria University Library, 1991 accession, box 28, file 6. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.

1. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe

Longus wrote in the second century C.E. Frye’s source: Three Greek Romances: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, An Ephesian Tale by Xenophon, The Hunters of Euboea by Dio Chrysostom. Trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). Page references in square brackets are to this edition.

References to Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 190, 197

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 48–9, 66, 69, 381

“The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 27: 368

The Prologue says it’s a verbalization of a picture. The following are the main things in the prologue: (a) pirates as the night-world power, turning up as the smugglers and gypsies in Guy Mannering (b) the story is an “offering” to Eros, the Nymphs and Pan. Thus later comedy-romance sets up supplementary mythologies beside the accepted ones, and helps to expand the mythological corpus accordingly. The Cupid and Psyche myth in Apuleius is the outstanding and obvious example. Then (c) the story advertises itself as therapeutic, a remedy for disease and solace for griefs. So the triumph of wish-fulfillment in such stories actualizes what dreams try to do, and I suppose dreams are therapeutic too for some of the same reasons. Then (d) the writer hopes to retain “prudence” when writing of the vicissitudes of others. Both writer and reader achieve sophrosyne by contemplating the cycle of fortune, is the idea. And finally (e) the emphasis on the inspiring picture introduces the ut pictura poesis principle.

The story begins with the boy Daphnis suckled by a nanny-goat and the girl Chloe by a ewe. The pastoral hero is nursed by an animal and picked up by a goatherd; similarly the girl by a shepherd: identification with animals outlined at the beginning, symbolizing the state of unfallen nature, or thereabouts. Daphnis has the usual talismans of recognition, a little purple mantle, a golden brooch, and a tiny sword with an ivory hilt. She has swaddling clothes, and a headband of gold, gilt shoes and golden anklets. Note how these talismans get supplied to the Christ-child by the Magi. A goatherd and shepherd become foster-parents, natch, and the names Daphnis and Chloe are said to be explicitly pastoral names—I don’t yet know why there are special pastoral names. Chloe is found in a grotto of the Nymphs, with statues of the nymphs in it, and the shepherd follows the nursing ewe and “wished to chastise her and reduce her to her former good behavior” [5], not realizing what she’s doing—faint trace of the calumniated mother. Nurturing animals teach lesson of love to humans.

Children grow rapidly—sixteen years passes in a sentence, as in the Winter’s Tale. They “revealed a beauty more exquisite than became rustics” [6]—the usual mystical snobbery about birth in romance. The Hymn of the Soul2 and its original lost birth-right may actually be the source of the whole aristocratic set-up in society. Well, the kids grow up—maybe this kind of thing is the origin of the word kids. Local goatherds and shepherds are bothered by a wolf and dig pits to catch it—they don’t catch the wolf but they do catch Daphnis, who’s pulled out by Chloe’s “band” (sash, I suppose). Combination of Joseph-in-pit and Rapunzel themes. They manage to fall in love, largely as the result of Daphnis’ continually taking baths in front of Chloe, and proceed to fall sick of love, with appropriate laments. I suppose the lovesickness is there to supply a kind of ritual death element in Court of Love stories—anyway, the approximation of it to death is as emphatic and explicit here as in the Renaissance, on the other side of Provence.

So far we’re in phase two, the brother-sister locus-amoenus one. The beginning of experience comes first with a rival, one Dorcon, who woos Chloe by disparaging Daphnis’ appearance and (assumed animal) parentage. Irony in latter is (a) that Chloe has the same origin (b) that later Dorcon assumed a wolf-skin with views of raping Chloe, but gets torn by dogs instead. Anyway, the love-debate between Dorcon and Daphnis goes back generically to the shepherd-farmer rivalry in Sumerian that comes into the Cain-Abel story. Dorcon boasts: “I am as white as milk, and my hair is red like grain ready for the harvest” [10]. Daphnis’ rejoinders include exempla: “I was suckled by a goat; so was Zeus” [10]. So they continue their love-meditations—note the set rhetorical piece starting so early. “Can it be,” says Daphnis, “that Chloe tasted some poison when she was going to kiss me?” [11]. Overtones of this go a long way into romantic literature. The next symbol of experience is pirates, who kill Dorcon (sacrificial victim implied in above self-description) and try to carry off Daphnis. Chloe saves him by piping to the cows: the cows rush to one side of the ship, overbalancing it, and jump in the water, setting up a tidal wave that sinks it. Improbable story, but the Gadarene swine archetype may be connected. Anyway, the piratical failure indicates the supremacy of the phase two theme, where Orpheus can still command animals, and by extension the sea.

The victory over the pirates also suggests something of the Ovidian story of Bacchus transforming the ship into vines (Metamorphoses bk. 3). This theme develops later, when a gang of youths comes along, get their ship’s rope stolen, and tie up their ship by a vine, which the goats eat. They eat it because they’re driven down to the shore by the youths’ dogs—they’ve come to hunt. Rows follow.

Well: the story follows the seasons closely, and gets to the vintage and the festival of Dionysus. An old man called Philetas tells Daphnis and Chloe a story about having met the little boy Eros in his garden who tells him he’s “shepherding Daphnis and Chloe” [21]. Previously he’s appeared to the foster parents in a dream and told them to bring Daphnis and Chloe up as shepherds (and goatherds). The youths beat up Daphnis and carry off Chloe: Daphnis, who is a pretty feeble specimen of a romantic hero, goes to the cave of the nymphs and complains—reproach theme, as in the Lycidas passage. They (the statues) turn into real nymphs in a dream and reassure him. Pan now takes charge and causes a “panic” among the youths on their ship. Some of the overtones suggest Ariel’s tricks in The Tempest, especially in the shipwreck. “You have dragged from the altars a maiden of whom Eros wishes to fashion a tale of love” [30]. So they return Chloe, with the beasts forming a chorus. “The ivy on the goats, the wolf howls of the sheep, the pine burgeoning on her head, the fire on the land” [31], etc. are some of the panic elements. So they naturally sacrifice to Pan—the festival of Pan follows on the Dionysus one. Keats.3

Two inset metamorphosis stories, the second the Pan-Syrinx one. The lovers, still innocent—that is, they’re still just fumbling—swear loyalty by their animals—“natural for a girl and for one who thought that goats and sheep were the proper deities for shepherds and goatherds” [35].

A war starts, but doesn’t come to anything—this is a very placid story. The lovers get through the winter somehow, with such rituals as “before she handed him his drink she sipped a little of it and then gave it to him” [38]. Cf. The Moonstone. Well, they see the animals fucking when the spring comes, but it doesn’t give them any ideas. Daphnis is taught what to do by a married woman, who warns him that Chloe is a virgin and will bleed—this terrifies him, so nothing still happens. I suppose bleeding from white flesh may be the red-and-white archetype of Eros, and may account for that curious episode in Parzival where the hero falls into a stupor over drops of blood on the snow.

Question of marriage begins: as usual, the lovers haven’t a clue until they’re told in a dream. The ship the youths came in earlier, that had its vine-hawser eaten by goats, drifted off and was smashed against rocks, “but a purse containing three thousand drachmas was spewed up by the waves and lies hidden under seaweed near the cadaver of a dolphin” [48]. The latter stinks—vestigial dragon. Money thrown up from the sea—previously a fishing boat with singing sailors has taught Chloe the principle of the echo, which leads to another metamorphosis inset story where Echo is torn to pieces by animals through Pan’s displeasure. The foster-parents worry about tokens of birth and what they mean, and Chloe’s foster-father muses “Perhaps when he finds his own people {i.e., Daphnis} he will find something of Chloe’s secrets also” [50]. There certainly seems a suggestion in the story that the sexual act between them can’t occur until something else happens. Then Daphnis climbs a high apple tree to get the apple on top of it to give to Chloe. Cherry-tree carol archetype.4 “I could not leave it behind where it would fall to the ground, where a grazing sheep might tread upon it, or a creeping serpent void his slime upon it …” [51]. Very strange the way all these shepherd and fisherman pastoral themes wander in and out of the Gospels.

Long description of Daphnis’ foster-father’s beautiful garden—Alcinous archetype.5 A jealous cowherd named Lampis tramples all the flowers “like a boar” [54], putting the foster-father’s life in danger because his “master” is coming to inspect. Well, that gets put right too. The master arrives—his name is Dionysophantes, which sounds like epiphany of Dionysos. Naturally he turns out to be Daphnis’ father—archetype of the master turning into the father. Meanwhile Daphnis gets tempted to buggery by a pederast in the train of his father and older brother. Foster-father says “the time has come to reveal what I have hidden” [60], and so he produces the talismans. This separates Daphnis momentarily from Chloe, who’s abducted again by the man who trampled the flowers, and who seems a displaced storm or boar archetype. Talismans were designed “not as tokens for recognition but as burial ornaments” [62]. Cf. the gifts of the Magi, myrrh especially. The last abduction of Chloe, which of course doesn’t last very long, reminds me of Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 6. Anyway, the parents of Chloe duly appear: “Both have we exposed, both have we found; both have been cared for by Pan, the Nymphs, and Eros” [67]. It’s Apollo in The Winter’s Tale. Daphnis and Chloe continue to live a pastoral life; the story ends with their first sexual act together, with the bridal company outside: “when they came near the door they sang out in shrill and harsh tones, as if they were breaking ground with three-pronged forks” [68]. Anyway, Daphnis’ three-pronged fork goes to work, for once: evidently the sex act can’t take place until it’s clear that they’re not actually brother and sister—one of the nasty little habits of recognition scenes. Such beautiful (and helpless) children can’t be the children of such old people as their foster-father’s, it’s said—Sarah archetype repeated in the Gospels (John the Baptist and the traditionally aged Joseph).

2. Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesiaca (An Ephesian Tale)

Ephesiaca is generally dated from the first half of the second century C.E. Frye’s source: Three Greek Romances: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, An Ephesian Tale by Xenophon, The Hunters of Euboea by Dio Chrysostom. Trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952). The page numbers in square brackets are to this edition.

References to Xenophon’s Ephesiaca in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 190, 227

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 75

Starts out with Habrocomes as a youth so handsome he gets boastful and says he’s more beautiful than Eros, or that Eros doesn’t exist, or something. Anyway, Eros gets sore. Euphues type of alazon-hero, and curiously similar in situation to a little-known story of George MacDonald, The Wise Woman, about two girls, one a princess and the other a shepherdess. I’ll summarize this later.6 Well, of course there’s an equally beautiful girl, Anthia, hailed by the crowd as either a goddess or a replica fashioned by her (Artemis: it’s at a festival of Artemis). So they fall in love, get lovesick and nearly die; the oracle of Apollo is consulted and it summarizes the plot of the story. They marry, then are sent off on a ship to mitigate the threatened woes, but of course the ship is captured by pirates. “The sailors were idle and took to drink; then came drunkenness and the beginning of the oracle’s fulfillment” [81]. Amnesia archetype. Habrocomes has a dream, or vision, of an immense woman in a scarlet robe setting the ship on fire—cf. the life in death of the Ancient Mariner. Pirates do capture the ship when the sailors are drunk, carry off Habrocomes and Anthia and others, and set the ship afire. Cf. the opening of The Tempest. Habrocomes’s tutor is drowned. At least more happens. The pirate chief naturally wants to bugger Habrocomes and his next in command wants to fuck Anthia. However, they have a boss, Apsyrtos, who talks them out of that. The lamentations of hero and heroine (they can’t do much except lament, as usual in these stories) introduce the theme of fatal beauty, i.e., everybody gets an erection from looking at them. So Habrocomes is loved by Manto, daughter of Apsyrtos, who burns with love until she can’t stand it any more: her two forms of relief are (a) to tell somebody else (b) to write a letter to Habrocomes. Habrocomes says no, so Manto accuses him on the Potiphar’s wife principle, and he’s flogged and imprisoned. In prison he has another vision, of his own father, clothed in black, wandering and finally arriving at the prison, freeing him. “Himself he saw then transformed to a horse and galloping over much territory in pursuit of another who was a mare; finally he found the mare and recovered his human shape” [89–90]. The Apuleius scheme goes by in a cloud of dust. Meanwhile Anthia, separated from Habrocomes, incurs the jealousy of, I guess, Manto, who wants to marry her to “the vilest sort, a rustic goatherd” [90], named Lampo. She begs off and Lampo lets her go—theme of invulnerable chastity, I suppose. Apsyrtos learns the truth of the situation with Habrocomes and Manto, lets him out of jail and makes him his steward, which would be fine only Habrocomes thinks of nothing but Anthia. Joseph was less cluttered. Manto has a husband Moeris, who naturally heads straight for Anthia’s genitalia, but Manto orders Lampo to kill Anthia. This of course he can’t do, though the detail about showing her animal’s blood is skipped. Another shipwreck and they land in Cilicia (i.e., Anthia and Lampo), where they’re captured by a band of robbers. These robbers have a pleasant custom of hanging a sacrificial victim from a tree and throwing javelins at it, hitting it being a mark of divine (Ares in this case) favour. So Anthia is strung up as the victim, but rescued by a law-and-order army, whose leader—well, it’s no surprise. Meanwhile Habrocomes falls in with the robber band chieftain, who wants to recruit a new band—Two Gentlemen of Verona archetype.

The robber band chieftain is named Hippothoos, and he tells an inset tale about homosexual love: his love however died. “ ‘You, Habrocomes, will see your beloved, and someday will recover her; but I can never see Hyperanthes again’ ” [97]. Too bad, but that’s the way inset tales go, in the opposite direction from the main story. Anyway, Anthia, weary of having every man in her presence sniffing her, asks an Ephesian physician to give her a drug that will kill her. Naturally he gives her a drug that only puts her to sleep. So she “dies” on the day of her wedding to—I think it’s Perilaos. Much Ado theme of the mock death of the heroine at a wedding, of course. “There he deposited her in a funerary chamber, having immolated many victims and consumed many garments and other attire in flame” [101]. Well, of course robbers come to the tomb and find her alive: she says “I am consecrated to two deities, Love and Death” [101–2], but they take her to Egypt and sell her there. Habrocomes hears about this and goes to Egypt too. Another Potiphar’s wife theme; this time the wife kills the husband: Habrocomes gets blamed for it and is tied to a cross (they don’t nail in that country). He prays to the river Nile, who sends a wind that knocks over the cross and sends him floating down the river: he’s picked up and sentenced to be burned on a pyre; the Nile floods it over, and the governor inquires what the hell. Note, first, that these devices of miraculous rescue are the stock in trade of saints’ lives which are based on the formulas of such romances as this; second, that the Acts of the Apostles contains the same structure of wanderings around the eastern Mediterranean and a shipwreck. In this story it’s hardly possible to get on a ship that doesn’t get wrecked.

Well, Anthia kills another cunt-sniffer, so she’s sentenced to be crucified, which is commuted to being shut up in a pit with two huge mastiffs. The guard who, guess what, wants her, feeds the mastiffs so they don’t hurt her. Daniel in the lion’s den, with the additional point that the Daniel and Joseph stories are structurally closely connected. Lamentation says “if you are alive these woes are nothing” [110]—cf. Pericles. So Habrocomes was carried to Sicily “by a gale” [110] and falls in with an old Spartan who ran away from Sparta with his lady love and was condemned to death in absentia because his parents had other ideas—Midsummer Night’s Dream theme. His lady love had recently died and he’s embalmed her in the Egyptian fashion and continues to live with her corpse. Same device turns up in Rider Haggard’s She. Epiphany of Thanatos-Eros, I suppose. Anthia gets collected by a few more men who want her, though now the pitch is that they’ll leave her alone and just look at her. However this doesn’t satisfy the wife of one of them, who orders a slave to sell Anthia to a brothel keeper. She gets out of that by pretending epilepsy, and then accidentally meets Hippothoos, the robber chieftain who’d originally sentenced her to the mastiff death. In spite of being a most unpleasant character, Hippothoos is the closest friend of the hero, and as soon as he hears that she’s his (Habrocomes’) he renounces his claim, or whatever it is. Two Gentlemen of Verona theme of the supremacy of friendship over love.

Earlier in the story two married servants of Habrocomes and Anthia, named Leucon and Rhode, have escaped to Rhodes, where they’re living quietly. They set up a pillar inscribed to Habrocomes and Anthia, with their names as donors, and Habrocomes sees it (I forget how he gets from Sicily to Rhodes, probably by a shipwreck, the normal means of transportation). Hippothoos determines to take Anthia to Ephesus, but gets sidetracked in Rhodes, where she cuts off her hair as an offering to the sun-god. Symbolic whatsit. Then a great recognition scene of Habrocomes and Anthia, of the two servants, eventually of Hippothoos. Note the Comedy of Errors theme of leads plus servants—also Rhodes is displaced from Ephesus, which is the real home. The final thanks are to Isis, again as in Apuleius. When Habrocomes and Anthia finally get to bed, they inquire about each other’s sexual fidelity, “and easily did they persuade one another, for such was their desire” [126]. They build a tomb for their parents “who, as it happened, had died by reason of old age and despair” [126], and Hippothoos lives with them with an adopted son. Curious how many Shakespearean themes get into this silly story—Spenserian ones too, such as the Serena sacrifice theme and the unfucked Florimell. Sounds almost as though there were a monomyth after all.

Daphnis and Chloe is an upper-hemisphere story: phase 1 with the exposure by noble parents; phase 2 with the innocent brother-sister pastoral love; phase 3 with distant threats of rivals, pirates, and such, returning to phase 1 with the recognition scene. Xenophon at least tries to explore more phases.7

3. Introduction by Moses Hadas to Three Greek Romances: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, An Ephesian Tale by Xenophon, The Hunters of Euboea by Dio Chrysostom. Trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952).

Daphnis and Chloe dates from the second century C.E.; The Hunters of Euboea from the first century C.E. These notes conclude with a brief analysis of Barnabe Riche’s Apolonius and Silla, one of the tales in his Farewell to the Military Profession (1581) which is the source of the plot of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Why these notes are tacked onto the Hadas material is uncertain. Frye owned and annotated an edition of Riche’s Apolonius and Scilla in Elizabethan Love Stories, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), but the edition he quotes from below is from Elizabethan Tales, ed. E.J.H. O’Brien (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1937), 125–53. The page numbers in square brackets in paragraph 3 below are to this latter edition.

For the single reference to Riche’s tale in Frye’s published work, see “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 52.

Moses Hadas’ introduction speaks of the derivation of love story, intrigue, recognition, and bourgeois atmosphere from New Comedy, of idyllic atmosphere from Theocritus (the apple on the top of the tree he says explicates some lines of Sappho), of dilemma situations from the rhetoric books, which stretch from the elder Seneca to Erasmus’ Colloquies and are really romance plots finding their way into the Gesta Romanorum and elsewhere. The implausible plot is intended as showing the caprice of fortune, and the inexorable recognition scene shows the working of providence. He says also that Isis and Diana of the Ephesians were identified and that Xenophon’s tale is propaganda for this goddess, like Apuleius. Cf. Acts again,8 and note that Dio Chrysostom’s dates are 40–120. Hadas naturally doesn’t mention the New Testament parallels, but does mention the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena and the Gospel of Nicodemus. The fact that both Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius were said to be bishops has various explanations, but points to the similarity between these romances and saints’ lives, only with Isis or the Nile as the rescuing deities instead of God. Hadas distinguishes the romance-comedy tradition from the epic-tragedy one by saying that the hero isn’t, as such, in love or happily married, though he may be incidentally; the heroes of romance are motivated entirely by love, and medieval romance descends from this convention. He also notes the Odyssey parallel in the plot.

Dio Chrysostom’s Hunters of Euboea is part of an oration, and is based on the ingenu archetype: simple rustic comes to the city and shows how good his life is. Pastoral Utopianism; Dio Chrysostom was, evidently, a Cynic who believed in the simple life.

Barnaby Riche’s story of Apolonius and Silla, one of a series of tales in a book called Farewell to the Military Profession (i.e., I’m going to tell stories now: the latent contrast between epic and romance, realism and love tales). Silla, daughter of governor of Cyprus, falls in love with Apolonius who’s visiting there, but he doesn’t give her a tumble. So she gets on a ship and chases him: the captain goes through the fuck-or-else routine: heroine prays, a storm busts the ship, her faithful servant is drowned, but she floats to shore on a chest of the captain’s full of money and clothes. Money from sea theme. She dresses up as a man, calls herself Silvio, the name of her brother who looks just like her, enters into Apolonius’ service, becomes his emissary to a certain Lady Julina; latter falls in love with her; brother wanders by, screws her and gets her pregnant—they never miss, these romance heroes—Lady Julina turns down Apolonius’ suit saying she’s Another’s, and he says “I must then content myself, although against my will, having the law in your own hands, to like of whom you list and to make choice where it pleaseth you” [140]. He’s talking of her social position, but the old mother-right white-goddess business is in the background. So he walks off in high dudgeon and sticks Silla in jail—note how this gets detailed onto Malvolio in Twelfth Night. A long colloquy between Apolonius, Lady Julina and Silla, where Silla’s repeated denials get her into steadily hotter water—trace of calumniated wife in Lady Julina and of ritual death of heroine for both, considering the jail. So, finally, Silla exhibits her “breasts and pretty teats” [150] to Lady Julina; eventually the real Silvio turns up, and finis with a double wedding. If I could figure out the interconnection of amnesia and identical twin themes I’d have this tied up. Incidentally, the story begins with the usual moral harrumph, where he says the ground of reasonable love is “desert.”9 Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost calls this a heresy (4.1.21–35), and insists that grace is as important in the religion of Eros as in its Christian counterpart. Note that Shakespeare takes the same Silvius in As You Like It for Lodge’s Montanus.10 Naturally you can’t exhibit pretty teats on the stage, especially when the part is taken by a boy who hasn’t got any.

Structure of the clinch-tease: Daphnis and Chloe makes one impatient, because of all the childish fumbling and masturbatory exercises—bathing and the like—but the structure is important. Phase One is the loss of the true parents and the acquiring of the foster ones. Phase Two is the pre-sexual brother-sister locus amoenus transitional one, and Phase Three is the phase of experience, including sexual experience. The point is that we can’t get to Phase Three until Phases One and Two come into alignment: the true parents have to be recognized before the sexual act can really take place.11 Otherwise the hero might actually be screwing his sister. The fear of incest, in other words, is a real structural principle, even if negatively, in romance—hence its importance in the Apolonius story. What’s true of this brief romance is true of the nine hundred odd pages of Tom Jones: Tom can’t get Sophia into his arms until he’s discovered the truth about his origin; heroines in Terence can’t marry the hero until they’ve discovered that they were stolen by pirates in infancy, and so on. Closely connected, in fact part of the same thing, is the theme of anxiety of continuity: hero and heroine can’t get together until the parents consent, or, if the parent is a humor, gets circumvented.

4. Thomas Lodge, Rosalind or, Euphues’ Golden Legacy

Rosalind was written in 1588 and published in 1590. The edition Frye read is unknown. The page numbers in square brackets below are to the edition prepared by Edward Chauncey Baldwin, Rosalynde, or Euphues’ Golden Legacy (BiblioBazaar, 2007).

References to Lodge’s Rosalind in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 231, 313

The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 280

Thought of as a kind of sequel to Euphues, with much euphuism in the style: note the similarity to the rhyming prose of the Arabian Nights. Of course a good many interspersed poems, providing a Menippean wash to the structure. In Lodge the usurping Duke (in Lodge the King of France) isn’t converted, but is chased off his throne by a revolution of the “twelve peers,” who shift their loyalty to Gerismond, the equivalent of Duke Senior (the other’s called Torrismond, a name that turns up in Beddoes). There seems some Charlemagne reference: there are “twelve peers,” which I suppose suggested Shakespeare’s names of Orlando and Oliver (and the wrestler Charles). The second brother, Fernandyne, also turns up at the end like Jaques de Boys, but is described as a student in Paris—pushing him out of the way is the germ of the Tempest theme.12

Besides the poems, there are set meditations on love, harangues like the old man’s (father of the three sons) at death, and other rhetorical insets. Lodge is very repetitive in his imagery, and he keeps using a labyrinth image combined with hair as net (cf. Rosalind with Rosamond),13 which seems connected with the wandering in forest theme. Also a careful cyclical imagery: usurping king banishes Rosalind “lest her perfection might be the beginning of his prejudice and the hope of his fruit end in the beginning of her blossoms” [59]. David–Jonathan set-up with the two girls; in Shakespeare Celia just sneaks off with Rosalind, whereas in Lodge that’s only a suggested possibility and the king actually banishes both. Shakespeare always plays down the generation clash. Celia says “be patient, Rosalind, for first by thine exile thou goest to thy father” [63]. The equivalent of Colin is Corydon,14 who’s also bound to the cycle: “The next year may mend all with a fresh increase” [76]. Next year country. Town and country mouse topos.

The Montanus (Silvius in Shakespeare, reinforcing the woods imagery)—Phoebe strand is very well done in Lodge—that is, he realizes that Phoebe is a narcist female who can’t love anybody outside because she’s already in love with somebody inside, and consequently falls in love with a disguised woman who epiphanizes that. Lodge also has a most interesting sequence of images about shadow and substance, where the disguised Rosalind is the shadow for Rosader (Orlando), and which Shakespeare doesn’t seem to pick up, although his forest of Arden is just as much a dream-world that characters keep falling into. With Phoebe he emphasizes the association of Narcissus and shadow themes. In Lodge Rosader is tied to a post by his elder brother and kept without food, and through “Adam Spencer, an Englishman” [54], he fights his way through his brother’s guests. They escape “knowing full well the secret ways that led through the vineyards” [84]. A lot said about fortune, also “despair is a merciless sin” [86]. Prodigal son structure with the true father still in exile and hidden. A remark of the disguised Rosalind, “if boys might put on their {women’s} garments perhaps they would prove as comely” [96] sounds like a dramatist. Another remark I could use for the Bible book. “Thou speakest by experience, and therefore we hold all thy words for axioms” [104]. Rosader says “the sun and our stomachs are shepherds’ dials” [107], the source of all the time business in Shakespeare. Rosader’s shadow-wooing of Rosalind is also compared to Ixion embracing a cloud, birds pecking Zeuxis’ grapes, etc. Well, as in Shakespeare, there’s a mock marriage between Rosader and Rosalind disguised as Ganymede. (In neither writer is the highly unchaperoned arrangement of Celia-Alinda living alone with a male page noticed.) The mock marriage ties up the shadow-substance theme, in an archetype very similar to the Twelfth Night and Riche story one. The cycle of fortune is said to turn for the hero when he comes across the repentant elder brother (Saladyne) asleep beside a lion who’s waiting to see if he’s alive before chewing him up, as lions don’t like carcass meat. Dumb sort of lion. Brothers are reconciled after Rosader rescues Saladyne, with a great deal of concord and “philosophical harmony” [118] imagery. Saladyne says “I go thus pilgrim-like to seek out my brother” [119] and proposes to go on to the Holy Land. Attack of robbers, omitted by Shakespeare, but turning up in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, book 6.

Phoebe says there’s nothing personal in turning down Montanus: “I count it as great honor to triumph over fancy as over fortune” [136]. Ganymede warns her that she may “shape yourself to your own shadow, and so with Narcissus prove passionate and yet unpitied” [137]. The moral is don’t neglect your father’s precepts, however boring.

The obvious difference is that there’s no Touchstone or Jaques in Lodge—not the slightest hint of them. Perhaps the studious nature of the middle brother accounts for Shakespeare’s giving the name Jaques also to his middle brother. Obviously Touchstone and Jaques are focal points, one in [Duke] Frederick and the other in the [Duke] Senior world. They’re both jesters within those worlds, and both deliver a set speech with seven parts in it, Jaques on the ages of man and Touchstone on degrees of the lie (As You Like It, 2.7.139–66, and 5.4.94–108). Touchstone operates as an outsider from the court: he tries to convict Colin of sin in not knowing court life. But, being really out of his element in Arden, he tries to adapt, seizes a woman more or less at random from another man and marries her. Jaques says it won’t last, and then he walks out: he’s a penseroso figure in an allegro world, of course; Touchstone is evidently the reverse of this, beginning his conversation with a ridicule of a knight who has no honour, and remaining faithful to Rosalind like a greater Fool. He’s a tedious figure in many ways, and yet so are so many of Shakespeare’s jesters, who, if not old and past their fashion in jokes like Feste and Lavache, are in some other way out of touch with the life around them. Touchstone, as his name implies, indicates that in a court like Duke Frederick’s the funniest joke is the simple truth, that a knight has no honour and that duelling codes are constructions of idleness, which is a form of cowardice.

5. Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time

Pandosto was published in 1588. The edition Frye read is uncertain, but a likely possibility is Greene’s text in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Merritt Lawlis (New York: Odyssey Press, 1967), a copy of which Frye owned and annotated. The page references in square brackets below and in the notes are to P.G. Thomas’s edition (New York: Duffield and Co., 1907).

References to Greene’s Pandosto in Frye’s published work:

“Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” and “Something Rich and Strange,” in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, CW 20: 188, 223

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 12

Anatomy of Criticism, 214; CW 22: 199

Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, CW 6: 490, 507

The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 280

We think of a fable as having a moral attached at the end, but the tradition is more that of beginning with a general moral reflection, which makes the story itself an exemplum. My statement that the first half of The Winter’s Tale follows Pandosto closely and the second half doesn’t follow it at all 15 may have to be modified a little, but is essentially true, I think. There’s no trace of Autolycus; the incest theme is introduced at the end, because Greene’s Pandosto (Leontes) doesn’t really get redeemed: he’s a hideous jerk from start to finish, imprisons Dorastus (Florizel) because he wants Fawnia (Perdita) for himself, and of course she turns out to be his daughter. Whereupon, “to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem, he slew himself” [85]. Both this story and Rosalind end with the phrase “comical event” (Rosalind, 168; Pandosto, 85). Curious how insistent this incest-fear is. Incidentally, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is supposed to be about the paradoxes of reality and fiction. But “reality” in this case is a preposterous melodrama in which a man finds a girl in a brothel who is—guess what—his own daughter. The play is really about the irresistible impact of literary archetypes on a dramatist.

Well, Fawnia’s sent off “to surge in the ghastful seas” [21], with a chain around her neck. The shipmen hate their job “and, with a few green boughs, made a homely cabin to shroud it” [22], i.e., the infant. Manger of rejection, slight trace of Bacchus in Ovid, and of course the bower or arbor of the female. The Delphic oracle has the same role here as in Shakespeare. Historically it’s of course impossible that this story could be a plug for the Delphic oracle, but it has exactly the same structure as though it were, and it certainly would have been if it had been written in late Hellenic times. So what it means is the assimilation of other themes originating in folktale to the central imaginative mythical structure. Pandosto “repents,” up to a point, when the oracle pronounces against him: he doesn’t resist it as Leontes does. “I have committed such a bloody fact as, repent I may, but recall I cannot” [30]. That is, discovery of (irrevocable) guilt and of (irreversible) time are part of the same process: the story is subtitled, of course, “The Triumph of Time.” He tries to kill himself, “offer my guilty blood a sacrifice” [31], but is restrained.

The inevitable shepherd finds the infant and a purse of gold—money from sea again. His wife becomes jealous in a contrapuntal movement to Pandosto’s jealousy which Shakespeare doesn’t bother with. Incidentally a remark by Bellaria (Hermione)—no, it’s only about her—that she’s the daughter of the emperor of Russia is echoed in The Winter’s Tale—I suppose that has something to do with the unfreezing of the statue theme—cf. the Russian masque in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.158 ff.). Egistus (Polixenes) wants his son to marry the daughter of the King of Denmark, and says “Thou seest my white hairs are blossoms for the grave, and thy fresh color fruit for time and fortune” [39]. Cyclical image. Reference to a meeting of farmers’ daughters and Fawnia as “mistress of the feast” [42], the sole basis for the tremendous scene in The Winter’s Tale.

Love scenes of Dorastus and Fawnia: Dorastus says “Fawnia shall be my fortune, in spite of fortune” [46], and later “Cupid is a child and Venus, though old, is painted with fresh colors” [52]. Painting image picked up in The Winter’s Tale. So Dorastus disguises himself as a shepherd and “she began half to forget Dorastus and to favor the pretty shepherd whom she thought she might both love and obtain” [56]. Curious how the device of disguise suggests the inner psychological mechanisms of projection. Anyway she recognizes him in the next sentence. Inevitable reference to Zeuxis and his god-damned grapes, which I suppose underlies the use of Romano in The Winter’s Tale. “Beauty’s shadows are tricked up with time’s colors, which being set to dry in the sun are stained with the sun” [57], etc. Suggests not only the painting imagery applied to Hermione but the “no more than were I painted” speech of Perdita (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.101).

Another reason, a more obvious one, for the delay of the final clinch in romance is the necessity, if there’s an unequal pairing socially, to provide equivalent social status for the lower one, who is nearly always the female. In other words social continuity has to be arranged for first, simply because there’s nothing more defenceless than a fucked female—this is the realistic basis for Pamela. Resonance in the remark: “then to transport themselves and their treasure into Italy, where they should lead a contented life until such time as either he could be reconciled to his father or else, by succession, come to the kingdom” [59]. Final scene of the father-daughter set-up: here it’s the silly father with daughter a sacrificial object that turns up in Uncle Silas and elsewhere. The frightening of the harmless old shepherd, which seems so vicious and silly in Shakespeare, comes partly from such threats as “thou shall have thine eyes put out and continually, while thou diest, grind in a mill like a brute beast” [82–3]. Don’t know why the Samson archetype is used here, unless Samson has foster-father overtones.

That is, the sex act in a society where class distinctions are of primary importance, is tragic, or at least pathetic when the partners to it are socially unequal. To get a comic ending there must be an ancestry-gimmick for the socially inferior partner. Note too that the conventions of most of the literature we know are male-dominated: there’s a dialogue in Pamela between Mr. B and a woman who says would you want me to marry your groom? Mr. B says that when the male is socially superior, he raises the woman to his level; when the female is, she’s dragged down to the man’s level.16 Curious the fanaticism of the reaction against the “white goddess” set-up where the woman chooses her lover: of course a woman may choose among suitors, but in most literature there’s a sharp distinction between courting and marriage. In the former the older stereotypes may be recreated or echoed; the latter is “real life,” which in literature always means another archetype. Strindberg’s Miss Julie for the tragedy of unlicensed sex—in fact sexual prudery itself may be really a desire to retain the structured class society. Note that Greene’s phrase about Pandosto’s suicide indicates that he understands his comedy is enclosing a tragedy,17 though he encloses it less skillfully than Shakespeare does, naturally.

6. Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale

The edition of Chaucer Frye used was quite likely the one he owned and annotated: The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Student’s Cambridge edition, ed. F.N. Robinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). The Canterbury Tales dates from the end of the fourteenth century.

References to The Man of Law’s Tale in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 187, 188, 197

“The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 75

The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 123, 302, 340

Anatomy of Criticism, 49, 199, CW 22: 46, 185

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism,” CW 23: 32

The story of Constance comes from the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Nicholas Trivet, and is also taken from there by Gower for Confessio Amantis, Book 2. There’s some hostile crack against Gower in the Prologue I don’t get;18 Chaucer evidently doesn’t like, or pretends not to like, the Apollonius story because of its incest overtones. But the tale of Constance is very like the Apollonius story in reverse: in the latter Pericles, to use Shakespeare’s version, is reunited with his wife and daughter; Constance is reunited with her husband and father.

Constance sent to the east and the west. The Sultan of Syria falls in love with her by telepathy, from hearing her described, and is willing to turn Christian to get her. Curious technique of interspersed chorus comments throughout this tale, the first complaining that the Roman Emperor, whose daughter Constance is, didn’t consult the stars before sending her off on this mission. Partly a lawyer’s story: if you know the law of the heavens you’ll be all right. Anyway, she goes off drizzling, and there’s the passage about the primum mobile buggering everything up [ll. 295–315]. Chaucer himself seems to understand the archetypal aspect of the story: he makes the reversing movement of the primum mobile practically a symbol of life in the fallen world, and the wicked mother of the Sultan, who plots to murder everybody in sight because of the Christian business, is compared to Satan as temptress of Eve. Most of these archetypal parallels are from the Bible, and most of them are Chaucer’s additions to his source.

Well, the sultan’s mother does her stuff [ll. 323 ff.], and Constance is sent out to sea in an open boat. Why wasn’t she killed? Well, who kept Daniel from the lions? [l. 473]. Why wasn’t she drowned? Well, who didn’t drown Jonah? [l. 486]. Where’d she get fed? Well, who fed Mary of Egypt? [l. 500]. These are Chaucer’s additions. I think he has Revelation 12 in mind. “The white Lamb, that hurt was with a spere” [l. 459]. There’s a lot of red-and-white imagery, and a lot of deadly pale faces in the imagery. Anyway, the ship runs aground in Northumberland, where the king is heathen, though the wife of the constable who rescues her is Christian. King’s name is Alla. Well, another wicked stepmother (mother-in-law) turns up, who steals letters from a messenger and rewrites them. One says Constance’s child (she’s married to Alla) is a monster; the other, purportedly from Alla, says get rid of the bitch. The perverting of the word or message is important—cf. again the Hymn of the Soul. Before this Constance is accused of murdering the constable’s wife (Hermengild), but she gets out of that when her accuser is struck dead by a God who wants to get on with the story. Anyway, Constance goes to sea again, with her child this time, whose name is Maurice and who isn’t a monster but looks just like her. The wind steers her again through the straits of Gibraltar, and she meets her father the Roman Emperor coming back in triumph from Syria, where he’s been buggering the heathen. He recognizes her in Maurice, but not her, evidently. Meanwhile Alla comes to Rome to be made a Christian, and the inevitable recognition scene follows. Husband and father, as I said. Husband soon dies, presumably of the overpowering odour of Constance’s chastity. “There is no man koude brynge hire to that prikke” [l. 1029].

Evidently this story is closely related to a folktale called The Maiden without Hands. She’s married by the king despite her mutilation, and usually gets her hands back. Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles was following the same formula in my youth.19 The change of letter announcing birth to say it’s the birth of a monster is a feature. Look up Emaré.20 A related folktale is Our Lady’s Child, where a girl is struck dumb by the Virgin (or by a wicked witch stepmother) for denying that she has looked into a forbidden room, which she has. Clue here to the silent girl in Peveril of the Peak that’s puzzled me. She gets her children stolen, and returned when she confesses her guilt. Casting off mother and child in open boat and leaving a bloody knife in the heroine’s bed, both in Chaucer, are frequent motifs. All this from Stith Thompson (121–3).

A blind man receives his sight in the story: this repeats the Sultan’s love of Constance from report, both suggesting a vision beyond vision. Gower is said to be closer to Trivet,21 though still quite free: Chaucer rejects one detail, of the child Maurice being sent to the Emperor instead of Alla’s going himself, which may be either Gower or Trivet. The point is that medieval poets telling the same story seem to have an ideal structure of the story in their minds, to which the version they’re giving seems to them to conform most closely. Here the analogy with, e.g., sonata forms breaks down—not that it really is an analogy.

The Roman Emperor in the story was Eastern Emperor only, but in his reign the Christian mission under Augustine was sent to England, hence probably Northumberland. In Chaucer there are a lot of lovely lines about the sea—almost every reference to the sea is resonant.

Incidentally, Ben Jonson is the link between Renaissance fiction and Shakespearean romantic comedy on the one hand, and nineteenth-century sentimental romance on the other. His late plays are not “dotages,” but they’re too elaborate to go down well on the stage, and they are really sketches for novels of the more highly structured nineteenth-century type. Hence Jonson’s close affinity for print, as in publishing the 1616 Folio: his conception of “nature,” too, indicates a later view of it than a successful dramatist like Shakespeare could afford to have.

7. Heliodorus of Emesa, An Aethiopian History

An Aethiopian History dates from the third century C.E. Frye owned two copies of Heliodorus’s romance, both annotated: An Aethiopian History, trans. Thomas Underdowne (London: Chapman & Dodd, 1924) and Ethiopian Story, trans. Walter Lamb (London: Dent, 1961). Frye quotes from the Underdowne translation in The Secular Scripture. In the present notes he quotes Underdowne for book 1. The remainder of the quotations are from Lamb’s translation. The page numbers in square brackets from Lamb are preceded by an “L.” Quotations not cited in square brackets are Frye’s own from an unknown source.

References to Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian History in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 183, 187, 197, 198, 224

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 48–9, 55, 75, 76, 82, 94–5, 381

“The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 27: 368

The first book starts off with an extraordinarily vigorous in-the-middle scene of pirates coming upon a battle on the beach, whereby everybody except Theagenes and Chariclea are dead. In the fifth book we learn that Theagenes and Chariclea got two bands to fight, and Theagenes attacked the second in command while Chariclea sniped with arrows and killed most of them. Anyway, the pirates find Theagenes and Chariclea in a Pieta position, and decide that although Chariclea is beautiful enough to be a goddess, she ain’t one, because no goddess would “with so much affection kiss a dying body” [3]. The pirates carry both off, Chariclea insists on Theagenes’ going and naturally emits ow-oos about getting fucked when she won’t even let Theagenes do it. They run across a fellow-captive named Cnemon, who tells an inset tale about himself which follows the Phaedria archetype—in fact Hippolytus and Phaedria are referred to as the archetypes. His father’s second wife loves him, then accuses him, and the mob (i.e., democratic justice in Athens is the same as a revolutionary tribunal) howls for him to be exiled. When he’s away, the wife’s vagina gets so itchy she can’t stand it, so Thisbe, her slave, who’s already set up one badger game, sets up another, a variant of the old bed trick, and the husband catches her at it (she’s promised Cnemon, but naturally doesn’t get him). So she dies, and the father wants the son recalled.

Chariclea pretends that she’s Theagenes’ sister to the pirate captain, Thyamis, Abraham’s old trick in Egypt, though with a different purpose. It’s one of a long series of lies and deceptions she goes through to keep her cunt covered. The pirates hide in a cave, very elaborately described, and Chariclea is hidden there too, “burying her in a manner alive, and consigning the brightest of human forms to darkness and obscurity” [27]. This is because the pirates are attacked by law-and-order types. Barbarians, “when they despair of their own safety, they are accustomed to destroy those who are most dear to them; either wildly imagining that they shall enjoy their company after death; or thinking that by so doing they shall deliver them from the injuries and insults of the enemy” [28]. The pirates live in some kind of kitchen-midden place in the delta of the Nile, and the book ends by setting the island on fire. When Chariclea is lying she says she and Theagenes were devoted to the service of Diana and Apollo respectively: sun and moon theme, important later. Also she’s at first mistaken for Diana-Isis. I think it’s in this book that Thisbe gets killed in the dark in the cave (which is described in a way to connect it with Egyptian tombs and tomb-robbers).22

Theagenes is descended from Achilles, but Ulysses turns up later in a dream as one of the oracular forces, and illustrates how the Odyssey is really Ulysses’ response to the magical charms of Penelope’s web, eventually drawing him home while she lies and stalls to the suitors.

I can’t figure out how Thisbe gets into the act, nor does it matter, but she does, and is confused with the heroine in a way that suggests the polarization of females we get so much of later. I’ll have to get a better summary of the goddam story than I have here.23 I think the first five books go round in a circle, ending where the first one begins, but I’m not sure that even that gets the whole number of complications. It would be interesting though if the total structure were binary, there being ten books.

Very lively in medias res opening, battle just ended, Chariclea bending tenderly over Theagenes in a pieta pose. She looks like a goddess, and awes everybody with her chastity, but the Egyptian brigands say “how could a deity kiss a corpse with such fervid passion?” [L3]. A second group of brigands, commanded by Thyamis (as Esau figure, son of a prophet, done out of inheritance by younger brother). Theagenes and Chariclea are put in charge of Cnemon, who tells an inset tale on the Hippolytus model (explicitly mentioned as archetype; the Biblical one of course is Potiphar’s wife, and it’s said the Testament of Joseph version of the story owes something to Hippolytus, which incidentally was a story Euripides invented). Thisbe, a little tart who specializes in setting up badger games, tells Cnemon he’ll see his mother-in-law’s paramour in there, so he goes and it’s his father, so he gets banished from the city (Athens; the popular assembly acts like a revolutionary tribunal in the Terror). Then Cnemon is told the rest of the story: Thisbe sets up another badger game, husband catches faithless wife getting laid by somebody she thought would be Cnemon—the old friend the bed trick. In intervals Chariclea ow-oos and threatens suicide—a latent sense threatening or bargaining with the gods or fortune. Wonder drug heals wounds—herb, actually; extraordinary how the wonder herb runs through romance down to Zanoni. The inset tale has something of the function of the Antiochus theme in the Apollonius story. Thyamis then says he’s going to marry Chariclea; Chariclea goes along with a long lie about herself and her “brother” Theagenes and manages to stand up his cock: “her his assent.” Another band of bandits attacks this bunch and Chariclea is imprisoned in a cavern with their treasure: modulation of grave robber decoys (this is Egypt). “Consigned Chariclea, brightest of human beauties, to night and darkness” [L28]. Thyamis’ bunch are defeated and their village or whatever set on fire, so he decides to kill Chariclea. “It is hard to withhold the barbarian temperament from any course on which it has set out: when it despairs of its own survival, it is wont first to destroy all beloved beings, either fondly believing that it will rejoin them after death, or wishing to rescue them from the danger of outrage at the enemy’s hands” [L29–30]. This is the passage referred to in Twelfth Night (5.1.121). So he buggers off and sticks her, only it’s Thisbe, and he’s captured. Extraordinary number of topoi in this first book.

Book II: Theagenes comes to the cave, sees Thisbe’s body lying on its face, gives out with ow-oo about his luckless and fuckless Chariclea. Being a hero in a romance, he waits till he’s through yowling before he turns the dame over. Cnemon recognizes her—the fact that she must resemble Chariclea, at least from behind, implies an undisplaced pattern where they’re closely related, Thisbe a demonic twin. Cnemon is sent off to look for Thyamis—don’t ask me why—and finds Calasiris, the guardian of Theagenes and Chariclea. Calasiris tells Cnemon a long story about how he got to be the guardian, half of it relayed second-hand from Charicles (confusing damn name), priest of Apollo at Delphi. Charicles tells him how he discovered the exposed Chariclea and took her off to Greece—wait a minute, he didn’t discover her, that’d be too straight—he talks to a man who did, and hands over the usual talismans of recognition.

Book III is all about the rites of Neoptolemus at Delphi and how Theagenes comes and falls in love with Chariclea and vice versa. Interesting that all the Courtly Love mechanism about love at first sight is all here—what the troubadours added, I guess, was the lady as lord, a static figure the lover revolves around. Note that love has to be a real sickness in romance so that we can get themes of death-and-rebirth and doctors and such into the archetypes. Long descriptions, showing the affinity of this form with ekphrasis and detailed accounts of pictures and processions and such—note that an engraved stone on Chariclea’s girdle becomes a part of her beauty.

In Book II there’s an oracle summarizing the rest of the plot—these oracles and prophecies are important as, in a sense, stabilizing the design, the dianoia or mythos as a simultaneous form. Well, in Book IV Chariclea falls in love with Theagenes, who isn’t the man her guardian Charicles designs for her, so there’s twenty pages of tee-hee about love-sickness to displace the mother-right setup that Chariclea is bloody well gonna have who she likes. It’s in this book that the beginning of the total action is indicated: mother an Ethiopian who concentrates on a picture of Andromeda at the moment of orgasm and so (it appears to be so: men will believe anything whatever about childbirth, breast feeding and menstruation) she gives birth to a white baby. (Chariclea’s tendency to lie so much that nobody comes to believe anything she says may be inherited from her mother.) Calumniated mother theme then enters: nobody’s gonna believe it, so the child is exposed, with the talismans including an Ethiopian script about her. It’s also in Book IV where she says what I quote in the second lecture.24

Book V takes us to the point at which the action began in Book I, and we learn that most of the brigands on both sides got picked off by Chariclea sniping with bow and arrows. Cnemon and Calasiris, respectively listening to and telling this story, then discover Chariclea in the house—Cnemon thinks it’s Thisbe, so there really is a connexion between them being insisted on. “This recognition scene, enacted as though in a drama” [L118]. Calasiris has a dream (he’s going on with his story which got rudely interrupted, I think), where Ulysses appears to him and says he’s annoyed because Calasiris sailed past Ithaca without getting anything. Interesting and significant that the Odyssey archetype gets so explicitly introduced—there are several of these recalls, like the Hippolytus one. The action leads at the end of Book V to the point at which it began in Book I, just halfway through. The total action, incidentally, runs from the mother’s (first? probably) orgasm to the daughter’s. I should have underlined total, not action. “No lapse of time could avail to erase from their souls the marks of identity made by love” [L114]. Check identity in the Greek. The fight the story opens with is over Chariclea, of course, who always has a Briseis role with the wrong guys. Fatal beauty theme, often referred to by her in her ow-oos.

One of these latter, in Book VI, includes “You have drawn out my drama to such an inordinate length that its story transcends all that are told on any stages in the world” [L149]. In other words prose romance busts through drama and creates a bigger form. Most of this book is the sorceress story, whose son, animated by her, speaks of Chariclea (who’s listening and wants to turn the situation to her own advantage) as “wandering the world over, one may say, in search of her beloved”[L158]. (Above in Book VI, Cnemon thinks Chariclea is Thisbe because he hears her voice.)

Book VII resolves the conflict over the prophet’s job between the two sons of Calasiris, the rightful heir being Thyamis. This takes the scene to Memphis, where the wife of the Persian governor (the story’s laid in the days of the Persian empire) goes into a she-who-must-be-obeyed act, falls in love with Thyamis, flogs him and ill-treats him, has a wicked confidante, and so on. Her name’s Arsace. “At this point either some divine Power or Fortune in control of human affairs appended a new scene to this tragic performance by introducing as a counter-interest, the opening of another drama” [L165]. This is the death of Calasiris. He and Chariclea are disguised as beggars, so that stupid bugger Thyamis doesn’t recognize her and gives her a whack when she comes near him—this theme recurs in Shakespearean romance. Chariclea wriggles and twists as usual, though in the resulting complications there are suggestions that her policy of always lying is a bit short-sighted.

Book VIII starts a war between Hydaspes, King of Ethiopia and actual father of Chariclea, and the Persian governor of Egypt. The wicked confidante, or somebody, drinks poison intended for Chariclea, Chariclea is accused of putting out the poison and is sentenced to be burnt alive, but the flames can’t touch her. “Always careful to carry secretly on her person the necklaces that were exposed with her, she then fastened them within her clothing about her loins, so as to have them upon her, in a sort, as her burial ornaments” [L204]. “Her beauty shone forth in the bright glare of the blaze, so that she seemed like a bride in a nuptial chamber of fire” [L205]. Oracle (previously given) about her ending up in Ethiopia is interpreted as meaning Hades—interesting identification of archetypes, and there are several associations with Ethiopia and a shadow-world. Cf. Homer’s innocent Ethiopians, and the Paradise tradition that runs through Ariosto and Rasselas. Well, Arsace hangs herself, there’s a literal quotation from Hippolytus again. “Troglodytes” fight on the Ethiopian side.

The battle goes on and Hydaspes wins, treating the losers with great generosity, but capturing Theagenes and Chariclea and reserving them for human sacrifice. “The Ethiopians are accustomed to employ gold for all purposes which with other peoples are served by iron” [L219]. Cf. Utopia. Egyptians holding festival of the Nile, which is a god they worship. “To the initiated authority pronounces that the earth is Isis and the Nile Osiris, bestowing these names on material things. Thus the goddess longs for the god in his absence, and rejoices in his union with her; when he disappears she weeps again and detests Typhon {here whirlwinds and dust storms} as a hostile power” [L227]. Hints of deeper mysteries he won’t tell. Letters of Nile, as numbers, make 365. Hydaspes says “But all these proud distinctions belong not to Egypt but to Ethiopia; for in fact this river, or god according to you, and all the river monsters {crocodile turns up earlier in the story}, are sent along here by Ethiopia, and to her you should rightly give your worship, as being to you the mother of the gods” [L238]. Counterpoint with the action of the story, moving up the Nile from the Delta where it begins. (Foreground action, that is.) Theagenes says to Chariclea that Hydaspes is obviously her real father, so maybe she might try telling the truth for once, but Chariclea demurs. “A plot, whose beginnings have been laid out by the deity with many complications, must needs be brought to its conclusion through detours of some length” [L240]. This gives her wriggling an architectus quality. “Tokens of identity.” King of course thinks he might have had a daughter like that. Cf. Leontes and Perdita. “This dream-born daughter of mine” [L242].

Book X. The Gymnosophists are idealized: they say that human sacrifice is nonsense, but the king is dazed by superstition. Persinna (the actual mother of Chariclea) has a dream of the our-Perdita-is-found type. A gymnosophist, Sisimithres, appears at the end of the story as a Jaques-de-Boys figure, resolving the final recognition. He says to the queen “A limb of your body, or a link in the monarchy, has been lost; but Destiny intends to restore at that moment the missing part” [L246]. The king is the high priest of the sun, the queen the high priestess of the moon; Theagenes is to be sacrificed to the sun and Chariclea to the moon. Various comments on the futility of Chariclea’s keeping herself unfucked all this while only to get sacrificed. Cf. the Diana-votary business in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Images of the semidivine Memnon, Perseus and Andromeda, whom the sovereigns of Ethiopia regard as the founders of their line” [L247]. The way Chariclea got born suggests that she’s a repeating Andromeda archetype, Andromeda being also a sacrificial victim. There’s a third sacrifice of animals, to be made to Dionysus. Horses for the sun, oxen for the moon. Theagenes and Chariclea are “first fruits of the war.” They put Theagenes and Chariclea on one of those virgin-detecting gadgets that romances are so full of, and natch they’re pure, although Chariclea, who’s approaching the apex of her gyre of lies, insists that he’s had her. Well, the recognition scene approaches. “Look carefully, and see if Andromeda is not unmistakably manifest in the girl as in the picture.” Cf. Portia and Hesione in The Merchant of Venice. Chariclea has a black ring around her arm. Persinna is satisfied, but of course there’s this little matter of the sacrifice. “Whether it is in truth the pleasure of the gods that she should be given to me and at the same time taken away—a blow which I suffered once before at her birth, and which I suffer now on her discovery—this I cannot tell” [L258]. Closed circle would be the tragic version of the story, and the tragic version would be a truncation of the comedy. Well, Chariclea gets off by popular demand. “Quietly she crept on in pursuit of her purpose” [L260], i.e., Theagenes has still to be got off. Theagenes captures a runaway bull (slight Cretan echo) and wrestles with and defeats an Ethiopian giant: cf. As You Like It. At this point Charicles appears (don’t ask me how he got there) and denounces Theagenes as the abductor of Chariclea. He establishes one of the main larger elements in the design; she was at Delphi, and “he has profaned your national god, Apollo, who is the same as the Sun, and his temple” [L274]. In other words Theagenes and Chariclea are connected with Apollo and Diana, and this sacrifice is the demonic counterpart of the fact. This brings the recognition to the final point, Sisimithres being its agent: “he was still waiting for the revelation from on high to come full circle” [275]. King still says how about our sacrifice; Sisimithres says the gods don’t want one, as they “have sent up here from the depths of Greece {note map turned upside-down} her foster-father, as though dropped from the sky” [L276]. King gives in and says O.K., let them fuck: “I sanction their union under the ordinance for the begetting of children” [L277]. End of foreground and total action; the latter began, as I say, in the orgasm that produced another Andromeda instead of a black baby.

Chariclea has three fathers, one black: the real one, Charicles, and Calasiris. Cf. Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. Father of origin, father of opposite point (the “depths” of Greece and the oracle of Apollo), father of wandering quest. Next come the various suitors, including Thyamis, son of Calasiris and killer of the demonic shadow-figure Thisbe. His relation to Chariclea is a displaced brother and fear-of-incest one.

Heliodorus was said to be a Christian who preferred acknowledging his book to keeping his bishopric (Montaigne). There’s nothing Christian about him, nor about Achilles Tatius either, who was also said to be a bishop. But the point is they practiced a kind of story which is under the primary conjunction of Dove and Virgin, whether it’s Christian or pagan. Chariclea’s rescue from the pyre set to burn her {it’s given some kind of “natural” explanation, I think, I can’t find now} is the kind of thing that happens in saints’ lives. Also the fact that only marriage (to the man the girl wants only) or virginity are tolerable alternatives. Similarly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the setting is supposed to be Greek-pagan.

Note the frequency of the sixteen-year interval, jumping quickly from birth to sexual maturity, used in A Winter’s Tale. Daphnis and Chloe, etc. In the Ninus romance Ninus (apparently) has conquered half the world at seventeen and wants his girl; society says girls shouldn’t marry until 15, but hell, they can conceive at 14, can’t they? Romeo and Juliet.

8. Apollonius of Tyre

Popular during the Middle Ages, Apollonius of Tyre may have been translated from an ancient Greek text. The earliest reference to the work in Latin is in the sixth century. The edition Frye used is uncertain, but it may have been the one in the Gesta Romanorum. He owned and annotated the translation by Charles Swan and edited by Wynnard Hooper (New York: Dover, 1959). However, the one passage Frye quotes from Apollonius—“the price of my virginity”—does not appear in the Swan translation. It comes rather from the translation of Gerald N. Sandy in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B.P. Reardon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 760.

References to Apollonius of Tyre in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 184, 188, 197, 204, 215

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 31, 34–6, 37, 47, 75

Apollonius Prince of Tyre is a Latin romance, probably dating from the third century A.D. It may or may not have a Greek origin. The essential theme is so like the Clementine Recognitions that the author was influenced by an earlier form of or source of it. We start with Antiochus of Antioch, who rapes his own daughter: her nurse urges her not to kill herself but go along with it—cf. Ford’s Pity play.25 Gets rid of suitors by proposing a riddle about his incest to them: if they solve it they’re beheaded on the plea that they got it wrong; if they don’t they’re beheaded anyway. Apollonius solves the riddle; Antiochus says he’s wrong but will give him a respite of thirty days; Apollonius naturally gets the hell out of there, back to Tyre. Silly damn story: the only reason for it is the archetypal one: it’s the old mother-right girl choosing her lover by ordeal, usurped by nasty old daddy, and hence the demonic analogy of what it should be.

Antiochus’ steward Thaliarchus goes to Tyre, finds Apollonius has scrammed, goes back to tell Antiochus. Antiochus has Apollonius hunted over land, forest, mountain, but doesn’t find him. Helicanus, a good guy from Tyre, meets Apollonius in Tarsus, warns him of his danger and the reason for it (i.e., everybody knows about Antiochus’ incest). Tarsus can’t protect Apollonius because they’re starving with famine: Apollonius brings them 100,000 pecks of grain from Tyre. This makes no sense either except archetypally: Apollonius here is being the young prince of fertility coming from over the sea. Perry, in his book on Classical romance,26 thinks this story was originally Latin because there’s such an obvious confusion of sources in it: contaminatio, he says, is Latin and not Greek. O.K., but there are two kinds of narrative movement, the “and then” kind and the “hence” kind. The former is the primitive one; it jumps from motif to motif, so suddenly that you’re sometimes even expected to forget the previous stage, as the end of Gonzalo’s commonwealth forgot the beginning (The Tempest, 2.1.161 ff.). Pericles is a kind of experiment in “and-then” narrative, seeing how far one can go with it on the stage. The Book of Job is an “and-then” folktale, the two halves separated by an enormous “hence” dialogue. The “hence” is in reverse, or what-the-hell; but even so there’s a logic holding it together. The return to the folktale at the end is an “and-then” jump that leaves us blinking, as though we’d wakened up from a dream.

Perry also notes that the “respite” is only to shift the victim-figure from the daughter to the suitor and motivate his travels. Apollonius is an Adonis-figure who’s first involved with an incest situation and is then hunted over the world. Antiochus I of Syria actually did fall in love with his stepmother (Lucian, De Dea Syria; Plutarch, Life of Demetrius), and his father Seleucus I surrendered her to him. The hideous death of Antiochus described in Pericles recalls that of Antiochus IV in 2 Maccabees, so that link’s there.

Well, Apollonius is shipwrecked (an original touch) at Apollonia (one of the five towns of Pentapolis, but the coincidence of name is curious). Befriended by a fisherman, who gives him half his cloak. Gets in favor with king (Archestrates) by playing ball with him and then massaging him. King’s daughter comes in, plays the lyre; Apollonius says she needs more teaching and plays it himself extraordinarily well, so he becomes her music teacher. (Not named in the original romance; Lucina in Twine).27 Cf. later comedies like The Taming of the Shrew where the hero sneaks in to the heroine disguised as a music teacher. David complex. King meets three suitors of his daughter who say what the hell. Gets them to write out their offers and tells Apollonius to take them in to his daughter, who’s lying in bed and thinks it’s funny he should bust in. She says she wants the man who’s been shipwrecked. As Perry says, the Pentapolis episode follows the Aeneas-Carthage-Dido formula, and the silly business about the letters and such shows derivation from a mime, or perhaps play. I suppose some Nausicaa echoes too, and the fisherman (expanded into three in Pericles) is interesting.

Apollonius then hears from a Tyrian that Antiochus is dead and he’s his heir, king of Antioch. This is an utter mystery, as there’s been no hint of this; it indicates a more fucked-up connexion with the daughter of Antiochus than the story itself tells us about. That is, Apollonius must be in some way the son of Antiochus or son-in-law, or in some way too close to him just to get beheaded. So he sets sail for Antioch (presumably) when wife’s nearly popped the pup. Detained by adverse winds; wife delivered of child, dies, to all appearances, body set adrift in a chest. Chest drifts ashore at Ephesus near the house of a doctor (lot of money enclosed in it too: treasure from sea theme). Brings her to life, adopts her as his daughter, and makes her a priestess of Diana.

Apollonius then changes his mind and goes to Tarsus, where he deposits his (female) infant with his old friends Stranguillio (Cleon in Shakespeare) and wife Dionysias. Calls infant Tarsia, after Tarsus, I suppose. Says he won’t cut hair or nails until she’s married, and buggers off to Egypt, where he stays fourteen years. And all the time he’s supposed to be the heir of Antiochus. Note time gap, along with a lot of other gaps, including a credibility gap.

Tarsia is well looked after in childhood, but her old nurse (Lycoris) doesn’t trust her foster-parents and tells her to embrace her father’s statue in Tarsus (they set one up because of the food parcel) and claim their support if anything goes wrong. Dionysias gets jealous because Tarsia is prettier than her daughter, so orders her steward to murder Tarsia: he grabs her at her nurse’s tomb, gives her a moment to say her prayers, chorus of pirates turns up, carry her off; he goes back and says he done it. Tarsia is sold at Mitylene to a pimp who sticks her in a brothel. Series of customers: everyone gets talked out of screwing her, and comes across with a gift instead, which she hands to the pimp as “the price of my virginity.” Pimp tells his steward to screw her; he’s talked out of it too, and she supports him by giving concerts. Protected by a wealthy nobleman named Athenagoras, who was her first alleged customer. In Euripides’ lost play Alcmaeon, summarized in Apollodorus, Alcmaeon has a son and a daughter, gives them to Creon king of Corinth to bring up; Creon’s wife sells girl as slave because she’s too pretty, Alcmaeon buys her own daughter and keeps her as a handmaid. Here’s the incest theme latent in this story also, between Pericles and Marina.

The series of customers that retire baffled also looks like a farce scene taken from some mime. The innocent virgin in the brothel is in Xenophon of Ephesus, in Seneca’s Controversiae (vestal virgin there: it’s a stock rhetorical piece) and in several saints’ lives, notably St. Agnes. Pagan-Christian identity again. The story-teller is badly confused about the extent of Stranguillio’s complicity in the attempted murder.

Apollonius returns from Egypt to Tarsus, inquires after his daughter, and is told she’s dead. He sails off to Mytilene and hides himself in the depths of the hold, giving orders not to be disturbed. Tells sailors he’d break their legs if they disturb him. Athenagoras goes down to him, with no luck, then sends Tarsia. She sings him a song telling her story, but he doesn’t listen; he tries to get rid of her with money, and when she persists whacks her so the blood gushes out her nose. She laments her ill fortune again, and this time he does listen. Displaced brothel and sublimated rape. She hauls him out of the night-world and marries Athenagoras. (During the scene with him, by the way, she propounds a number of riddles to Apollonius, all of which he promptly solves.)

Then Apollonius has a dream (doubtless sent by a god who’s getting tired of the story) to go to Ephesus and tell his story to the chief priestess in the temple of Diana there. She being his wife, that fixes that up. Apollonius retires to his father-in-law’s kingdom of Pentapolis, which latter wills to him and wife when he dies. Apollonius then reigns for 74 years over Antioch and Tyre, after showering gold on everybody in the good-guy category, including the fisherman, and getting the mob to stone the Tarsus couple to death.

Most students of folktales try to compare a bunch of “and then” versions to try to find a “hence” version, one that makes logical sense. My method is rather to reduce “hence” stories to their “and then” sequence of archetypes. Note how the teleological plot of New Comedy doesn’t have it all its own way in romance: you have things like this Apollonius story going the other way. Pericles, as I’ve said, is a deliberate experiment in “and-then” technique, or looks like one. And Eliot’s The Waste Land, although the explicit echoes are from The Tempest, is actually a Pericles poem, and that’s one reason why it’s written discontinuously, in a series of “and then” episodes.

9. Parthenius of Nicaea, Love Romances

Parthenius flourished during the first century B.C.E. Frye is using the Loeb Classics edition: Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, trans. George Thornley and J.M. Edmonds; Parthenius, Love Romances, trans. S. Gaselee: Loeb Classical Library, Volume 69 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916). Page numbers in square brackets are to this edition.

I. Lyrcus. Hero who unsuccessfully hunts for Io; marries Hilebia; no pup; asks oracles; is told he’ll get one on first woman he screws; decoyed by friend and screws daughter Hemithea (variation of bed trick); gives belt as talisman; goes home; father-in-law exiles him; war results, evidently Lyrcus wins; yahs and yahs later son turns up and becomes next king. Ho hum.

II. Polymela. Daughter of Aeolus, seduced by Ulysses, threatened by father but married off to her brother (Aeolus had six sons and six daughters and married them all to each other).

III. Evippe. Seduced by Ulysses after Odyssey story over; son called Euryalus; when grown mother sends him to Ulysses with talisman tokens; Penelope intercepts them, persuades Ulysses to kill his son. From a tragedy of Sophocles. Ulysses is later killed by his son.

IV. Oenone. Daughter of the river-god of Troad; loves Paris, who deserts her for Helen; tells him she can cure his wound if he gets one; he does and sends for her; she sends back stiff answer saying haw-haw better send for Helen, but leaves herself; message gets there first; Oenone finds he’s given up and died, ow-oos and suicides. Slight resemblance to the end of Tristram.

V. Leicippus. Falls in love with his sister; mother connives at it and everything is rosy till father gets suspicious; he puts a private dick on them, interrupts a jug, stabs girl thinking she’s seducer, is killed by Leicippus, who’s exiled.

VI. Pallene. Beautiful girl: father makes ordeal for suitors of wrestling with him; kills everybody who loses; when he gets old changes policy and two suitors turn up, Clitus and Dryas. Girl falls in love with Clitus, her male nurse learns this, bribes someone to undo the pins of Dryas’ chariot; Dryas is killed; father learns this, builds huge pyre for Dryas, proposes to kill Clitus as sacrifice to shade; heaven sends cloudburst; marriage.

VII. Hipparinus. Homosexual love affair; tyrant of the city, who’s a rival, gets killed by lover and caught by getting fouled up with sheep with their feet tied. Said to be parallel to the story of Harmodius and Aristogiton.

VIII. Herippe. Woman married to Xanthus who was carried off by a Celt during the raid into Ionia (275 B.C.). Xanthus followed her to Marseilles and proposed ransoming her. Her Celt master proves very reasonable but Herippe finds Xanthus has still more money and advises Celt to kill Xanthus, for whom she feels nothing. Celt is horrified, takes Xanthus to frontier with Herippe, proposes a sacrifice, tells Herippe to hold victim, cuts off her head instead, explains why to Xanthus and gives him his money back.

IX. Polycrite. Maiden in temple of Artemis in Naxos, which is besieged; Diognetus in the besieging army loves her; she says he has to betray his army to get her; he does; he’s killed in the resulting melee; the Naxians are so eager to do her honour “they pressed on her such a quantity of head-dresses and girdles that she was overcome by the weight and quantity of the offerings, and so was suffocated” [289]. Burned on same pyre as Diognetus.

X. Leucone. Woman married to Cyanippus, who hunts all day and is too tired to fuck at night; this gets her down and she decides to sneak off after him to see what he likes to do so much instead; his hounds find her and tear her to pieces. Cyanippus builds pyre, burns her, dogs and himself on it. “She girded up her skirts above the knee” [291], like the statues of Artemis, which implies a less simple-minded origin for the story.

XI. Byblis. Brother-sister incest. She’s changed into an owl, or a river, or something.

XII. Calchus. Loves Circe, who doesn’t love him and changes him into a swine (drives him mad and into the pig-sties, which is different).

XIII. Harpalyce. Daughter of Clymenus, who loves her but allows her suitor Alastor to marry her, then reverts to his obsession, chases them, grabs the girl back and lives openly with her. She kills her younger brother, cuts him in pieces and serves him up in a pie to the old boy. Changed into a bird at her own request; Clymenus suicides.

XIV. Antheus. Said to be from Aristotle. Youth involved in a Phaedria setup with a woman who throws a partridge, or a gold cup, down a well and makes him go after it, then rolls a big stone on him, then hangs herself.

XV. Daphne. Loved by Leucippus, who puts on women’s clothes and joins the gang; they bathe and strip; he gets found out and stabbed to death with their spears.

XVI. Laodice. Loves Acamas; king hears of it and puts her to bed with him, telling him she’s one of the royal concubines.

XVII. Periander. Good ruler who became a tyrant because his mother loved him and kept getting him into bed with her; he got tired of never seeing or hearing a woman who seemed to fuck pretty well, so he got a light put in; attempt to kill her restrained by a divine apparition, but he went nuts.

XVIII. Neaera. Got her husband’s best friend to sport with tangles of her pubic hair. Fled to Naxos and became a suppliant; Naxos wouldn’t give her up to husband so he declared war.

XIX. Pancrato. Two male lovers of her fight and kill each other. Several of these Knight’s Tale triangles.

XX. Aero. Loved by Orion, who cleared her island of wild beasts; father kept putting off wedding because he doesn’t want to marry her to “such a man” [317]: Orion gets drunk and smashes down her door and proceeds; father puts out his eyes with a burning brand. Suggestion that Orion is a Polyphemus figure.

XXI. Pisidice. Loved Achilles and promised to betray Lesbos to him if he’d marry her; he agreed and stoned her instead.

XXII. Nanis. Same story with Cyrus.

XXIII. Chilonis. Father-son rivalry for same woman.

XXIV. Hipparinus. Tyrant of Syracuse, homosexual lover of boy, returns from successful battle and disguises himself saying he’s the killer of Hipparnus; boy strikes him a fatal blow. Silly bugger and pointless story.

XXV. Phayllus. Tyrant of Phocis, loves Ariston’s wife; she asks for a necklace that belonged to Eriphyle and inherits Eriphyle’s luck, being burned in a fire set by her son, who’d gone mad. Don’t suppose Blake’s Ariston has any echoes outside of Herodotus. He’s not in this story anyway, except as a name.

XXVI. Apriate. Virgin attacked by man later killed by Achilles; is either thrown into or throws herself into the sea.

XXVII. Alcinoe. From the Dirae of Moero (Byzantine poetess of 250 B.C.) (series of myths linked to invective against enemy, like Ovid’s Ibis). Married woman deserts husband for lover and drowns herself—love is punishment of Athene for gypping a servant.

XXVIII. Clite. No archetypal point.

XXIX. Daphnis. Loved by nymph who tells him if he loves a mortal woman he’ll go blind. He does and he does.

XXX. Celtine. Loved Hercules and stole Geryon’s cattle from him, agreeing to give them up if. He does; the result is Celtus, eponymous ancestor of the Celts.

XXXI. Dimoetes. Grisly tale: marries his niece who loves her own brother; he exposes her and she hangs herself; Domoetes then finds a woman’s body thrown up by the sea and “he conceived the most passionate desire for her company”; she, or it, starts to stink, he burns the body, can’t get his cock down, kills himself. This is the result of the hanged girl’s curses.

XXXII. Anthippe. Killed by a king in mistake for a leopard while she’s getting fucked by his son; king goes mad and hurls self over cliff. The thicket they fucked in was sacred to somebody.

XXXIII. Assaon. Niobe story, only it’s a father-daughter affair again.

XXXIV. Corythus. Son of Oenone and Paris, loved Helen, killed by Paris.

XXXV. Eulimene. Has an affair; oracle demands sacrifice of virgin; she’s sacrificed in spite of lover’s protests that she ain’t one; he says cut her belly open; she’s found with child; lover murders her father.

XXXVI. Rhesus. Rhesus wooed and won his girlfriend, who was a huntress and didn’t care about boys, by pretending to share her tastes. She fell for the line and him.

10. Clementine Recognitions

The Clementine Recognitions, an anonymous philosophical and theological romance, appears to date from the first half of the third century C.E. Frye’s source is unknown, but the most likely candidate is the text as it appears in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, originally published 1868–73 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark) and reissued several times.

References to Clementine Recognitions in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 18: 184, 188, 195, 197, 201, 207, 277, 279, 290

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 92–3

The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9: 287, 340, 345

The Great Code, 205, CW 19: 226

The story skeleton of the Clementine Recognitions has a father and a mother, twin sons, and a still younger son, Clement. Also the father’s brother. The mother, Mattidia, tells the father, Faustus, she’s had a dream that says something awful will happen if she doesn’t bugger off, so he sends her away with the twin sons, keeping Clement. All news he tries to get about her through messengers (he sent her to Athens) fails, so he assumes he’s lost her. Actually, she hadn’t had any dream; she’d been made passes at by the brother. After she goes, the brother sets up a Potiphar’s wife situation in reverse. Anyway; she got, of course, shipwrecked, and separated from the twins. Nothing comes of the twinnery: that is, the author must have taken it from some story of the Menaechmus persuasion, but he doesn’t develop it, probably because what he’s really interested in is the demonic parody theme of Peter and Simon Magus, which is what he uses instead. Clement stays home with father until he’s twelve, after which his father buggers off and disappears also. So he attaches himself to Peter, and on their wanderings Peter finds a woman who’s gnawed her hands off and is begging and wants to kill herself: he discovers it’s Mattidia, cures her hands, and unites mother and son. They go to Antioch, where there are two prominent Christians calling themselves Nicetas and Aquila. They turn out to be the twins, and have changed their names from their originals, which were Faustinus and Faustianus, or Faustinianus. No reason particularly; they just didn’t want to leave things simple. They’d been captured by pirates at the time of the shipwreck, were sold to a Jewess named Justa, who was a Christian proselyte. So they’re hitched up. Peter arrives late after a long argument with an old man who’s an astrologer and believes in something called genesis, fate, more or less. His example of fatality proves that he’s Faustus, so they all get hitched up. As I say, I think the general idea is that heaven is one vast recognition scene, the Mediterranean Sea symbolizing life in this world.

11. Chariton of Aphrodisias, Chaereas and Callirhoe

Chaereas and Callirhoe dates from the middle of the first century C.E. The edition Frye used is unknown, but he may have read Warren E. Blake’s edition, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939).

Heroine daughter of Syracusan general named Hermocrates. Awfully beautiful. Chaereas, almost equally so, loves her and they go through the sick formula; public assembly and crowd demands their marriage, which Hermocrates sanctions despite rivalry of fathers. Other suitors assemble and plot against them. First scheme is the Much Ado about Nothing scheme of slandering heroine; hero naturally falls for it; kicks heroine so she faints and seems dead (Nero and Poppaea). After that he discovers it’s All a Lie, so tries to get himself convicted of murder, but Hermocrates, who’d heard about it, gets him off. Callirhoe buried (alive) with great treasure around her; villain named Theron tries to get it, finds her alive, takes her off to Miletus to sell her. She’s bought by a man named Dionysius, very decent guy, who marries her: she’s faithful to Chaereas, of course, but her child is about to be born and there’s nothing else she can do. Meanwhile Chaereas goes in search of her, finds Theron’s ship, gets Theron crucified, and discovers Callirhoe is in Miletus. Chaereas’ ship is captured by Persians, who rule the country, Chaereas is sold as a slave to Mithridates, satrap of Caria, who finds out who he is and wants Callirhoe for himself. Advises Chaereas to write a letter to Callirhoe, sending one of his own offering to help her; letters intercepted by Dionysius, who thinks they’re both by Mithridates. Quarrel, reported to Artaxerxes of Persia. They assemble for a big trial scene, done with references to drama. Chaereas, thought dead by Dionysius, turns up in the courtroom. Mithridates is acquitted, trial set between Chaereas and Dionysius but Artaxerxes keeps postponing it, you can guess why. Chaereas hears a (false) rumor Callirhoe has been awarded to Dionysius, so he joins the Egyptian army and fights Persia, taking Tyre and an island called Arados, where Callirhoe and the queen (Statira) had been left for safekeeping. Callirhoe writes affectionate letter to Dionysius saying adieu and Chaereas and Callirhoe return to Syracuse, sending queen back to the king. Home again and recognition scene with father, Chaereas’ sister (not mentioned previously) being married off to his friend (just barely mentioned).

Perry thinks the Dionysus bit is founded on some legend about Dionysius I, tyrant of Sicily, and that Chariton was thinking of the chee-yild as the future tyrant. Story better integrated and less dependent on providential salvations than later ones. More genuinely popular literature than Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, hence the latter got more scholarly attention later.

12. Barlaam and Ioasaph

Barlaam and Ioasaph has been attributed to John of Damascus (seventh century C.E.), but it was in fact transcribed by the Georgian monk Euthymios in the eleventh century. Frye is using the Loeb edition, St. John Damascene: Barlaam and Ioasaph, trans. G.R. Woodward and H. Mattingly (New York: Macmillan, 1914). The page numbers in square brackets below are to that edition.

References to Barlaam and Ioasaph in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 197, 199, 277, 278

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 5, 10, 71, 93

Said to be a Christian adaptation of the story of Buddha, but, hell, there’s so little story I don’t see why it’s that any more than a lot of other things. Anyway, a heathen king has a son and brings him up in a pleasure-prison. The archetype is much closer to Rasselas than anything else I know, and probably it’s an important archetype, maybe even part of the fabulous myth. The silly bugger who wrote it evidently doesn’t know the difference between Ethiopia and India: “the inner land of the Ethiopians whom our tale calleth Indians” [headnote to Introduction, 3]. St. Thomas, of course.

Heavy plugs for the ascetic life, men in mortal bodies adopting the spiritual life of angels. Two natures in Christ: without leaving his father’s throne in heaven he entered the virgin’s womb; he suffered on the cross as a man, but not as God. The idolators are characterized throughout by “the smell of bloody human sacrifices” [pt. 2, 15]. Curious remark about Anger and Desire “brought into being by the Creator to be fellow-workers with nature” [pt. 2, 19]. Boy surrounded with nothing but pleasant things, so he gets angst. It’s very Rasselas-like. The ascetic Christian Barlaam sneaks in with a story he’s got a precious pearl or gem or something: naturally it turns out to be an utterly interminable harangue. It’s punctuated with “apologues,” of which the second is a story about two pair of caskets, one full of shit with gold on top, other the reverse. The editor thinks it’s the ultimate origin of the story in The Merchant of Venice, but it’s pretty feeble-minded. “Without Baptism it is impossible to attain to that good hope, even though a man be more pious than piety itself” [pt. 8, 101]. Real meaning of the kingdom of heaven is vision of God. Hairs of head numbered: this means the smallest and slightest phantasy or thought. Reference to what Peter says to a disciple: editor thinks Simon Magus. Divided lordship among gods unthinkable notion. Virtues make a ladder to heaven. Account of Peter getting over his denial: devil flees “howling horribly” [pt. 11, 165]—slight Pilgrim’s Progress Apollyon fight feeling, if Bunyan knew this work. St. Antony is the archetypal hero, referred to as model several times. Another dismal apologue winds up with hero befriended by his own good deeds, Everyman archetype. The sixth apologue has an interesting setting: custom in a country of making a man king for a year: he thinks it’s going to last forever, but in a year “they would rise up against him, strip him bare of his royal robes, lead him in procession up and down the city, and thence dispatch him beyond their borders into a distant great island; there, for lack of food and raiment, in hunger and nakedness he would waste miserably away” [pt. 14, 201]. Various design arguments: man doesn’t make himself, but “when I was broken, {God} re-created me with a better renewal” [pt. 17, 247].

Barlaam, asked his age, says he’s forty-five, although he’s over seventy. “When I lived to the flesh in the bondage of sin, I was dead in the inner man; and those years of deadness I can never call years of life” [pt. 18, 255]. Barlaam then proposes to leave, taking off a borrowed garment and putting on his own—trace of disguise theme. Usual schizophrenia about hell: “Believe not that there is any true being or kingdom of evil, nor suppose that it is without beginning, or self-originate, or born of God: out on such an absurdity!” [pt. 19, 279]. But natch it’s going to last forever. Doctrine of Trinity very complicated, but the councils have figured it all out, so you gotta believe it all without question. Plug for images: anti-iconoclastic setting: “when we see the drawing in the Image, in our mind’s eye we pass over to the true form of which it is an Image, and devoutly worship the form of him who for our sake was made flesh, not making a god of it, but saluting it as an image of God made flesh” [pt. 19, 281]. Well, Ioasaph is instantly and completely converted, which makes his father the king (Abenner) furious, and he goes through all the regular Herod manoeuvres. Son-father tension, as Barlaam becomes the real or spiritual father. King catches some monks and tortures them (usual IV Maccabees model), asks them why they carry around old bones, and gets a plug for relics.

There’s a man named Nachor, who looks exactly like Barlaam but is an idolator, so they get him to speak for Christianity, so weakly (public debate) that the other side will win. What little suspense there is is destroyed by God, who tells Ioasaph what’s really happening in a dream. Some of the anti-idolatry stuff has a flicker of interest: “Those of them that stand have never thought of sitting down; and those that sit have never been seen to rise” [pt. 24, 355]. Curious absence of any sense of dialectic, for all the argument: the king is “convicted by his own conscience” [pt. 26, 385], but remains in the grip of habit—a kind of psychoanalytic resistance, but no sense that another position than the Christian could be anything but neurotic.

Anyway, Nachor does the Barlaam act: he speaks very well of Christianity, and the stunt is a failure. Not only Barlaam but the Clementine Recognitions, which also present Simon Magus as a kind of double-opposite of Simon Peter. Nachor’s speech is something called the Apology of Aristides, supposed to have been written for Hadrian around 125. The elements aren’t God because they’re corruptible; nor heaven, earth, sun and moon, nor man himself. Then a run-through of the Greek gods and the Egyptian Isis-Osiris story, as in the Clementine Recognitions. Paradox that gods are represented as breaking {their own?} laws. “If the stories of the gods be myths, then are the gods mere words: but if the stories be natural, then are they that wrought or endured such things, no longer gods: if the stories be allegorical, then are the gods myths and nothing else” [pt. 27, 419]. Nachor’s converted by his own speech, so another champion of the pagans named Theudas arises, and says to king: “Wherefore I am come, that we may celebrate together a feast of thanksgiving, and sacrifice to the immortal gods young men in the bloom of youth and well-favoured damsels, and eke offer them an hecatomb of bullocks …” [pt. 29, 443] (it’s the translator who ekes). Suggests some filtering in of the Ethiopica final situation. Anyway, Theudas advises tempting the prince with damsels, and the prince is given a “potion” by an evil spirit [pt. 30, 459], though it doesn’t come to anything. The damsel proposes honorable marriage, and when the prince says “yet to pollute my body through unclean union is grievous for me, and utterly impossible” [pt. 30, 463] she points out that marriage is honorable in Christianity. Yeah, sure, “but not to them that have once made promise to Christ to be virgins” [pt. 30, 463]. He’s refreshed by visions of heaven and hell, at least scared by the latter. One striking sentence: “the idol hath no right to be called even dead, for how can that have died which never lived?” [pt. 31, 481]. Idols and gods are images of men’s vices: the fighter creates Ares, the drunk Dionysus. “For, as man, he was crucified; but, as God, he darkened the sun, shook the earth, and raised from their graves many bodies .… Again, as man, he died; but as God, after that he had harried hell, he rose again” [pt. 31, 489]. “Fishers of the world, whose nets drew all men from the depths of deceit” [pt. 32, 495]. Theudas gets converted, and—guess what—burns his magic books. King then divides his kingdom with his son, evidently with the design of making him a fool as an incompetent ruler. However, he helps the poor—strong egalitarian sense combined with an equally strong sense of authority as a model for conduct. “He searched the prisons, and sought out the captives in mines, or debtors in the grip of their creditors; and by generous largesses to all he proved a father to all” [pt. 33, 519]. Not a complete answer, but the only thing in the book that isn’t sick. So the king gives up and gets converted too. “The Holy Ghost, by whom the fishermen enclosed the whole world in their nets for Christ” [pt. 34, 527]. When the king’s baptized his son “appearing as the begetter of his own father, and proving the spiritual father to him that begat him in the flesh” [pt. 35, 535] fixes that up. Father dies; Ioasaph abdicates, lots of struggles from his people, but he “promised to be with them still in the spirit though he might no longer abide with them in the body,” preceded by “words of comfort” [pt. 36, 561]. The direct Gospel echo comes a little closer to the Buddha archetype, if there is one. Temptations of beasts, first illusory and then real, like St. Antony: quotation from Psalm 91 suggests a slight link with Paradise Regained. He’s looking for Barlaam, and finally finds him in a strangled recognition scene. Barlaam dies; Ioasaph wants to die with him, is told he has to live out his life; finally he makes it; Barachias (left as king when Ioasaph abdicates; the monk who got Barlaam in at first) finds the bodies incorrupt, which seems funny, as it’s clear they stank to heaven in more than one sense when alive.

Ascribed to St. John Damascene: translated into Latin not later than the 12th century; got into the Golden Legend (both Barlaam and Ioasaph got canonized). 1672 English translation. Editor says “Ioasaph’s temptation by the fair damsels and the fair princess is anticipatory of Parsifal, the flower maidens and Kundry” [n. 2, xiv] Well …

**13. Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).**

An e-text of Hadas’s book is available from Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/stream/hellenisticcultu010847mbp/hellenisticcultu010847mbp_djvu.txt

Reference to Hadas’s book in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 198

Ubi bene ibi patria [where you feel good, there is your country] was an Epicurean axiom according to Cicero’s Tuscan Disputations 5.37.108. Platonic view of king was nomos empsychos, incarnate law. Greek and Aramaic names in the New Testament: “We may surmise that Mark and Peter and Didymus were called John and Simon and Thomas by their intimates and where religion was involved” [37]. The abomination of desolation was the Syrian Baal Shamayim in Greek dress, and Antiochus thought he was doing the Jews a favor in giving them the statue. IV Maccabees modelled on tragedy. “Rhythmical verse in the west was entirely a Christian possession and was never employed by pagan writers” [51]. So it isn’t based on popular Latin but is Syriac and Semitic in origin.

“Greek education was designed to produce gentlemen amateurs, eastern education was designed to perpetuate a guild of professional scribes” [68]. Scribes important in Egypt, but not among Jews until after Ezra’s time. Inspiration of Muse connected with Orphism by Sappho (likely); origin of the epithet doctus for a poet. “Preoccupation with a classic literature of such high authority that it is canonized into a scripture must eventually introduce a scribal form of education” [70]. Judaism; adopted in Christianity. Alexandrine Jews said Musaeus a distorted spelling of Moses. Maccabean rulers owe more to Greek than Hebrew precedent. Wisdom of Solomon Greek: wisdom an emanation of God, wisdom initiates into secrets; God loves humanity (does this mean that all love is of Eros origin?); wisdom personified, halfway between Proverbs and the logos doctrine. Testament of Abraham shows Orphic tendencies. IV Maccabees influenced by Gorgias. Talmudic dialogue the Greek pupil-teacher type, not the prophet-disciple type. “Most of the creative literature of the hellenistic age is expansion and reinterpretation of ancient myth” [80]. (The Argument is that the midrash technique is Greek rather than Hebrew in origin.)

Josephus Against Apion says “even {Homer}, they say, did not leave his poems in writing. At first transmitted by memory, the scattered songs were not united until later” [84]. Homeric heroes claimed as founders of Italian cities—hence Aeneas in Virgil; wide practice of claiming affinities (2nd Maccabees of Jews and Spartans). Eupolemus (2nd century B.C.) derives name Jerusalem from hieron Solomonos. Artapanus I should look up: Moses was named Hermes because of his invention (hermeneia) of hieroglyphs. Aristobulus says that seven symbolizes the logos.

Zeno the Stoic may have been Semitic: his contemporaries thought of him as a Phoenician. Chrysippus was from Tarsus. Strabo 16.2.29 names four famous Gadarenes: “Philodemus the Epicurean, and Meleager, and Menippus the serious comic (spoudogeloios) and the orator Theodore” [110]. The epithet of Menippus is interesting. Horace’s second book of Satires probably inspired by Varro: that every silly man is mad is a Varro thesis. Mingling of prose and poetry is Semitic: Arabs call it maqama or “session.” Meleager is the Anthology poet. “Love has become a religion” [112] in his poems.

Early categorizing of history as true (alethes), false (pseudes) and as it may likely have happened (plasma or hos genomena). The last is the same as literature. “That the religious interest should be dominant in III Maccabees is to be expected; but it must be observed that the religious interest is also prominent in the romances, and may well be, as has been maintained, the chief motive for writing them. … The actual hero of III Maccabees is patently the whole Jewish community, as in Deutro-Isaiah’s conception of the Suffering Servant” [128]. “Every work in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of Old Testament has expressions from or allusions to tragedy which the reader was obviously expected to recognize” [130]. “The seven brothers {of IV Macc.} are actually called a chorus at several points” [130]. Aeschylus’ insistence on individual responsibility for wrong parallel with prophets. Look up Horace Kallen on Job as a tragedy:28 evidently he defends its integrity as it stands, Elihu and all. Hadas suggests that Prometheus is not Aeschylus but a hellenistic fourth-century production. Zeus despises man and wants to destroy them and bring another race into the world; Prometheus is as a Titan man’s elder brother and enables man to survive. Or so he says, p. 139.

I should think about the diatribe as a literary genre: Spengler says something about it, and here it’s treated as a collateral form of the Menippean satire. Invented by Cynic-Stoic preachers, practised by Menippus and Meleager; an active influence in the Pauline epistles; the real genre of Ecclesiastes. Greek parallels to Paul’s speech at Athens, noted in Norden’s Agnostos Theos.

Earliest triangle of love stories goes back to a rival trying to get husband’s social status, conferred by woman under mother-right, rather than simply the woman. In ancient Egypt, of course “admission to the queen’s bed symbolized accession to the throne” [148]—he doesn’t mention Esther. “Where these elements would not seem extraordinary in a matriarchy, they would be startling in a society where the woman was never allowed the initiative and where incest was anathema” [148]. Hence a patriarchal society makes these stories tragic. Aegisthus and Bellerophon in Homer; Phoenix in Iliad 9; Reuben and Bilhah in Genesis; Gyges and Candaules’ wife in Herodotus. The Agamemnon illustrates transition from political to erotic motivation. Hippolytus story invented by Euripides (he also wrote an earlier play on the subject); question of succession important in Racine’s Phèdre. Expansion of Potiphar’s wife story in the Testament of Joseph derived from Hippolytus. Secular version of Phaedra story in Apuleius, combined with drugged sleep and premature burial, the tradition surviving in Romeo and Juliet. Ethiopica, of course, and even the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. “Unlike other literary forms, where we can trace development step by step, pastoral was an invention (his italics) of the hellenistic age, and wholly artificial” [160]. Maybe a “misunderstanding” of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.29 I doubt this. Hadas thinks Song of Songs comes from this pastoral Greek genre: “The ‘white and ruddy’ lover who is invited to ‘come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits’ is very like Longus’ Eros” [161]. He’s baffled by the Song of Songs, but the red and white lover is clear.

Aretalogies, meaning lives of virtuous people, a common form, though the word itself is pejorative in Roman times. Lucian’s True History is criticism of aretalogies: it contains the Jonah theme of descent to a whale’s belly. Life of Apollonius and the Gospels. Stoics interested in martyrs: Plutarch on Agis and Cleomenes and the Gracchi. Martyrdom of Polycarp remarkably reminiscent of IV Maccabees. Acts of the Pagan Martyrs.

“In the Greek Romances Karl Kerenyi has observed that certain motifs—premature burials, scourging of the hero, apparent executions from which the victim is providentially delivered, and similar matters—recur in each of our extant examples. They are not then, Kerenyi argues, disparate romances but disparate treatments of a single basic story, and this story he identifies as an aretalogy of the Isis-Osiris cult” [181]. As he says, we don’t need to push the theory so far.

Among the Greeks “the chthonic deities lived underground, were usually feminine in nature, and were much concerned with ties of family; they operated directly and according to mechanical rule” [182]. “If the Synoptic Gospels are in the nature of aretalogies, the Fourth is in the nature of a mystery” [192]. “The Qumram brotherhood was in fact very like a Neo-Pythagorean fraternity” [195]. Manual of Discipline and IV Maccabees close to New Testament. “Tobit is, like Judith, a romance, based on the oriental story of Ahikar but influenced in form by hellenistic practice” [206]. Aeneid 6.637 ff. speaks of “yellow sands” [214]: check for The Tempest. Check also the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, which describes a locus amoenus that oddly reminds me of Yeats’ Delphic Oracle poem. I don’t know what Sappho’s Leucadian Leap is. Daphnis and Chloe: “The shade and the water, the flowers and the music, and in particular the red and white coloring of the extraordinary occupant of the garden are all regular motifs in the descriptions of the Elysian fields and of the Christian paradise which derive from them” [217]. Gardens of Adonis in Spenser.

“The satyrs of the Greek vase painters are surely adaptations of popular Egyptian representations of the dancing god Bes” [224]. “The figure of Buddha himself is a product of Greek influence” [230] (by way of Gandhara). Hence a kinship with the Christ figure: “each was an incarnation of a logos and it was therefore natural for Greek artists to represent each by the orator type” [231]. This is quoted from a B. Rowland.

“That piece i.e. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, it has aptly and correctly been said, is a blueprint for the Aeneid” [241]. The person who said it was N.W. DeWitt.30 Virgil knew, if not Isaiah, at least the Sibylline Oracles, as did Horace and Tibullus. Horace’s Epode 16 is Sibylline, and is a rejoinder to the 4th Eclogue, Hadas says.

“The doctrine of election as it appears in Augustan Rome is in fact a precise parallel to that in the Old Testament” [252]. He goes on to link the Exodus and Aeneid themes very strongly, and may be right, of course. Problem of getting the dates right by assuming a long intervening period similar in Livy (Alba Longa regime) and the Old Testament. Livy is the sister of the Aeneid. The title “Augustus” definitely “carries a religious connotation” [260]. Roman and Christian view of history so similar that “No compromise was possible, one or the other must give way. And therefore when Christianity prevailed it became Rome” (his italics) [260]. Tacitus says departure of Jerusalem’s god signalized by a whistling sound.

Going back to things I missed: “Aretalogus, then, is ‘one who (professionally) speaks the wondrous deeds of a deity,’ and aretalogia is the discourse he delivers” [171]. “The greater Homeric Hymns are in effect themselves aretalogies” [172]. “The utopias were themselves a development of the aretalogy” [173]. “The synoptic Gospels, as both defenders and enemies of Apollonius saw, are aretalogies of virtually the same type” [177]. “Originally the extravagance of the aretalogy was plebeian and despised by the literate; the object of the writers of romance was to give it standing by clothing it in elegant literary form. Actually the Romances are no more like one another than the plays of Plautus or of New Comedy in general” [181]. (This is in answer to the Kerenyi thesis; the pejorative association with the word aretalogy in Juvenal and elsewhere is part of my thesis about the gyre going through a social revolutionary phase.) “If not the details, the general tendency may reflect the influence of the aretalogies. If that is so, then the Romances have had a large role in disseminating aretalogy over all of Europe” [181]. In a later chapter he quotes Isidore Levy’s book on the legend of Pythagoras which says there’s an original life of Pythagoras that included a theme later dropped though it’s left traces in Virgil and Lucian, the descent to the underworld. A legendary life of Moses, used by Artapanus, Philo and Josephus, adapted elements from this “aretalogy” of Pythagoras. For late poets like Luxorius and Tiberianus on the locus amoenus I should probably look at whatisname’s book—Stewart?31

P. 133: “On the basis of various ancient Near Eastern texts Theodor H. Gaster has shown that a primitive kind of drama, analogous, in all probability, to the antecedents of perfected Greek tragedy, did in fact exist in the literatures which affected the Old Testament. Gaster points to vestiges of this drama in various passages in the Old Testament, but he cannot of course claim that these were felt as drama by the audiences for which they were intended—any more than audiences of New Comedy were aware that the infants who were exposed and subsequently recognized were descendents of the year baby in the annual vegetation cycle” [133].

14. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

Frye owned two editions of The Moonstone, both of which he annotated: London: Collins, 1871, and New York: Modern Library, 1964. The novel was first published in 1868.

References to The Moonstone in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 200, 201, 203, 232, 242, 244

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 68, 76

Well, The Moonstone. Extraordinary preface, author saying that formerly he traced the influence of circumstances on character and is now reversing the process, studying the motivation of a young girl in an emergency, just like Henry James.

The general patterns are: first, the “night world” theme. That is, all through romance there’s a special territory indicating another side of human existence, on which among other things the author’s and readers’ prejudices are projected. In eighteenth-century Gothic thrillers, as I’ve said, the English Protestant middle-class audience ensures that the night side will be Continental, Catholic and upper-class. With the expansion of the British Empire, the night side extends to Asia, Africa and Central America. Here the diamond, called, in defiance of gemology, the moonstone, comes from India, and three dark little men keep buggering around trying to get it. The encompassing story is very like the Ring theme in Wagner: the diamond was originally stolen by an English officer, hence there’s a real curse on it; eventually the three black little buggers succeed, and the diamond is restored to its original home.

Second, the amnesia plot, going back to the Hymn of the Soul. The hero steals the diamond, not knowing what he’s doing, under the influence of opium. Opium is a favorite theme in nineteenth-century fiction, but the fictional device, as such, goes back to the love potion in Tristram and the like. In fact the second does turn out to be a love potion: the heroine kisses the glass and the hero drinks out of that side of it.

Third, the pharmakos role assumed by the hero. He’s a thief, a murderer (of Rosanna Spearman), a liar, and a displaced adulterer, as he goes into the heroine’s bedroom late at night to steal her “jewel.” Hence the story has a sequence of pistis-gnosis “solutions,” Sergeant Cuff’s being the first one. I think Ben Jonson calls this structure a catastasis. Anyway, it’s a common device in detective stories to have a plausible solution precede the real one.

Fourth, the imagery of labyrinths and the underworld (the shivering sands are also enlisted) to symbolize the world the hero is wandering in while he’s a pharmakos. The phrase “from darkness to light” occurs more than once.32 At the moment when he’s lost, the figure of Ezra Jennings appears, in a very precisely and clearly marked peripeteia. Note that Jennings is also the doctor who brings the hero to life again. The original pseudo-stealing act was prompted by the practical joke of another doctor, whose role corresponds to that of the cursing anchorite in Sakuntala who causes the amnesia. (I should warn people who haven’t read The Moonstone that I’m going to spoil the story for them.) Hence an emphasis on smoking generally—Betteredge’s pipe and Blake’s cigars—as part of the drug theme. For some reason I haven’t quite grasped both the redemptive figures, Cuff and Jennings, are associated with flowers, the former with roses (note Rosanna’s name).

It’s part of this underworld imagery that the underworld itself should be a dream world. The archetype of the cipher in the lower world turns up with the disconnected phrases of Candy’s delirium being restored by Jennings into connected sentences. Collins has an extraordinarily shrewd insight into the connexion between what he calls the new disease of detective fever and the operations of psychoanalysis. This is even clearer in The Woman in White than here. Jennings is an inhabitant of the world of dreams, and is Franklin Blake’s sin-eater, taking on the pharmakos role.

I’m not quite sure just where Collins’ own social snobbery fits it. The convention of the novel, enthusiastically supported by Collins, is that good families can do no wrong. People who oppose this, like Drusilla Clack, do so only for absurd reasons, and get properly isolated from the action in consequence. Of course Lady Verinder has gone to heaven—she’s a lady, isn’t she? The hero resents being dunned for a bill he owes, and the heroine takes exception to his resentment: he says it’s a romantic high-flown reason, though the modern reader would see it as realistic and low-flown. Expressions of resentment on the part of the lower classes are always encased in something sinister, like Rosanna’s neurotic attachment to Blake. This connects of course with what I’ve already said about the paradoxical revolutionary and reactionary aspect of romance, and with the fact that snobbery seems to be built into the detective story: it needs a well-to-do amateur who can baffle the criminal when the professional police have failed, and it often needs a variant of the pastoral myth—stately homes and lots of weekend guests and faithful servitors like Betteredge. If The Moonstone is still the best detective story, it’s partly because it really belongs to the period, and doesn’t have to reconstruct it as the Agatha Christies and Dorothy Sayerses have to do.

I’ll return to this later. Ezra Jennings is a grotesque figure whom nobody likes, a helpful dwarf or even animal. As he takes over the action (he’s enabled to do so when the hero decides he’s really a gentleman in spite of not looking like one), he becomes a master of ceremonies, a role connected with that of the cook in Old (and New) Comedy. The cook in turn is closely related, in nineteenth-century fiction, to the chemist (i.e. alchemist), and the Fosco of The Woman in White has elements of cook as well as chemist. (Enormously fat and a braggart.)

The business of re-enacting the scene of the crime, such a cliché in later detective stories, has here overtones of a good deal more. For one thing, it’s profoundly unconvincing, and whatever is unconvincing is archetypally significant, or likely to be. The mouse-trap play in Hamlet is one of the archetypes; also the cancelling out of amnesia by repetition (there’s a certain amount said about past and future). Also a certain amount about time bringing things to light. Incidentally, Rosanna makes a very shrewd comment about her own life: as long as she was a thief, she was relatively happy because she lived in the present; as soon as she decided to go straight, the dimension of the future opened up and brought a heavy emotional burden with it. The law-abiding, the teleological, and the social sanction against the rebellious individual are all connected. The world of the rebellious individual is part of the night side of the map, and maybe that’s some of the reason for the prominence of Robinson Crusoe, the isolated individual as the polarization of the main scene. For Betteredge he goes along with pipes of tobacco, which fits, more or less.

The John Herncastle who (maliciously) presents the diamond to the heroine is associated with the devil, and the diamond itself has the role of the apple of discord in the Judgement of Paris story. That is, it’s a social disintegrant. Herncastle, like Fosco, makes chemical investigations and loves animals. Threat to recut the diamond, which like the golden bowl in Henry James, has a flaw, which will destroy its “identity.” The three black buggers experiment in clairvoyance with a boy they’ve picked up: this doesn’t get anywhere, because Collins doesn’t believe in clairvoyance, but he knows it goes in.

It’s interesting that the real thief, who gets murdered by the black buggers, is not only called Ablewhite but is expressly made large and blond, with relatives to match. He gets disguised as a black bugger himself, and the disguise is torn off his face (when dead) by the detective, black becoming white in a reversal of the normal symbolic pattern.

“When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam.” (p. 54). Light of the counter-world in short. “The Devil (or the Diamond) possessed that dinner party” (60).

Incompetent investigator followed by competent one: cf. the two judges in The Chalk Circle.

Technique of doubling characters: the Rosanna-Limping Lucy doubling doesn’t seem specifically structural, like the two doctors and the two detectives. Note that the major pistis solution, Cuff’s, is that the heroine has stolen her own diamond, which puts the archetype of the calumniated heroine very dimly into the picture. Dimly, because it’s understood from the beginning that she can do no wrong, being a lady.

Note the connexion of the word “clue” in detective stories with the suppressed metaphor of a labyrinth. A clue may also be a talisman of recognition. Here, the smear of paint on the hero’s nightgown (didn’t realize men wore them) is the essential clue, and when the hero finds it it’s a scene of self-recognition as a thief. Incidentally, it’s shut in a box and sunk into quicksand at the end of a rope: hero is directed by a posthumous letter of Rosanna’s to fish it up, which brings the Rudens archetype into the story,33 and with it the confrontation of the hero with his own Narcissus oblivious self. It’s a singularly concentrated focus of traditional archetypes.

Limping Lucy speaks of an uprising of the poor against the rich: again it gets the lightning-rod treatment. Well, the hero leaves for foreign parts—withdrawal theme, like the hero’s parallel withdrawal in The Woman in White. Symmetry: the hero’s father and the heroine’s mother die in the interval between the loss and the solution. Of course the five non-rhetorical proofs are all there: the story is told by “witnesses,” one of them Miss Clack, who eavesdrops. Miss Clack, as I’ve said, becomes isolated from the society by her fanaticism, which leads her to suggest that Lady Verinder may not after all have gone straight to heaven. She’s thus a second social disintegrant, like the diamond itself. The modern reader is likely to have some sympathy for her.

“Strong language! and suggestive of something below the surface, in the shape of a romance.” (219).

North side of map: begins with those awful Italians in Elizabethan romance, continuing into the eighteenth century. Note the emphasis on the French, German, Italian sides to the hero’s character.

The telos of romance is almost always the heroine’s cunt. This usually turns into a womb from which the next generation is born. The point is the number of symbols for that cunt that are strewn along the way.

The sun shining on the quicksands “hid the horror of its false brown face under a passing smile.” Little black buggers modulate “as if some spirit of terror lived and moved and shuddered in the fathomless deeps beneath” (p. 248). Watch for “as ifs.” “An unutterable dread of seeing her {Rosanna} rise through the heaving surface of the sand and point to the place.” Reads his own name on his smeared nightshirt. Discovers himself as thief, and the shock “completely suspended my thinking and feeling power” (250).

Rosanna shapes up in her posthumous letter as the dark female polarized against Rachel (note name). Hence her social protests (she became a thief because her mother was deserted by the “gentleman who was my father”) are appropriate, despite the lightning-rods carefully strewn around them. As the heroine who gets swallowed by the monster, she has a natural connection with Jennings. The hint of the censored sexual assault by hero on heroine is on p. 255. Note Rosanna’s pleasure at the thought of involving hero with herself because they’re both thieves: imprisonment in the lower world. She wears his nightgown—displaced copulation. The peripeteia is on p. 259, and Jennings has a nose “so often found among the ancient people of the East,” so he comes from the night-world. Maybe Jewish, as Luker (lucre) who gets the diamond almost certainly is. Candy, who played the practical joke of giving the hero opium, has lost his memory—amnesia archetype, of course: cf. the Sturk theme in Le Fanu. Recognition of anamnesis tied up by reference to birth, p. 261. Rosanna could manage hero in lower world because she’s had a record of fraud “on such a grand scale.” Letter concludes by hope of “understanding each other” (266), exactly the phrase used about the first Rachel-Blake interview. Darkness to light, first mention, p. 267.

For the recognition of oneself by one’s own name cf. Scrooge in Dickens. When the hero is snitching the diamond the heroine watches everything he’s doing in one of the three mirrors in her room. Time theme: pawned jewel to be redeemed at the end of a year (and a day, I suppose). Lawyer says “let us look to what we can discover in the future instead of to what we can not discover in the past,” but hero says “the whole thing is essentially a matter of the past” (286). Darkness to light, second mention, 288. Period of doubting whether the diamond existed at all (ib.): cf. Alice’s wood of no names.34 After this he takes Betteredge’s “forgotten” letter out of his pocket. “When the pursuit of our own interests causes us to become objects of inquiry to ourselves, we are naturally suspicious of what we don’t know” (289). This starts a series of close parallels between detection and psychoanalysis: “revive my recollection of every thing that happened in the house” (292).

The reviving doctor first revives the first doctor, to whom he’s obliged for taking him in—another Rosanna link. “Death and I fought our fight over the bed which should have the man who lay on it” (298). He keeps running away from some “horrible accusation” never specified, like Lord Jim. Only his is. He’s dying, and keeps himself under sedation with opium, hence again he belongs to the dream world. For the drug of forgetfulness cf. the catalepsy in Silas Marner. The patter about the experiment of repetition quotes a doctor as saying that any mental impression may be “reproduced at some subsequent time.” Cf. the business about total recollection in Coleridge. Reference to De Quincey. Jennings has a vice role which is really a “virtue” one, like Edgar. Some by-play twice about keys, one Blake’s to Rachel’s house, another Blake’s to his own supply of tobacco. Not much made of it.

In the closing scenes a clever boy with rolling eyes is introduced. Otherwise I have most of it. The diamond gets passed along a series of people.

15. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Frye’s own edition of The Woman in White, which he annotated: New York: Modern Library, 1964, published with The Moonstone. Frye’s page numbers in parentheses are to this edition. The novel was first published in 1859.

References to The Woman in White in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 201, 228, 232, 242, 244

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 75, 96

The Woman in White concentrates all its archetypes at the end. The main things are the father who sets up the daughter as a sacrificial victim. Laura’s father isn’t in the story, but it’s his “wish” that she marry the villain, and he also begets the woman in white. He leaves behind him, as a surrogate, the useless hypochondriac of a brother, a heavy comic humor. Laura is polarized, of course, against a dark heroine, Marian, the passed-over firstborn, as she’s a half-sister. She’s masculine in her temperament, “ugly,” because she has some hair on her lip, and active. Later on the hero takes her on as a displaced wife, because, though he’s married to Laura, Laura has a Victorian child-wife role. The doubling of Laura and the woman in white (Anne Catherick) is much more insisted on. In fact the undisplaced story really has Laura dying and coming to life again out of her tomb; the displaced one kills off the woman in white, of course, and puts Laura in the asylum instead. She comes out practically a double of the woman in white: it’s said that she’d be a double if she were marked by sorrow and suffering (the author doesn’t add mental deficiency, but she has that too).

Ekpyrosis theme: image of exploding mine used in connexion with Fosco, but Percival does go up in smoke like the spontaneous combustion man in Dickens. Here it’s partly a matter of God-projecting: the hero has a right to clear the heroine’s name, but no right to personal revenge, hence the latter is for both villains taken out of his hands.

Preface to The Woman in White says he’s got the law right with the help of a lawyer friend: example of the nineteenth-century obsession with the law. Curious example in final scene: the revolver is kept in the drawer, and the possibility of murderous violence remains all through, but what takes place is a contract or bargain, with one profoundly unconvincing element—you gotta write the assend of my story. Nation of shopkeepers.

Two interesting passages unconnected with structure: one that suggests that the older generation is more spontaneous than the younger, the latter being over-precocious and perhaps too well brought up. The other that nature is not a comfort to man except in books (417). One step in the shrivelling of nature from Wordsworthian nature to Lawrentian cock.

Hero gets uneasy at “accidental” likeness suggested between Laura and the Woman in White and says “Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight.” Later: “It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened … always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence” (436).

Woman in White says grave of her female protector (actually her stepmother, as it turns out) ought to be kept white as snow: she dresses in white because her stepmother did. Obvious ghost displacement, of course. Dog dislikes the villain—the device I call dog nose. Anyway, Laura tells villain her heart will always belong elsewhere—horkos archetype.35 Hero buggers off to central America, and heroine and villain get married at the winter solstice—winter, with its white snow, being part of that bookish nature-ground.

Interesting that Laura becomes more childish as she falls from innocence (i.e., half-Lesbian involvement with half-sister) to experience (bride after honeymoon). Phrases: “happy, innocent Victorian for sexless life” (533); “dark, clever, gipsy face” for Marian, the dark girl (534).

Second villain, Fosco, compared to Napoleon at beginning and end. One of the finest experimental chemists living, so it’s not surprising that his schemes involve the use of drugs. He’s also an expert chess player, and the whole organization of the plot recalls a chess-game—several metaphors about moves in a game. Very fat, loves animals and is ruthless about human beings. Name suggests fusco, dark, the contrast to the white and the name Fairlie. Describes himself as arch-master of the Rosicrucian Masons of Mesopotamia. A political situation buried in it. A conspiratorial society, evidently for Italian liberation, goes around murdering traitors to it, and one of its members is the Pesca who appears at the beginning to get the hero his job because he owes his life to him. He later drops a silly-ass persona and becomes a serious intriguer. Fosco is a reactionary spy, and never forgives Laura for calling him that by accident. If you join this society, you get tattooed (birthmark archetype); if you later desert it, you get T marked across it when you’re murdered.

This story also has a sinister lake, compared to the Dead Sea (547). Fosco says he says what other people only think—his cynicism is lightning-rodded as usual, but he’s a deliberately striking character. Refers to Jesuits and “suspicious Italian character,” rubbing in the close affinity between this situation and that of Emily with Montini in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Interesting use of presaging dreams—interesting because really unnecessary, and introduced only to emphasize the structure. They’re Marian’s dreams, and the hero says in one “The night when I met the lost Woman on the highway was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a Design that is yet unseen” (579; capitals his). This hero-as-chosen-instrument business is obvious but needs thinking about, besides being an author-projection. In another dream “he was kneeling by a tomb of white marble; and the shadow of a veiled woman rose out of the grave beneath.” Undisplaced version of what actually does happen a few pages further on—a very neat example of how dreams express the undisplaced form of the plot in sentimental romance. Towards the end the hero finds a witness who remembers Lady Glyde because Glyde is his wife’s maiden name. This too is unnecessary, and is an example of overdesigning, something deliberately done in spoof-stories like a lot of Michael Innes’s, and corresponding to knittelvers in poetry. In this story frequent God-projections take care of such things—if it’s all the will of God, it’s more plausible that some of the episodes aren’t, if I follow me.

Much said about the sequential shape of the plot—instead of the darkness to light, labyrinth to illumination, metaphors of The Moonstone, we have “advancing, blindfold, to an appointed and an inevitable End.” Cf. “I am blind with crying” at the end of the first section (called “Epoch”).

Marian: “I saw the white tomb again, and the veiled woman rising out of it, by Hartright’s side. The thought of Laura welled up like a spring in the depths of my heart.”

Names rather obvious: if your name is Hartright, you’re the hero, and can’t go headwrong. Villain’s home is called Blackwater Park—another black-white element. Anyway, Marian overhears a conversation, witness device, and catches cold doing so, which turns into typhus. Fosco is in love with her, which fits the dragon-swallowing-heroine archetype. This isn’t just me: he’s very persistently associated with metaphors of overflowing and of absorbing, besides being fat. Anyway, at the end of the second “Epoch” hero comes to grave with inscription of Laura’s death on it, and there’s a veiled Laura looking at him over the grave. (Of course it’s the woman in white buried in it.)

Third “epoch” begins with a clue and labyrinth image, and then talks about “the hopeless struggle against Rank and Power,” underlining the latent revolutionary theme. The woman in white has died like—is the name Marcellus?—in The Winter’s Tale (the “white” business suggests some link with this play). Hero says it was providential that Marian and Laura happened to turn back to the mother’s grave to meet him: “I believe in my soul that the Hand of God was pointing their way back to them,” etc., implying God-projection of the U shape—turn up at the bottom. The three leads settle in a poor and populous part of London—again a slight social overtone; as isolated as “a desert island”—cf. the Crusoe archetype in The Moonstone. Laura by this time has become essentially the reborn woman in white, and, as I say, the menage is really Marian-wife and Laura-child. Cognitio has to take place “without her knowledge or her help.” “I left her; and set forth to pave the way for discovery—the dark and doubtful way, which began at the lawyer’s door.” Four or five archetypes of structure there.

In this story Collins shows extraordinary perception, even more than in The Moonstone of the detective story-psychoanalysis link. Begins with a jury choosing “a plain fact, on the surface, and a long explanation under the surface” (704). Questions of identity are the hardest to settle, especially when there’s a resemblance. The lawyer’s advice is of no help, hence hero has to transcend the law (706). First hero has to know villain’s “secret”—discovery of cipher in the depths archetype. The secret is that he isn’t Percival Glyde at all, as his parents weren’t married. Hero has to disentangle his “pure” motive from a revenge-motive, and avoid “base speculation on the future relations of Laura and myself”—in other words keep his prick in his back pocket, though in fact he does marry her very shortly. Well, I don’t need all the indications of the binary form of this story, the point-by-point reversal of fortunes, but it’s interesting how he encourages people to babble and associate and hopes to pick something essential out of it. “Here, if I could find it—here was the approach to the Secret, hidden deep under the surface of the apparently unpromising story” (726). Also “any chance suggestion” (727).

Hero considers putting on a disguise but abandons the idea as “repellent” (734), and Fosco actually is disguised, even if unintentionally. “If the woman’s fierce temper once got beyond her control … she might yet say the words which would put the clue in my hands” (738). The clue is associative (743). Percival’s Secret is that he’s not a gentleman born, as the dog perceived earlier. “Our unintelligible world” (766). Note the “no name” device in regard to Percival. The woman in white’s wicked stepmother won’t let her dress in white (773). Note how much turns on the mystery of birth, as in Dickens; also the Little Dorrit device of hero and heroine united by latter’s loss of money. Some phrases about the woman in white (789) suggest an adaptation of the grateful dead theme. Laura hysterically suppresses painful memories but dreams them (794). Wonder if Pesca has any fish connotations—certainly Pesca-Fosco contrast in sound at least. Here’s the “mine” (i.e. the gunpowder plot archetype) image for Fosco (807): cf. Milton’s use of it in Samson Agonistes, Shakespeare’s in Hamlet; Promethean explosion of Orc. Note that the Italian secret society fills the role of the night side of the map, like the Indians in The Moonstone.

Final scene with Fosco, where he threatens to shoot the hero, is the descent into ritual death for the latter. What saves hero is identification with the villain. “At that final moment, I thought with his mind; I felt with his fingers” (812). Hero isn’t (much) afraid—reverse of an earlier scene with Fosco and a bloodhound—Fosco can fix the dogs, as Percival can’t.

The “mountebank bravado” in Fosco associates him with alazon types, up to a point: “motive of securing the just recognition {note word} of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out.” This last forms an Odysseytype conclusion. The way Fosco’s confession is extracted from him is silly, but of course the convention of the villain’s confession is standard procedure. Fosco doesn’t actually swallow Marian, but wants to: “the complete transformation of two separate identities” (823). Fosco’s final statement is full of these metaphors of overflowing and of swallowing that I’ve mentioned earlier. “shrouded in total eclipse” (829): pun on fusco close to surface here. “designed to assist the resurrection of the woman who was dead in the person of the woman who was living. What a situation! I suggest it to the rising romance-writers of England” (830). At end he speaks of reader’s attention as “concentrated breathlessly on myself,” which of course is a point in the villain’s confession device. He doesn’t realize that taking Laura’s identity is worse than taking her life.

Marian has, as I think I said, the passed-over firstborn role, and a sort of Paulina isolation, because nobody can in decency marry her: she’s been undisplacedly swallowed by the dragon. Final business of erasing the false inscription from the white tombstone. At the recognition of Laura as Laura in her birthplace she’s raised so as to be visible to the crowd, who naturally cheers her—faithful servitors again. The death of Fosco has dragon overtones too—“a man of immense size, with a strange mark on his left arm.” His death is public—contrast of choruses between him and Laura. At the very end Laura produces an infant who is the heir of the estate (Limmeridge) the hero has married his way into—nostos tie-up, otherwise I don’t get it altogether.

Half-witted servant named Porcher (threshold echoes); female jailer type like Mrs. Jewkes, if that’s it, in Pamela. I don’t get the echoes in “Halcombe,” but Marian’s hair on her lip and Fosco’s admiration for her suggest Italian connexions: cf. “gipsy” above. Just enough night-side links. More important, the binary structure, leading first to the triumph of the villains and then to the reversal of the situation, suggests (a) a chess game (Marian also plays chess, though not as well as Fosco), hence the black-and-white patterns (b) the binary form in music. The latter leads to the rovescio, and that again to the mirror separating pistis from gnosis, or what Collins calls “our unintelligible world” from the more intelligible world of fiction which represents a higher reality. This latter phrase sounds phony, but cf. the end of my Dickens essay.36

**16. The Harlequin, Goldoni, and Gozzi**

Frye’s edition of Eric Bentley’s book, which he annotated: The Classic Theatre, Volume I: Six Italian Plays (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958). Goldoni’s Harlequin was written in 1743.

References to Goldoni and Gozzi in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 204, 206, 279, 209, 219, 280

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 27, 47, 70, 71, 368

On the harlequin as twins:

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 73

I need to know a lot more about Harlequin. In Eric Bentley’s collection of Italian plays there’s a commedia dell’arte scenario written up as a play by someone called Leon Katz.37 If the characteristics assigned to Harlequin are conventional they’re interesting. He is, of course, a vice or merry-andrew, playing tricks on the other characters; also a jester. More important is a curious self-detaching quality about him; he divides himself into two people, one sneering at the antics of the other, and holds other dialogues with himself: he pretends to go to hell and says “Myself came to the door, told me to go away, and went back in without me” [132]. Twin theme. Also he dresses up as a woman; also he plays a mute part, suggesting Harpo Marx, who’s a modern Harlequin. A character says to the audience, “go to the commedia, and laugh at Arlecchino”; Arlecchino says “I am Arlecchino, and I have laughed at him until I cried” [142]. All this must be traditional: it’s (roughly) contemporary with the improvised cadenzas and figured-bass playing of music.

There’s a hell of a lot of commedia dell’arte in Shakespeare: this play makes a great to-do over a basket of lemons that’s precisely the buck-basket theme in The Merry Wives. One of the stocks of Pantalone, always an older man, is handing out advice to his son, which implies that Polonius, as his name perhaps implies, is something of a pantaloon (I’ve already called Barbantio that, and the first scene of Othello has a curious resemblance to an Arlecchino type of lazzi, waking up Pantalone by shouts). Evidently catching and eating flies is another Harlequin routine: in Yeats’ poem “The Statues” there seems to be a confusion or identification of Harlequin with Hamlet. In any case the link between the commedia dell’arte and Yeats’ Vision is something I noticed from the beginning, and it was referred to by Yeats himself.38

Four character types in Goldoni derive from the Comedy of Masks: Pantalone, the Dottore, Brighella and Arlecchino. The first three are dressed respectively in red, white and black. Truffaldino is a kind of double of Harlequin. That gives two senex types, of contrasting physical appearance (Pantalone tall and thin; Dottore short and fat), and two servant types, one knave or ruffian, the other fool. Harlequin wears a black mask, which originally represented merely the dirty face of a charcoal burner or chimney sweep. The word “zany” comes from Zanni, the Bergamo dialect form of Giovanni. Bergamo is of course proverbially rustic: cf. Suite Bergamasque. Pierrot and Columbine must be of different origin.

I must think about the role of jesters generally in drama: they’re even central to Sanskrit drama, and I’ve noticed that Shakespeare deliberately puts them in where his sources have no mention of them (there’s no trace of Touchstone in Lodge’s Rosalind or of Autolycus in Greene’s Pandosto). I think they have something to do with the preservation of an oral tradition in drama—wit and jokes depend on an oral tradition, which is why they’re so damn dismal even in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s melancholy clowns may be connected with Harlequin’s self-detaching quality. It’s not that they’re more realistic than their romantic surroundings, necessarily, but that they create a Brechtian sense of “alienation,” a realization that this is a show. Hence, Jaques, who’s really a jester and wants to wear motley, and whose apotheosis is a long set speech comparing life to a stage. Touchstone’s seven stages of the duel create alienation from the upper-class rituals to which duelling belongs [As You Like It, 5.4.94–108].

Gozzi’s King Stag (Il Re Cervo) is an almost completely undisplaced metamorphosis theme. The King and his ambitious and wicked Prime Minister go hunting (the Prime Minister, who’s evidently a Dottore type, also loves the girl the King’s gonna marry). Then the King, under pressure from the Prime Minister, tells latter a secret confided him by a magician: if you pronounce a formula over a dead body, you die and enter the dead body and bring it to life. King tries it on a stag; Prime Minister promptly tries it on the King, i.e., enters his body, and then offers a huge reward for killing the stag. So we have somebody who looks like the King behaving like a tyrant: the girl senses the difference and promptly falls out of love. The King shuffles off the stag body for a very old man, a beggar; trace of Odyssey theme. Comes to his girl friend and says the Prime Minister “took possession of my real body and had me hunted by my own hounds” [356]. Meanwhile the magician who taught him this spell has been turned into a green parrot, and is captured (voluntarily) by the king’s bird-catcher. At the end he turns back into a magician, and accuses the false king: “you sought to usurp the shape and power of the King, and turn the King into a lowly creature, spurned or hunted by all” [364].

Gozzi again: the other trick the magician taught the king was a statue that laughs like hell when any woman lies to him. So he interviews 2748 females looking for a bride and they all lie, including the Columbine (or equivalent; she’s not called that), who’s naturally in love with somebody else. (She’s also the daughter of the Prime Minister, who goes into a great rage when she tells him she do wanna; the accepted bride, whom Prime Minister also loves, is the daughter of Pantalone, so called.) A lot of by-play about these interviews, making me wonder if Yeats knew this play: it has points in common with The Player Queen. Certainly the Magic Flute links are there, what with the bird-catcher and his birds: he starts out in love with a silly female called Smeraldina, whom he refers to throughout as a bird or “hen”; the name suggests another green parrot. The main story is very like that werewolf folktale in the Lees’ book.39 Anyway, metamorphoses and demonic parody, with the magician assuming the persona of the playwright, more or less, at the end, and, of course, renouncing his magic and saying he’s “free,” at the very end. I know I can’t trust the translation in details, but I wish I knew how much was Gozzi—the Tempest links suggest some common source for two plays widely removed in time and culture.

The hunt, as the deer and hart puns emphasize, is a cunt-hunt: hunting is male, with both pursuit and linear thrust elements in it. What’s important in romance is less the victim of the hunt than the female enclosing forest, into which the hunter disappears. The victim is often a death symbol, of course: the boar in the Adonis myth, the fox in Surtees as the “thief of the world,”40 and when it is, the enclosing forest becomes the scene in which the drama of death is transmuted into rebirth. The forest is the abode of Diana the virgin, and the lurking tragic possibility is that of metamorphosis, the Actaeon fate of being hunted by one’s own hounds. Hence a lurking identification with the victim: what shall he have that killed the deer? His leather skin and horns to wear [As You Like It, 4.2.11–12]. The song goes on to say that the hunter’s father and grandfather wore the horns before him—usual stale joke about cuckold, but the cuckold joke really does have some connexion, I think, with the Actaeon reversal theme. Male body as prick is what dies, of course.

Gozzi was the man quoted by Goethe as having maintained that there were only thirty-six dramatic situations: I’ve been trying to track this down, and a dramatist whose work is so undisplaced would be the most likely person to think in such terms.41

That is (re above), the cuckold is a displaced Actaeon figure: the hounds, symbol of both his erotic and his acquisitive drives, are turned around on him. Because you only get cuckolds when the wife is thought of as her husband’s possession, or rather as part of his honour, the symbol of his social freedom, as her chastity (fidelity to him) is of hers.

17. Indian Drama

The Dream of Vasavadatta was written sometime between the second century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. Ratnavali is attributed to a seventh-century Indian emperor. The other plays mentioned are all from ancient India.

Indian drama isn’t as archetypally rewarding as I thought it might be from Sakuntala, and the Indians sure as hell do make honey a sauce to sugar.42 However. There’s a play called The Dream of Vasavadatta. Vasavadatta is queen of King Udayana, a virtuous enough king, only the astrologers have said that the husband of another woman named Padmavati will be master of all India, so Udayana’s prime minister, Yaugandharayana, is anxious to snag her for Udayana. So he burns up the place where Vasavadatta is, spreads the rumor she’s been burned alive in it, then introduces Vasavadatta, disguised as his sister, into an ashrama where Padmavati is also. Udayana and Padmavati are betrothed, and Vasavadatta has to watch all this, though the king’s grief for her is intense, genuine, and therefore pleasant to her. Padmavati says she has a headache; Vasavadatta comes in to try to comfort her; it’s dark; she finds her lying on the bed and lies down beside her; what’s on the bed is not Padmavati but the king. He talks in his sleep and thinks he’s seen his dead wife, as he has, only she ain’t dead. This is where the “Dream” comes; the translator says the title really means “The Dream and Vasavadatta.” Note the displaced or token bed trick theme. Meanwhile Udayana’s commander in chief cleans up his enemies for him, and restores him the kingdom he’s been dispossessed of, more or less. Two tokens of recognition, one of sight and one of sound, handed to him. One is Vasavadatta’s lute: he’s taught her to play it, which links with the lover as music-master theme which is also in Apollonius, and gets realistically down-graded in The Taming of the Shrew and The Marriage of Figaro (the Beaumarchais version, not the Mozart one). The other is a portrait of her brought by her sorrowing relatives. Her mother says he ran away with her instead of marrying her with them (a lot of things aren’t very clear), so “we drew your portrait and hers on a plate and performed the wedding ceremony.” Magical portrait theme. According to the amiable Indian convention, a king can have two wives, so everybody’s happy: note however (the important thing) the survival of the first heroine through a death-and-rebirth theme (the bed in the dark being the stage equivalent of her {reported} death) to emerge again at the end of the play—this is the folklore theme behind Aristophanes recorded by Cornford. Displaced here. Author’s name is Bhasa.

Another play, perhaps written a thousand years later, is called Ratnavali: King Udayana and Queen Vasavadatta and Prime Minister, elaborately scheming Yaugandharayana, are the same as above, but the second wife is different in name and the story uses different archetypes. Ratnavali means necklace, which is her talisman of recognition; her name is Sagarika in the play. Same story about how marrying her would make Udayana master of India: she’s brought into the palace in disguise by Yaugandharayana again, and the king falls in love with her, starting by falling in love with her portrait (she’s painted his, and somebody else hers on the same picture). There’s also a tell-tale bird, a mynah, that helps communicate. Here Vasavadatta turns bitchy and has the girl imprisoned—the king isn’t a very royal figure. A Magician turns up, dismissed in favor of an urgent appointment before he can pull off his best trick. Yell that the palace has caught fire; Sagarika is imprisoned in the dungeons of it; Vasavadatta seems to have changed her mind and wants her rescued; she is, only there ain’t no fire; it was the magician’s prize trick. Recognition through necklace; king buys a bed for three and everybody’s happy.

Two others, The Toy Cart and The Signet Ring of Rakshasa, haven’t very distinctive outlines: both of them lead up to an execution of a victim who’s delivered at the last moment. The former has an innocent and pious man the victim, unjustly accused of a crime; the cognitio is simply the discovery of the real criminal, who is also let go (Barabbas archetype). I don’t know why it’s called The Toy Cart. The other is a drama of political intrigue, where a Machiavellian politician, adviser (and guru, therefore with far more authority) of Chandragupta, manages to win over Chandragupta’s chief enemy, Rakshasa, by a series of cunning devices, in which Rakshasa’s signet ring is a floating talisman, very ingeniously handled, I should think, if I had time to figure it all out.

The Later Story of Rama is more interesting from my present point of view. The story is a modification of the sequel stuck on the end of the Ramayana. Rama’s quest is over and he’s ruling Ayodhya with Sita: the play begins with them studying the story of the Ramayana as depicted in a series of pictures. Ecphrasis, or whatever it is; also involvement of art in the argument, as in The Winter’s Tale, and self-recognition of the hero, as with Aeneas at Carthage, as I’ve already mentioned. Considering that Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, is an important character in this play, the Winter’s Tale links are even clearer. Well, the “people” are said to doubt Sita’s purity, so Rama exiles her in the forest (she was going there anyway, but this time she can’t come back). Note the combination of pastoral and slander themes, as in The Faerie Queene, book 6, Spenser’s equivalent of the last two romances. Twelve years pass; Sita has given birth to twins, who are brought up by Valmiki. Meanwhile, Rama has celebrated the horse sacrifice: Hindu law requires that he do this with his wife; the “people” say he should marry again; he says the hell with that and celebrates it with a golden statue of his wife. Rama, in quest of a dragon or whatever to kill, enters the forest where Sita has been revisiting the scenes of her past: she’s invisible, but he feels her presence. She was kept from suicide by Ganga, the spirit of the Ganges. Then we’re introduced to the twins, who are heroes already, and one of them defies an entire army. Rama comes and admires them without knowing that they’re his own sons. Finally, there’s a supernatural spectacle devised by the poet Bharata, a dramatization of the Ramayana, and played by Apsaras (Tempest theme of drama acted by spirits), depicting the sorrows of Sita. Rama sees it, and can’t get over the feeling that it’s real and not just a play, and faints. A somewhat unconvincing jerk into a happy-ending reunion of Rama, Sita and the twins, occurs in the last minute. The original Ramayana ending was better: Sita (the name means “furrow”) asks her mother the Earth (Prithvi) to swallow her up; Rama drowns himself and joins her in the other world. Extraordinary union of Winter’s Tale and Tempest themes.

Such a play as The Later Story of Rama, with its many parallels to Winter’s Tale and Tempest, raises a lot of questions about the nature of recognition-reconciliation in drama. Why so much about the arts? Painting, sculpture and music, as well as drama itself, come into The Winter’s Tale; music and drama (masque) into The Tempest. In the Rama play we have first paintings giving the Ramayana story that the chief characters involved look at; then Sita goes into exile, where the exile, the pregnancy, the slander are all Winter’s Tale themes; in her absence she’s replaced by a golden statue in Rama’s life and returns to Rama as an invisible spirit—Hermione returns to Leontes as a ghost in a dream and a statue is said to be made of her. The play at the end is acted by Apsaras or spirits, and again it’s the story of the exile of Sita which is a part of the play itself, at least a part of its action, though it’s offstage action. Rama takes it to be real, and it ends with a cognitio of Rama, Sita, and her twins.

All this appears to mean that the arts, brought together by drama, have a crucial role in uniting a dream with an awakened life, and by that union bringing about a form of higher consciousness which is what the cognitio at the end symbolizes. Drama, which partakes of both dream and wakened life, points to a form of consciousness transcending the schizophrenic alternation of dreams and waking “reality.” The statue doesn’t come to life in the Indian play, but the drama does. Note too that Valmiki, author of the Ramayana, is the tutor of the twins. Poet as guru—cf. the curious Prospero-Shakespeare link. Why does Sita have twins, for crissake? I thought twins belonged in the journey out, not back in. But of course the Comedy of Errors ends with the twins united; maybe they symbolize the union of the divided identity.

Calumniated heroine theme of course—no explanation of why the crowd doubts Sita’s purity: they just do. In the Ramayana the “furrow” and earth-mother aspects seem to point to a phase of symbolism that the dramatist isn’t much interested in.

18. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley

The edition of Waverley Frye is using is apparently the one edited by Andrew Hook (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Frye owned and annotated this edition. Frye’s page references, as well as those in square brackets, are to this edition. Waverley was first published in 1814.

References to Waverley in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 189, 192, 195, 238, 276

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 28–9, 57

This is not the type of story that I need to summarize too closely for my present purposes: I have most of my main points about it already. He’s very explicit about the romantic and quixotic cast of Waverley’s mind, to the point of saying his readers may expect an imitation of Cervantes. But Waverley isn’t nuts: he’s describing “that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and coloring” [55]. Also “Female forms of exquisite grace and beauty began to mingle in his mental adventures” [55]. He read a good deal, brought up in a household where it was regarded as meritorious just to look at a book, regardless of the degree of understanding involved: true also of the household I was brought up in, and of my first efforts to read Waverley itself. “The vague and unsatisfactory course of reading which he had pursued, working upon a temper naturally retired and abstracted, had given him that wavering and unsettled habit of mind which is most averse to study and rivetted attention” [73]. The word “wavering” indicates how he chose the name for his hero. So Waverley retires to a ruined tower on his Tory uncle’s property and broods over the War of the Roses, some of which was fought there. The reader is assured that he can’t follow the rest of the story without reading all about the Tory-Whig eighteenth-century background. Anyway, Waverley gets a commission in the king’s Hanoverian army and sets out for Scotland—I forget why at the moment.

Scott’s essential characters then begin to appear: Bradwardine is a lovable pedant of the Oldbuck type, and the contrast with Waverley is like the Wardour-Oldbuck relation in some ways. I’m typing badly because most of this is shit. Also the idiotes or whatever figure: Davie Gellatley, who had a brother of unusual talents who died early, and Davie learned a lot of songs from him—Shakespearean singing fool, and the progenitor of the wild character like Wandering Willie. It’s obvious that the Highlanders appear to Waverley as a kind of objectification of his own quixotic daydreams (129). The colors red and black seem to have some thematic significance: sidier roy means red or government soldier; sidier dhu an insurgent. The preface says the wrath of our ancestors was gules, ours black.

Two heroines, as I’ve noted: “they would have afforded an artist two admirable subjects for the gay and the melancholy muse,” 170: cf. Pirate. A good deal about the oral poetry of the Highlands. Flora doesn’t mind heights; Waverley does, 175: cf. Anne of Geierstein. She says to him “He who wooes her {The Celtic muse} must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.” This book is really Ossian II, as the civilization of the Highlanders is as remote from an Edinburgh lawyer as that of the Cree Indians would be to me. Scott says the van of the Highland army was tolerably respectable, but “the rear resembled actual banditti” [324]. A great deal is, naturally, made of the intense tribal and comitatus loyalties of the Highland clans: it’s part of the whole tragic theme that the comedy of Waverley runs through. Waverley says think of all the poor sods who’re gonna die in this fight; Fergus says think only sword: “All other reflections are now too late” [336]. Very accurate phrasing. Flora talks to Rose about Waverley and says he’s a sissy, more or less, adding that when it comes to fighting, most male animals are much alike, and it generally takes more courage to run away. Waverley himself says he’s “dedicated myself to one who will never love mortal man, unless old Warwick, the King-maker, should arise from the dead” [376]. Curious, this equation of the War of the Roses with the Jacobite rebellion: cf. Eliot’s Little Gidding. The Jacobites wear a white cockade, which is called (390) the “cause of the White Rose.” Of course the other side of comitatus loyalty is hopeless rivalry and dissension on any co-operative occasion, and the Jacobite army soon falls to pieces in consequence. Involved plotting about the Bradwardine estate, seized by the heir-male, and we’ve been told that “from a romantic idea of not prejudicing this young man’s right as heir-male, the Baron had refrained from settling his estate on his daughter” [438]. Sexism here as in Redgauntlet, similarly leading to disaster, or at least connected with it. Waverley is actually saved from the fate he’s provoked (a) by Rose and her intrigues (see 448) (b) by the Colonel Talbot he took prisoner at Prestonpans: he’s a really cuddled pet. Narrative compared to a stone rolling down hill, 480. It passes through the very real tragedy of Fergus to the comedy of Waverley’s escape, pardon, marriage to Rose, fixing up of the Bradwardines, etc. A good example of a principle just dawning in my mind about the miraculous escape of the hero being that of humanity as a whole in romance.

19. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering

Frye owned two copies of Guy Mannering, both of which he annotated: Boston: Aldine, 1831, and London: Dent, 1957. Frye’s page references, as well as those in square brackets, are to the Dent edition. Guy Mannering was first published in 1815.

References to Guy Mannering in Frye’s published work:

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, CW 15: 192, 195, 206, 218, 225, 226

“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18: 6, 71, 75, 77

Note Scott’s fondness for beginning a story with a single, or at most two, traveller(s) in a bleak and lonely landscape, generally in or near the dark. It’s a modulation of the hunting king disappearing into the forest, symbol of trying to screw the whole outdoors as a shrouding female, or getting back into the womb. Said to form a historical trilogy, following Waverley and preceding The Antiquary. Waverley is named after the adulscens hero; The Antiquary after a pedant-senex; Guy Mannering is halfway between. Guy Mannering is a considerably cut-down astrologer: the man Scott doesn’t believe in what the novelist Scott needs, so there’s a good deal of buggering around. The introduction suggests a considerably more undisplaced romance with an astrologer as an old wise man. Some of this gets lightning-rodded onto Julia Mannering, who’s very romanticized, being a bored and intelligent middle-class girl.

Well; Guy Mannering is night-foundered and stays with Bertram, the Laird of Ellengowan, a pedantic humor and a weakling, who later becomes a judge and shows his weakness in the opposite disguise of tyrannical obstinacy, a moral virtue which creates the evil it fears. Dominie Sampson is a kind of Frankenstein character and partly a helpful animal: ugly, clumsy, pedantic, but faithful. He’s often described as an automaton. Meg Merrilies is of course one of Scott’s wise women: both she and Guy Mannering tell the fortune of the infant being born at the time, Henry Bertram, and arrive at the same result: disasters at five (ten) and twenty-one. He’s kidnapped by pirates (smugglers) at five; adopted by a Dutchman named Brown; goes off to India; engages in a displaced Phèdre affair with Guy Mannering’s silly wife, is wounded (displaced killed) in a duel by Guy Mannering. Guy Mannering finds from his astrology that his wife (then just the girl he’s engaged to) is threatened with death or imprisonment at the same time as Henry Bertram’s 21-year-old disaster. Hero enters death-and-rebirth stage at the time of death of sinister mother, who’s also, like her daughter, a romanticist, and therefore a creator of illusion or false architectus. A lot said about the labyrinth and maze of Guy Mannering’s astrology (39). There are a lot of scale-stairs in the book, including an ascent leading from Bertram’s present abode to an old castle—symbol of historical butterslide, more or less. A very complex imagery of beacons, fires, marsh-lights, and the like, meshing in with the stars (astrological) imagery. Note that The Antiquary features alchemical imagery. Meg’s fortune-telling is done with yarn and a spindle, and her song sounds vaguely Fatal Sisterish. Hatteraick says to her “Come, bless the good ship and the voyage, and be cursed to ye for a hag of Satan.” “A very narrow staircase here went down to the beach” (45). Bertram says Hatteraick is a smuggler when his guns are in ballast and a pirate when they’re mounted (46).

Well, Bertram reforms, as he thinks, and makes a mess of everything: “the young women wanted pins, ribbons, combs, and ballads”—implication is that if you banish Autolycus you banish an important part of the world, as with Falstaff (a lot of the mottoes come from The Winter’s Tale, and there’s the same sixteen-year break in the story to give Henry Bertram time to get to be 21) (Pleydell, who’s a Clement figure, recalls Falstaff and Shallow, being introduced as a Lord of Misrule, so the point about roguery is really there.) Gipsies are called banditti. “The wildness of their character, and the indomitable pride with which they despised all regular labour, commanded a certain awe.” They’re proletarian aristocrats, so to speak, and link with all Scott’s wanderers (Edie Chiltree in The Antiquary). Impressive curse pronounced by Meg Merrilies who breaks a switch she’s cut from one of his trees; she’s compared to Margaret of Anjou. Light image, 74. Kennedy (never mind who he is) murdered, Harry kidnapped, Mrs. Bertram dies bringing out Lucy Bertram. Kennedy’s murder is investigated in a remarkable early piece of detective-story writing: he was thrown over a cliff, and it was thought Harry might have been too (important cliff imagery in The Antiquary).

Guy Mannering “kills” Brown in a duel over his wife; she’s grabbed by “natives,” and though soon released, this covers the “imprisonment” he foresaw in the stars and is counterpoint to Bertram’s abduction. She dies eight months later, leaving him with a female child—more counterpoint. So Henry Bertram “dies” as part of his release from the mother and revives to marry the daughter. Also Guy Mannering is a murderer and cuckold who’s killed his own son (in law). What a tangled web we weave. Well, Bertram goes broke and is sold up, the auction being a displaced rape (“It is disgusting, also, to see the scenes of domestic society and seclusion thrown open to the gaze of the curious and the vulgar,” etc., 99). Glossin, parasite and pharmakos, buys property and Bertram dies as a result of seeing him.

Naturally the Dominie sticks with Lucy, “a ridiculous appendage to a beautiful young woman” (111); heroine with grotesque, as in Dickens. Guy Mannering and daughter are now back in Britain; Guy Mannering tries to buy the Ellengowan estate but misses out by a fluke. Series of letter-extract passages from Julia Mannering, who, being an adolescent romantic, can safely be allowed to express some of the undisplaced imagery. “Do you know there was a murmur, half confirmed too by some mysterious words which dropped from my poor mother, that he possesses other sciences, now lost to the world, which enable the possessor to summon up before him the dark and shadowy forms of future events!” [119]. She gets serenaded by Brown-Bertram on a flageolet, which is given magic-flute overtones, from a boat on a lake; her host, a friend of Guy Mannering, tells Guy Mannering and he snatches her out of there. Guy Mannering is an utter prick, self-righteous and prissy, although he does all the right things. “There seemed to be a fate which conjoined the remarkable passages of his own family history with those of the inhabitants of Ellengowan, and he felt a mysterious desire to call the terrace his own, from which he had read in the book of heaven a fortune strangely accomplished in the person of the infant heir of that family, and corresponding so closely with one which had been strikingly fulfilled in his own” [132]. That means he’s a displaced magician-creator, like Prospero; the set-up is not unlike the Gozzi King-stag one. Well, Guy Mannering buys another place, installs the Dominie in it, who assimilates to the Samuel Johnson type of pedant—I only mean the combination of bookishness and awkwardness. So we leave “the principal characters of our tale in a situation which, being sufficiently comfortable to themselves, is, of course, utterly uninteresting to the reader” [140].

So we go on to Brown, who follows the Mannerings into Scotland, and runs into Dandie Dinmont, where there’s a halt for some ritual huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin,’ with some interesting flickering-light imagery for the fishin.’ Pp. 170, 171, and an ignis fatuus on 178. Now we go into a scene where Brown is protected by Meg from being murdered, in a hut where somebody (I forget who) has been murdered, so we have death-rebirth and sinister-woman again. One of Meg’s roles is faithful attendant to the Bertram clan, however: an interesting reference to Lady Macbeth on 182. “The little tower, of which only a single vault remained, forming the dismal apartment in which he had spent this remarkable night, was perched on the very point of a projecting rock overhanging the rivulet.” Displaced grave on top of a precipice, “if he had attempted to go round the building, which was once his purpose, he must have been dashed to pieces” (188). Calls Meg mother, and she says “I know it has been the will of God to preserve you in strange dangers, and that I shall be the instrument to set you in your father’s seat again” (190). She gives him money to go on which is a “treasure.”

Back to Julia, who’s bored stiff—Scott is fairly shrewd about the plight of respectable young ladies with military prigs for fathers. All she can do is write letters to her girl friend. You, she says, preferred “tales of knights, dwarfs, giants … ” while “I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at farthest, to so much only of the supernatural as is conferred by the agency of an Eastern genie or a beneficent fairy” [199]. Too bad Scott hasn’t a prose style: these hay-wagon sentences are a bore. So “you should have had my father, with his… abstruse and mystic studies”—I quote all this guff because it’s from the undisplaced Guy Mannering-as-enchanter conception of the story. Well, Brown reappears in the story and by accident shoots Hazlewood, the other adulescens and boy friend of Lucy, with his own gun. Second duel and hero as villain. “I feel the terrors of a child who has, in heedless sport, put in motion some powerful piece of machinery”—this is Julia, and the machinery goes on creaking and rattling. Well, Hatteraick is arrested and threatens to sing about Glossin, who dreams that “after wandering long over a wild heath, he came at length to an inn” [225]. Lights obscured, 227. Glossin and Henry confer about possibility that Brown has returned: Henry, confusing him with the other guy, says “he was laid six feet deep at Derncleugh the day before the thing happened … do ye think that he could rise out of the earth to shoot another man?” (233).

Guy Mannering goes to Edinburgh and meets Pleydell, who was the sheriff investigating the murder of Kennedy earlier—a well-constructed romance never wastes a character. The Lord of Misrule business is a Saturday-night carnival, Sunday being so damn dismal in Edinburgh. Well, a distant connexion named Margaret Bertram dies and leaves a lot of money to our hero, being assured by Meg Merrilies that he’s still alive. Pleydell takes on a case of Dandie Dinmont, which he refused at first—the Scotch are very litigious, is part of the point. He says “In civilized society, law is the chimney through which all that smoke discharges itself that used to circulate through the whole house, and put every one’s eyes out” [273]. Connects with my point about the fascination of the nineteenth century for law, where we have to allow for the influence of Scott, who of course was a lawyer. Pleydell gives Guy Mannering letters of introduction to all the Scotch geniuses, Hume, Home, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, etc. Dunno why, except to bring them in.

Back to Brown, 288: “And thus, unconscious as the most absolute stranger, and in circumstances which, if not destitute, were for the present highly embarrassing; without the countenance of a friend within the circle of several hundred miles; accused of a heavy crime, and, what was as bad as all the rest, being nearly penniless, did the harassed wanderer for the first time, after the interval of so many years, approach the remains of the castle, where his ancestors had exercised all but regal dominion.” Then he changes his name back to Bertram, “since he has set foot upon the property of his father” [288]. Naturally he gets a strong sense of deja vu, and wonders about India and reincarnation, also about whether we get it from unconsciously recalling dreams. Refers to “a skirmish in which my father was killed” [290], i.e., Kennedy—like most romantic heroes, he has a string of fathers. His own, Kennedy, Brown, and eventually Guy Mannering. “It happened that the spot upon which young Bertram chanced to station himself for the better viewing the castle was nearly the same on which his father had died. That’s his real father. It was marked by a large old oak-tree … used for executions by the barons of Ellengowan” [290]. Meets Glossin, who doesn’t see him at first because “he was quite shrouded by the branches of the large tree” [290]. Glossin “thought the grave had given up its dead” [291]. They converse about the family motto which Bertram sees: “The remnants of an old prophecy, or song, or rhyme, of some kind or other, return to my recollection on hearing that motto” [292]—the prophecy is the usual oracle about the end of the story. Glossin “appeared to wither into the shadow of himself” [293]; Bertram plays a tune on his flageolet which a girl hears and sings to; Glossin says “the devil take all ballads, and ballad-makers, and ballad-singers!” [294]. So Glossin pinches him for assaulting Hazlewood, and he’s stuck in a room in the old castle.

Then he’s transferred to jail, where Mrs. McGuffog, the jaileress, is grim comic relief. Meanwhile the Dominie goes for a walk and wanders past the “vestige of a tower, called by the country people the Kaim of Derncleugh” [327]—the place Bertram saw the murder of Hatteraick’s lieutenant. Legend associating it with the last stand of a Macbeth type of murderer. Here the Dominie meets Meg Merrilies, in that wonderful comic scene where she feeds him dinner “which, if the vapours of a witch’s cauldron could in aught be trusted, promised better things than the hell-broth which such vessels are usually supposed to contain” 330: the “lights” image occurs on 327–8, and is part of the undisplaced background of this story, which includes the belief that Meg has the fern-seed and goes invisible, and earlier, that Harry had been spirited away into fairyland. Sunset image 332 and reference to breaking the wand of peace over the father. Meg has a long red cloak, a scar on the forehead, and “a staff in her hand, headed with a sort of spear-point.” (The Dominie earlier has been compared to a dumb-waiter and a mental pawnshop.) Bertram is to be committed to trial before Hazlewood’s father, a baronet and justice of the peace who is also a snob and a fathead—usual pattern of dumb judge before wise one (Pleydell). Bertram looks at moon over ocean and wishes that “some siren or Proteus would arise from these billows, to unriddle for me the strange maze of fate” [334]—well, the moon shone from the clouds, counterpoint on p. 344 to the sun on 332, which does ditto and is commented on by Meg. The prison is set on fire, with lots of the light imagery: see p. 349 and elsewhere before. Bertram is rescued along with Dandie Dinmont, who’s come to help him. Back to Pleydell, visiting the Mannerings, who says “I love the cœna, the supper of the ancients” [352] and is given the letter to read that Meg had given the Dominie: it’s the oracle at the climax of the story, and quotes the motto, which he says is “in a vein of poetry worthy of the Cumaean sibyl” [353]. Pleydell is a self-projection, much less amusing than Oldbuck. Chapter 50 has a passage from the inner play in The Critic, which parodies what Guy Mannering takes seriously, more or less. It’s the epigraph. The return of the hero puts the Mannering family into a tizzy and Pleydell says to himself “has this young fellow brought the Gorgon’s head in his hand?” [359]. Dominie says “If the grave can give up the dead, that is my dear and honoured master!” [360]. Recognition by Argus, more or less.

Final (more or less) scene of returning heir “would have formed no bad group for a skilful painter” [361]—epopteia image. Guy Mannering of course goes all prissy—son has to appease the father, of course, but too bad those implications couldn’t have been left to the critics, if there had been any. Counsellor was “in his element,” thinking of a wonderful lawsuit—lawyer as projection of a novelist who is a lawyer, trained to observe people, he’s said earlier. Dominie less of an automaton; Dinmont resembles “a huge bear erect upon his hinder legs” [361], which is not just the wild man archetype but repeats the family crest (pp. 289, 361). Anyway, there’s a family-gathering scene, with the lawyer as chairman, of a type I haven’t a name for—it occurs in Eliot’s Confidential Clerk and elsewhere, and is common in detective stories, but is neither a symposium nor a trial scene, but something in between. Bertram recognizes Dominie as his “old master” (363). They have to act “before daybreak” to outwit the bad guys, don’t know why. Final change of name to Bertram, 364, and then he’s asked to remember everything he can about his abduction. This connects with my stuff about Woman in White and the trepanning business in Le Fanu. Pleydell says “since you have wanted a father so long, I wish from my heart I could claim the paternity myself.” “We must pass over his father, and serve him heir to his grandfather”—something about entail, p. 366, ibid. Guy Mannering says “I … chanced to be in the house of Ellengowan as unexpectedly as you are now in mine, upon the very night in which you were born.” Called an enfant trouve, 367: Scott, like Shakespeare, knows this stuff is corn, but doesn’t give a damn.

Incidentally, the Dominie, who can barely speak, is a master of tongues, and has taught Lucy French, Italian, and Spanish. He would have taught her Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but she said no because they were unladylike, so Pleydell has to go on explaining Latin tags to her. He says this just as Bertram meets his sister, and it’s traditional, though I don’t know in what contexts. Bertram speaks of “that dim and imperfect shadow of his memory,” i.e. Sampson, which he’d loved. P. 372: entanglement, wild dream, unriddle: the mixed metaphor of unriddling a maze has come up before. Julia compares the story to an Oriental romance—more lightning-rodding—“this lively crack-brained Scotch lawyer appears like a pantomime at the end of a tragedy” [373]. Julia met Bertram when he shot Hazlewood, but said nothing to her father, so he wants to know why the hell not—well brought up girls tell everything but everything to fathers. Scott has to save his face while indicating to the reader that he’s a prick and mostly wrong anyway, so it’s a silly scene. Like Prospero and Milton’s God, Guy Mannering is hard to take. He says he’ll call off the heavy father act because “Henry Bertram … is a very different person from Vanbeest Brown, the son of nobody at all” [375]. Besides he’s respectable because his ancestors fought their guts out in battles, “while our own fought at Cressy and Poictiers” [375]. Oh, well, daughter-fucking is something you can’t give up without a struggle.

The Dominie nearly throws boiling water over a fainting Lucy—serves her damn well right—and does throw some over a dog—don’t know why. Now they have to establish Bertram’s legitimacy, or something. Pleydell says he sees doubts, the Dominie says “I trust HE, who hath restored little Harry Bertram to his friends, will not leave His own work imperfect” [378]. Walter Scott as executive son of God. Old Hazlewood still balks; two girls take Bertram for a Pisgah view of his estate, and Meg appears, “as if emerging out of the earth, ascended from the hollow way, and stood before them” [383]. As if always points to what’s undisplaced. She’s compared to the fairy bride of Sir Gawain, and now she’s a Buttercup figure. She reminds Julia of stories heard in India about witches with the evil eyes—remember the gypsies came from India. “There was something frightful and unearthly, as it were, in the rapid and undeviating course which she pursued .… Her way was as straight, and nearly as swift, as that of a bird through the air” (385). He’s accompanied (Bertram is) by Dinmont. Something about rejected corner stones (387) and imposing silence. “She paused an instant beneath the tall rock where he had witnessed the burial of a dead body” [387]—second Moses echo. She insists that despite stocks, scourging, brands, banishment and the works, she’s not mad. “I’m stripped too” [388]—she has a red cloak and Sampson calls her whore. To do what she wants to do she has to isolate herself from her people. She says to Bertram he should build up the old walls again for her sake “and let somebody live there that’s ower gude to fear them of another world—for if ever the dead came back amang the living, I’ll be seen in this glen mony a night after these crazed banes are in the mould” [388].

13Notes on Romance (56b) (1974)