1 Letter to Ross Woodman, 31 October 1968. Frye also discusses his objections to the Macpherson Report in an interview with Bruce Reynolds. See CW 24: 358–9.
2 “Incidentally, have you seen a novel called The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov? Bulgakov was a much persecuted writer in Soviet Russia who produced this extraordinary story a year or two before he died. It’s about a man who is writing a book on Pontius Pilate” (Selected Letters, 163).
3 See Wagenknecht, Six Novels. In one of his diaries Frye writes, “I wonder about extra-sensory perception of books—I don’t mean simply the capacity of people hag-ridden by erotic fantasies to open any book at whatever erotic passage it contains. I have had some experiences of having the books I wanted fall out of the shelves at the time I wanted them. Four years ago I bought, on a pure impulse, a Viking Library collection of novels of the supernatural. I regretted the impulse instantly, kicked myself for wasting the money, &, trying to salvage the purchase, dawdled through de la Mare’s Return & Machen’s Terror, also an opening story by Mrs. Oliphant [A Beleaguered City] which actually gave me a calendar idea, though it was more an instance of an idea than the idea itself. Yesterday, for no reason at all, I suddenly pull the book out of the shelves & read Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie, which I’d completely ignored before, & it turns out to be an anima story that may be an opening lead into my romance study” (CW 8: 107–8).
4 Johnston (1870–1936) is not much remembered today, but To Have and to Hold, her second novel, broke existing publishing records: it sold 60,000 advance copies and more than 135,000 copies during its first week, making it the biggest popular success in the eighty-four years between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind. For a thoughtful survey of Johnston’s twenty-three novels see Wagenknecht, “The World and Mary Johnston.”
1 Crashaw’s metaphors for tears in these lines have often been berated.
2 Elsie Venner, one of Holmes’s “medicated novels,” was published in 1861 when he was a professor at Harvard Medical School.
3 Echoes of Spengler are in this and the previous entry. Spengler continues to appear in the entries that follow.
4 George Jeffreys, First Baron Jeffreys of Wem (15 May 1645–18 April 1689), also known as “The Hanging Judge.” He rose to prominence during the reign of King James II.
5 Albrecht Dieterich was the author of the influential Abraxas: Studien zur Religionsgeschichte des spätern Altertums (1891). Frye’s source is unknown. It is highly unlikely that he is translating from Dieterich’s German text. It is more likely that he is quoting the exact same translation by Bertram Lee Woolf in Martin Dibelius’s From Tradition to Gospel.
6 Frye refers to Collins’s book in his letter to Helen Kemp of 15 July 1932.
7 An allusion to T.S. Eliot’s line in Morning at the Window: “I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids,” l. 3.
8 The Grande valse brillante in E-flat major, Op. 18, was composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1833.
9 Hotspur describes this man in Henry IV, Part 1, 1.3.28–68.
10 The Bishop of Rochester in England, known for having created an astonishingly long curse.
11 Above “aristocrat” Frye wrote “snob.”
12 Frye’s variation on the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional: “God of our fathers, known of old— / Lord of our far-flung battle line—.”
13 In 1775 Johnson wrote a letter to Lord Chesterfield after a rift developed between them over the issue of the latter’s support, or rather lack of support, for Johnson’s Dictionary. Johnson claimed that Chesterfield’s patronage was too little and too late.
14 The reference to Themis is perhaps further evidence for a post-1934 dating of the notebook. Frye appears not to have read Jane Ellen Harrison until he was a student at Emmanuel College.
15 In 1945 the lawyer and modernist poet F.R. Scott defended Lady Chatterley’s Lover before the Supreme Court of Canada. In spite of Scott’s efforts, the book was banned in Canada. Frye is doubtless referring to the banning of the book in the United States, which happened in 1929.
16 The allusion is to T.S. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, ll. 21–4: “Under the penitential gates / Sustained by staring Seraphim / Where the souls of the devout/ Burn invisible and dim.”
17 Frye’s question mark.
18 In August 1803 Blake removed John Scofield, a drunk soldier, from his Felpham garden. Scofield later accused Blake of damning the King and claiming that all soldiers were slaves. On the basis of this testimony, Blake was charged with high treason. After he was acquitted, he left Felpham for London.
19 In July of 1877 Ruskin, in his magazine Fors Clavigera, had criticized Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and White, saying that Whistler had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face” and that the price of the painting was exorbitant. Whistler filed suit for libel, asking for £1,000 in damages; he won the case, the jury awarding him a farthing, but was driven into bankruptcy by the legal costs.
20 The merchant in Ben Jonson’s Everyman in His Humour.
21 A leading character in John Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife (1697).
22 The Book of Jubilees 2:7.
23 Frye himself had begun a subscription to Étude in 1924.
24 The “long cross” coins were introduced in England under Henry III. The cross on the verso made it easier to cut the coin into halves and quarters, thus producing halfpennies and farthings.
25 During his student days at Emmanuel College Frye had read Glover’s The Jesus of History, about which he had a rather low opinion, and he had used Glover’s The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire in a student paper he wrote on “St. Paul and Orphism.”
26 Frye is referring to Régis Michaud’s The American Novel Today. The only other reference to Michaud in Frye’s work is in his 1933 review of The Art of the Novel, by his Victoria College mentor, Pelham Edgar.
27 The reference is to Anthony Comstock (7 March 1844–21 September 1915), a U.S. postal inspector and politician who dedicated himself to policing the moral conduct of American citizens.
28 Whether or not Frye is taking the phrase from Thomas Fuller is uncertain. H. Rogers records the phrase in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Fuller (1857).
29 The Three Voices appeared in Carroll’s Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869). Princess Ida is a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera (1884).
30 “An objective, spatial, dynamic art form would naturally be symbolized by a sphere, while a subjective, spatial, static art form would be better represented by a ring. Hence, Browning’s great drama (it has nothing to do with epics), which the Roman gold ring so symbolizes, as the poet expressly tells us [The Ring and the Book, ll. 1–31], presents modern literature with the technique of the modern drama worked out in full. The characters illuminate the subjectively conceived theme like floodlights—that is all they exist for—and a perfect modelled drama would have the complete balance of the ring.” This passage actually comes from Frye’s student essay on Romanticism (CW 3: 80). He doesn’t use the sphere as a symbolic form in his essay on Browning but uses rather a circle and a radiation figure (see CW 3: 106). A separate essay on Browning and drama is not extant.
31 Puff is an author in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Critic; Or, A Tragedy Rehearsed (1779). See act 2, scene 2.
32 In Lord Chesterfield’s well-known letter of advice to his son, he recommends that said son not take up fiddling as it leads to bad company and is a waste of time.
33 “ ‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him’ ” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ch. 7).
34 A 1931 British musical film directed by Victor Saville and starring Renate Müller, Jack Hulbert, and Owen Nares.
35 “Elstree” refers to one of several film studios based in or around the towns of Borehamwood and Elstree in Hertfordshire, England.
36 Characters in The Mikado and Patience, respectively.
37 “There was a moment’s pause. Horror! his path ended in a fathomless abyss. … A rush a flash a crash all was over. Three drops of blood, two teeth, and a stirrup were all that remained to tell where the wild horseman met his doom” (Carroll, “Photography Extraordinary,” 31).
38 Franck’s Chorals were written for the intimate sound of the organ in the Basilica of St. Clothilde, Paris.
39 Above the line here Frye inserted “cannot possibly be all Shakespeare.”
40 The popular engraving that serves as the frontispiece for the First Folio (1622), executed by Martin Droeshout.
41 See entry of 19 March.
42 In this form of the cinquain the lines contain respectively 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 stresses and 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables.
43 The Pathétique sonata.
44 Which of Ernest Bloch’s four string quartets Frye is referring to is uncertain.
45 The reference is to Still’s Shakespeare’s Mystery Play.
46 The reference is to the allegorical garden episode in Richard II, 3.4.
47 Oswald Spengler claimed that cultures were like organisms: they got born, matured, declined, and then died. See Spengler 1: 93–113.
48 See Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies.
49 The title of some early editions of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
50 Titian and Wagner come under Twain’s gaze in A Tramp Abroad.
51 Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley was a New Brunswick politician. He became minister of customs in Sir John A. Macdonald’s first government. With the fall of Macdonald in 1873, Tilley was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick. With Macdonald’s return to office in 1878, Tilley became minister of finance. See Macdonald, Correspondence.
52 A soprano aria by Händel.
53 Above the line here Frye wrote, “ ‘discordant’ as though discord were the opposite of music.”
54 The cenotaph was originally built after World War I to commemorate Torontonians who lost their lives. It also commemorates those who died in World War II and the Korean War. Unveiled on 11 November 1925, it was modelled on the Cenotaph at Whitehall in London, England.
55 As indicated in the introduction, a more developed version of this passage appears in the “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism.
56 The Georgian poets generally, so named because the anthologies of their poetry were edited by J.T. Squire.
57 The reference is to the Fowlers’ The King’s English, where they explain that Slipshod Extension “is especially likely to occur when some accident gives currency among the uneducated to words of learned origin, & the more if they are isolated or have few relatives in the vernacular; examples are protagonist, recrudescence, optimism, meticulous, feasible, dilemma.”
58 Above the line here Frye wrote, “Augustinian—Manichean—ascetic.”
59 In 1609 Philip III of Spain decreed the Expulsion of the Moriscos, the descendants of the Muslim population that converted to Christianity under threat of exile from Ferdinand and Isabella in 1502. From 1609 through 1614, the Spanish government systematically forced Moriscos to leave the kingdom for Muslim North Africa.
60 Here Frye inserts above the line several indecipherable words in minuscule script.
61 Ibid.
62 “What about the malleable sort of people—and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born? What about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it’s the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of—what then? Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?” (Huxley, Point Counter Point, 282). Frye refers to the same passage in a letter to Helen Kemp, 22 May 1935 (CW 1: 443), as well as in his citation “Stanley Llewellyn Osborne” (CW 4: 296).
63 Hamlet, 2.2.564.
64 The Pass Course was a three-year non-specialized program leading to the B.A. degree at Victoria College, as distinguished from the four-year Honour Course.
65 Characters in Dickens’s Hard Times.
66 Frye is referring to Spengler’s thesis that the new Russian culture is “a plane without limit.” Both its architecture and its religion express a “denial of height.” See Spengler 1: 201.
67 Donald Clark Amos, B.A., Victoria College, 1932; B.D., Emmanuel College, 1935.
68 John Stinson, B.A., Victoria College, 1935.
69 John William Witzel, B.A., Victoria College, 1932; B.A., Emmanuel College, 1936.
70 The book by E.K. Broadus was actually titled The Story of English Literature.
71 Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from Horace’s Odes (3.2.13).
72 The references are to chapters 19 and 26 of Erewhon.
1 In the top margin at this point Frye wrote: “Shift of stress to first syllable except in verbs with prefix in Germanic separation from Latin. Cf. love, lover, loveliness, etc. with family, -iliar, -iliarity. Hence accenting of poetry in Old English is trochaic. / Enormous number of synonyms for sea in Beowulf, not a sea-faring people then, but had been when they distinguished them. / Euphemism and alliteration in Wulfstan, especially in Homilies, to enormous extent, especially in descriptions of hell.”
2 In reflecting on what he had said—ecce locusta, “look at the locust”—Gregory determined it was a sign from heaven because the similar sounding loco sta means “stay in place.”
3 This double acrostic serves as the preface to St. Aldhelm’s De Laude Virginitatis, a thirty-eight-line poem which begins with the thirty-eight-letter line “Metrica Tirones nunc promant carmina castos.” The first letters of each of the thirty-eight lines spell out these same words when read vertically, and the last letters of each of the lines spell out the same message when read from bottom to top.
4 In the margin here Frye wrote: “nervous rather metaphysical nature of Saxon MS painting.”
5 In the top margin here Frye wrote: “The paganism of the author of Beowulf is not behind him but ahead of him: he anticipates the medieval spiritualized conquest of pagan life by absorbing it into its own synthesis.”
6 “The Tale of Adrian and Bardus”: book 5 of Gower’s Confessio Amatis.
7 See Warren, Dance of Death.
8 To the right of these lines towards the margin Frye has copied the following lines, which are from a medieval liturgy, In Assumptione: “Luce floret hodierna / Flore iugi ad sapema / Flos devectus et materna / Iura dat in filio.”
9 “Q” is the symbol Frye often uses in his notebooks and other holograph manuscripts to indicate the insertion of a quotation. The passage here from Eliot is uncertain, but it seems likely to be one of two remarks about Browne in his essay “Verse and Prose”: “[I]n the prose of Sir Thomas Browne only a commonplace sententiousness is decorated by reverberating language”; “There is more essential poetry in Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, even in translation, than in the whole of Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater” (Rainey, Annotated “Waste Land,” 162, 163). “Verse and Prose” was originally published in Chapbook 22 (April 1921): 3–10.
1 Colonel Blimp was a British cartoon character who satirized the reactionary views of the British establishment.
1 This paragraph, which Frye picks up in entries 5 and 6, has been cancelled. Other paragraphs that have been cancelled are preceded by an asterisk.
2 “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality,” wrote Eliot in Burnt Norton, pt. 1, ll. 44–5.
3 “Dissociation of sensibility” was Eliot’s term for what he saw as the separation of intellect from feeling in seventeenth-century poetry. It comes from his essay “The Metaphysical Poets.”
4 See Sinclair, who had written a highly sympathetic review of Prufrock and Other Observations.
5 “This passage I find very obscure, but it may be the fact that I cannot identify, under the disguise of this metaphor, any experience of my own, that makes me suspect that ‘cleaning up the verbal situation’ is, in plain English, eyewash” (Eliot, “Introduction” xxi–xxii).
6 “But let criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper soon after reading Roebuck:—‘A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.’ Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Adderley and Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! ‘Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!’—how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has anyone reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,—how dismal those who have seen them will remember;—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! ‘I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?’ Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch,—short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or, shall I say? the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed!” (Arnold, “Function,” 389–90).
7 Frye apparently means either Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) or F.R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932).
8 Books and articles that Frye wants to look into in preparation for writing his book on Eliot: F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (1958); George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot (1953); Williamson had written an earlier study, The Talent of T.S. Eliot (1935), and Frye apparently assumes, because that book had appeared eighteen years earlier, it was written by a different Williamson; Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949); Leonard Unger, ed., T.S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (1949); Hugh Kenner, T.S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet (1959); Philip Wheelwright, “Pilgrim in the Wasteland,” in The Burning Fountain (1954); Reid MacCallum, “Time Lost and Regained: The Theme of Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets,’ ” in Imitation and Design and Other Essays, ed. William Blissett (1953); Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot (1964); Roy Daniells, “T.S. Eliot and His Relation to T.E. Hulme,” University of Toronto Quarterly 2, no. 3 (April 1933): 380–96; William Blissett, “Pater and Eliot,” University of Toronto Quarterly 22 (1953): 261–8; Friedrich W. Strothmann and Lawrence V. Ryan, “Hope for T.S. Eliot’s ‘Empty Men,’ ” PMLA 73 (1958): 426–32; Anne C. Bolgan, “Mr. Eliot’s Philosophical Writings, or ‘What the Thunder Said,’ ” a University of Toronto Ph.D. dissertation (1960), written under Frye’s supervision; Elizabeth Drew, T.S. Eliot: The Design in His Poetry (1949).
9 This is perhaps the echo passage Frye has in mind: “Word is unspoken, unheard; / Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, / The Word without a word, the Word within / The world and for the world” (pt. 5, ll. 3–6). There are other candidates.
10 This is perhaps a reference to one of the forms of the lyric that Frye arranges in a circle, like the dial of a clock, in essay four of Anatomy of Criticism.
11 See the concluding lines to part 3 of The Dry Salvages.
12 “(The lengthened shadow of a man / Is history, said Emerson / Who had not seen the silhouette / Of Sweeney straddled in the sun)” (Sweeney Erect, ll. 29–32).
13 In a famous passage from his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” T.E. Hulme characterized Romanticism as “spilt religion.”
14 A character from “Fragment of a Prologue” in Sweeney Agonistes, Wauchope was a former soldier from the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
15 The concluding lines of Sweeney Agonistes:
“Specially when you got a real live Britisher
A guy like Sam to show you around.
Sam of course is at home in London,
And he’s promised to show us around.”
16 “[I]t would appear to be for the better that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born” (Notes towards the Definition of Culture, 1948, in Christianity and Culture [New York: Houghton, 1960], 125).
17 Frye has a somewhat different diagram of the twelve phases on the following page.
18 Compare this and the following two entries with a passage from Frye’s “The Imaginative and the Imaginary”:
Spenser had a disciple in the next generation, Phineas Fletcher, who produced a long didactic poem called The Purple Island (i.e., the body of man, traditionally formed of red clay). Half of it consists of an expansion of Spenser’s House of Alma, an exhaustive survey of anatomy under the allegory of a building. Fletcher finds the same three divisions in the brain that Spenser found: he seems in fact to be merely cribbing from Spenser, but when he comes to Phantastes he makes a significant change:
The next that in the Castles front is plac’t,
Phantastes hight; his yeares are fresh and green,
His visage old, his face too much defac’t
With ashes pale, his eyes deep sunken been
With often thoughts, and never slackt intention:
Yet he the fount of speedy apprehension,
Father of wit, the well of arts, and quick invention.
Here, we see, Phantastes is the source of the arts, and of the creative aspect of the mind generally. The change may be sheer inadvertence, or it may mean that an actual change of emphasis is beginning to make itself felt on the level of informed but unspecialized opinion represented by such a poem. If so, it was not for another century that the change becomes generally perceptible. (CW 21: 428–9)
19 “I have been reading Wells’ Kipps, unable to shake off the feeling that Wells in spite of all his perfect accuracy doesn’t quite bring his characters to life, and Dickens, though he’d bungle and hack up & have Kipps doing all sorts of incongruous & untrue things, somehow would. I don’t like ‘somehow,’ or reflections about the mysterious transmutations of the alchemy of genius (75%) as distinct from high talent (a 74 that the Revising Committee refuses to raise). I think it may be something in the unvarying accuracy, in which every aitch is conscientiously dropped, something in the complete objectivity of presentation. Part of Dickens’ faults as a novelist are virtues of a creator of character: occasionally he sees a character from the character’s own point of view. This shocks the reader, but with a little sympathy he can see its kind of truth. Dickens would have Kipps burst into articulate torrents of eloquence, threaten suicide & never think of ‘self-pity,’ make him frequently Byronic & even intellectual, in all of which he would be wrong as a novelist, yet, in letting Kipps do once in a while what he wanted to do, he gives the reader a glimpse of different mental planes. Shakespeare goes all out for every character, & so gets the objective pattern in reverse, with all its positive virtues intact” (CW 25: 115–16).
20 Written above “Emily Dickinson” in pencil is “Jane Austen.”
21 Frye did comment on forms of vision and on the Frankenstein myth in his Romanticism paper. See “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” CW 17: 75–92.
22 The allusion is to the final line of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, where he calls poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the World.”
23 The reference apparently is to Frye’s story “Interpreter’s Parlour” (CW 25: 84–6).
24 That is, the lecture that became chapter 3 of The Well-Tempered Critic.
25 “Hawthorne’s inhibitions seem to be at least in part self-imposed, as we can see if we turn to Poe’s Ligeia, where the straight mythical death and revival pattern is given without apology. Poe is clearly a more radical abstractionist than Hawthorne, which is one reason why his influence on our century is more immediate” (CW 22: 128).
1 “Introduction.” Design for Learning: Reports Submitted to the Joint Committee of the Toronto Board of Education and the University of Toronto, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), 3–17. Rpt. in On Education, 46–61, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, CW 7: 127–42.
2 Frye gave the Inglis Lecture at Harvard on 18 April 1972. It was published as “The Developing Imagination,” Learning in Language and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1963), 31–58; rpt. in Reading the World, 80–98, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, CW 7: 143–59.
3 In April 1962 Frye presented a paper on Blake, “The Road of Excess,” at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Central Renaissance Conference, University of Nebraska. It was published under that title in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963), 3–20; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 160–74, and in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, CW 16: 316–29.
4 Frye lectured at the University of Rochester in 1962 where he presented a version of his paper “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts,” first published in The Hidden Harmony: Essays in Honor of Philip Wheelwright, ed. Oliver Johnson et al. (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 13–22.
5 In May 1962 Frye gave an address, “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” at the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, which met in Toronto. It was published as “Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” American Journal of Psychiatry 119 (October 1962): 289–98; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 151–67, and in “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963, CW 21: 420–35.
6 This refers to Frye’s paper “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” which he gave at a conference on Romanticism he chaired at the English Institute. It was published under that title in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), 1–25; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 200–17, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 75–91.
7 Frye gave the first of six Massey lectures at McMaster University on 9 November 1962.
8 In February 1962 Frye gave a talk on “The Two Worlds of Art and Science” at Ryerson Collegiate Institute.
9 In 1962 Frye received an honorary D.Litt. degree from Mount Allison University.
10 On 18 May 1962 Frye gave an address to the graduating class at Queen’s University, at a convocation at which he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
11 The manuscript for this talk, if there was one, is not extant, and no published version has been found.
12 See n. 5, above.
13 See n. 3, above.
14 See n. 6, above.
15 “Introduction,” Design for Learning: Reports Submitted to the Joint Committee of the Toronto Board of Education and the University of Toronto, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962), 3–17; CW 7: 127–42.
16 The sequel to the Anatomy—the “Third Book”—was never realized, at least as a single book.
17 This lecture is not extant. It may have been the lecture Frye gave on Blake during the fall of 1957 at the Thomas More Institute.
18 Beginning here, the numbers following some of the entries refer to one or more of the six Massey Lectures.
19 Frye did use it. See The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 445–6.
20 “Man has always wanted to fly, and thousands of years ago he was making sculptures of winged bulls and telling stories about people who flew so high on artificial wings that the sun melted them off. In an Indian play fifteen hundred years old, Sakuntala, there’s a god who flies around in a chariot that to a modern reader sounds very much like a private airplane. Interesting that the writer had so much imagination, but do we need such stories now that we have private airplanes?” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 443).
21 “All around you is a highly artificial society, but you don’t think of it as artificial: you’re so accustomed to it that you think of it as natural. But suppose your imagination plays a little trick on you of a kind that it often does play, and you suddenly feel like a complete outsider, someone who’s just blown in from Mars on a flying saucer. Instantly you see how conventionalized everything is: the clothes, the shop windows, the movement of the cars in traffic, the cropped hair and shaved faces of the men, the red lips and blue eyelids that women put on because they want to conventionalize their faces, or ‘look nice,’ as they say, which means the same thing. All this convention is pressing towards uniformity or likeness. To be outside the convention makes a person look queer, or, if he’s driving a car, a menace to life and limb. The only exceptions are people who have decided to conform to different conventions, like nuns or beatniks. There’s clearly a strong force making toward conformity in society, so strong that it seems to have something to do with the stability of society itself. In ordinary life even the most splendid things we can think of, like goodness and truth and beauty, all mean essentially what we’re accustomed to. As I hinted just now in speaking of female make-up, most of our ideas of beauty are pure convention, and even truth has been defined as whatever doesn’t disturb the pattern of what we already know” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 465–6.)
22 “We think of things as up or down, for example, so habitually that we often forget they’re just metaphors. Religious language is so full of metaphors of ascent, like ‘lift up your hearts,’ and so full of traditional associations with the sky, that Mr. Krushchev still thinks he’s made quite a point when he tells us that his astronauts can’t find any trace of God in outer space. If we’re being realistic instead of religious, we prefer to descend, to get ‘down’ to the facts (or to ‘brass tacks,’ which is rhyming slang for the same thing). We speak of a subconscious mind which we assume is underneath the conscious mind, although so far as I know it’s only a spatial metaphor that puts it there. We line up arguments facing each other like football teams: on the one hand there’s this and on the other hand there’s that” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 482).
23 “What is true of the relation of literature to history is also true of the relation of literature to thought. I said in my first talk that literature, being one of the arts, is concerned with the home and not the environment of man: it lives in a simple, man-centred world and describes the nature around it in the kind of associative language that relates it to human concerns. We notice that this man-centred perspective is in ordinary speech as well: in ordinary speech we are all bad poets” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 482).
24 “The essential thing is the power of choice. In wartime this power of choice is greatly curtailed, and we resign ourselves to living by half-truths for the duration. In a totalitarian state the competition in propaganda largely disappears, and consequently the power of imaginative choice is sealed off. In our hatred and fear of war and of totalitarian government, one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 490).
25 “Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time. So it’s natural to swing to the opposite extreme and say that literature is really a refuge or escape from life, a self-contained world like the world of the dream, a world of play or make-believe to balance the world of work” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 470).
26 “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23 (June 1956): 144–52; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 130–7, and in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, CW 17: 7–15.
27 On censorship, see The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 469.
28 Apparently a reference to the lecture Frye gave at the University of Rochester in 1962, an early version of “Design as a Structural Principle in the Arts.”
29 On pastoral myths, see The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 489.
30 “The author of a recent book on Blake, Hazard Adams, says he gave this poem to a class of sixty students and asked them to explain what it meant. Fifty-nine of them turned the poem into an allegory; the sixtieth was a student of horticulture who thought Blake was talking about plant disease” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 462).
31 A reference apparently to Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.
32 That is, the February 1962 lecture at Ryerson Collegiate Institute.
33 “In an Indian play fifteen hundred years old, Sakuntala, there’s a god who flies around in a chariot that to a modern reader sounds very much like a private airplane. Interesting that the writer had so much imagination, but do we need such stories now that we have private airplanes?” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 443).
34 On Peacock, see The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 443–4.
35 “No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams” (William Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 1, 395–400).
36 “But suppose your imagination plays a little trick on you of a kind that it often does play, and you suddenly feel like a complete outsider, someone who’s just blown in from Mars on a flying saucer. Instantly you see how conventionalized everything is: the clothes, the shop windows, the movement of the cars in traffic, the cropped hair and shaved faces of the men, the red lips and blue eyelids that women put on because they want to conventionalize their faces, or ‘look nice,’ as they say, which means the same thing. All this convention is pressing towards uniformity or likeness” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 465–6).
37 “The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way. That’s why it’s important for Canadians to pay particular attention to Canadian literature, even when the imported brands are better seasoned. I often think of a passage in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’ The Gettysburg address is a great poem, and poets have been saying ever since Homer’s time that they were just following after the great deeds of the heroes, and that it was the deeds which were important and not what they said about them. So it was right, in a way, that is, it was traditional, and tradition is very important in literature, for Lincoln to say what he did. And yet it isn’t really true. Nobody can remember the names and dates of battles unless they make some appeal to the imagination: that is, unless there is some literary reason for doing so. Everything that happens in time vanishes in time: it’s only the imagination that, like Proust, whom I quoted earlier, can see men as ‘giants in time’ ” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 482).
38 “Here was Gibbon, sitting on the steps of the capitol hill in Rome—a comfortable little eighteenth century agnostic suddenly being picked up by some mysterious force that he never turned around to look at and stuck in a library to scribble frantically for the rest of his life about the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Well, the operation confronted him with a vast, amorphous pile of documents. But he had the magic wand: he had the myth of ‘decline and fall.’ That was the principle on which he selected his material. That was the magic wand by which he could make this vast mass of documents obey his will. Without the myth the book would have been entirely shapeless and, of course, would never have been written at all. So whether a story is factual or regarded as such or not has no effect on its possession of myth. That is what it must have, regardless of anything else” (“Reconsidering Levels of Meaning,” CW 25: 320).
39 “But the poem [Blake’s The Sick Rose] is not really an allegory, and so you can’t feel that any explanation is adequate: its eloquence and power and magic get away from all explanations. And if it’s not allegorical it’s not allusive either. You can think of Eve in the garden of Eden, standing naked among the flowers—herself a fairer flower, as Milton says—and being taught by the serpent that her nakedness, and the love that went with it, ought to be something dark and secret. This allusion, perhaps, does help you to understand the poem better, because it leads you toward the centre of Western literary imagination, and introduces you to the family of things Blake is dealing with. But the poem doesn’t depend on the Bible, even though it would never have been written without the Bible. The student of horticulture got one thing right: he saw that Blake meant what he said when he talked about roses and worms, and not something else. To understand Blake’s poem, then, you simply have to accept a world which is totally symbolic: a world in which roses and worms are so completely surrounded and possessed by the human mind that whatever goes on between them is identical with something going on in human life” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 462–3).
40 “A more common way of indicating that an image is literary is by allusion to something else in literature. Literature tends to be very allusive, and the central things in literature, the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible, Shakespeare and Milton, are echoed over and over again. To take a simple example: many of you will know G.K. Chesterton’s poem on the donkey, which describes how ungainly and ridiculous a beast he is, but that he doesn’t care because, as the poem concludes:
I also had my hour,
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 459)
41 See Jastrow, Story of Human Error.
42 “So, you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 464).
43 “In ordinary life, as in literature, the way you say things can be just as important as what’s said. The words you use are like the clothes you wear. Situations, like bodies, are supposed to be decently covered. You may have some social job to do that involves words, such as making a speech or preaching a sermon or teaching a lesson or presenting a case to a judge or writing an obituary on a dead skinflint or reporting a murder trial or greeting visitors in a public building or writing copy for an ad. In none of these cases is it your job to tell the naked truth: we realize that even in the truth there are certain things we can say and certain things we can’t say” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 485).
44 Aria 5 of Bach’s Hunting Cantata (“Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd”).
45 “I think of sheep because I’ve just heard, on the radio, someone singing an aria from a Bach cantata, which begins: ‘Sheep may safely graze where a good shepherd is watching.’ This was on a programme of religious music, so I suppose somebody must have assumed that the sheep meant Christians and the good shepherd Christ. They easily could have meant that, although by an accident this particular cantata happens to be a secular one, written in honour of the birthday of some German princeling, so the good shepherd is really the prince and the sheep are his taxpayers. But the sheep are allegorical sheep whether the allegory is political or religious, and if they’re allegorical they’re literary” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 458).
46 The titles for the six Massey Lectures that Frye finally settled on were: “The Motive for Metaphor” (phrase from title of a Wallace Stevens poem); “The Singing School” (phrase from Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium); “Giants in Time” (phrase from the last sentence of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu); “Keys to Dreamland” (phrase from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake); “Verticals of Adam” (phrase from Dylan Thomas’s “Altarwise by Owl-light”); and “The Vocation of Eloquence” (phrase from St. John Perse’s Anabase). “Strange Angels,” a lecture title that Frye did not use, is perhaps a reference to the last lines of D.H. Lawrence’s Song of a Man Who Has Come Through: “What is the knocking? / What is the knocking at the door in the night? / It is somebody wants to do us harm. / No, no, it is the three strange angels. / Admit them, admit them.” “Heart of Light” is a phrase from Eliot’s The Waste Land, pt. 1, l. 41, and from Burnt Norton, pt. 1, l. 37.
47 See n. 46.
48 For this and the next entry, see n. 46.
49 “Even the details of literature are equally perverse. Literature is a world where phoenixes and unicorns are quite as important as horses and dogs—and in literature some of the horses talk, like the ones in Gulliver’s Travels. A random example is calling Shakespeare the ‘swan of Avon’—he was called that by Ben Jonson. The town of Stratford, Ontario, keeps swans in its river partly as a literary allusion” (The Educated Imagination, CW 21: 466–7).
50 Frye used a version of this chart in his essay on Yeats’s A Vision. See “The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Spiritus Mundi, 245–74; rpt. in Northrop Frye on Twentieth Century Literature, CW 29: 252–77.
51 A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (1965).
52 This is the sentence Frye anticipates using in his essay on Yeats’s A Vision. He opened his essay in another way.
53 “Many of Yeats’s examples are writers who, like Whitman at phase 6, have made their lives conform to literary patterns, or who, like Shakespeare at phase 20, are described by the kind of poetry they produced and not personally. The primitives of phases 2 to 7 are much easier to understand as archetypes of pastoral or Romantic conventions in literature; Dostoevsky’s Idiot is the only example given of phase 8; and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra fits better into the ‘Forerunner’ position of phase 12 than Nietzsche himself. Phase 15 would then become intelligible as the phase of the poet’s ideal or male Muse: the Eros of Dante and Chaucer, the ‘Ille’ of Ego Dominus Tuus, the beautiful youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the like. The high antithetical phases would be much more clearly represented by characters in Shakespeare or Irish legend, and the high primary ones by characters in Balzac and Browning, than they are by Galsworthy or Lamarck or ‘a certain actress’ ” (“The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, CW 29: 269).
54 “Yeats’s own interpretation of the Axël passage is indicated in ‘The Tables of the Law’: ‘certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and … these have no father but the Holy Spirit’ ” (“The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, CW 29: 277).
55 What Frye is referring to is Madame Blavatsky’s cosmic view that our world is attached to another one, which she sees as the shape of a dumb-bell or hourglass, the stem of the two figures symbolically connecting the worlds of Generation and Beulah—an image Frye picked up from reading Yeats’s Trembling of the Veil.
56 “In this perspective the whole cycle of nature, of life and death and rebirth which man has dreamed, becomes a single gigantic image, and the process of redemption is to be finally understood as an identification with Man and a detachment from the cyclical image he has created. This ultimate insight in Yeats is the one expressed in his many references (one of which forms the last sentence of A Vision) to a passage in the Odyssey where Heracles, seen by Odysseus in hell, is said to be present in hell only in his shade, the real Heracles, the man in contrast to the image, being at the banquet of the immortal gods” (“The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, CW 29: 277).
1 “The Archetypes of Literature,” Kenyon Review 13 (Winter 1951): 92–110. Incorporated into Anatomy of Criticism, Second Essay; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 7–20 and in CW 21: 120–35.
2 “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” Dædalus 90 (Summer 1961): 587–605; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 21–38 and in CW 21: 401–19.
3 Presented as a paper at Cornell University, April 1958; published as “Nature and Homer,” Texas Quarterly 1 (Summer–Autumn 1958): 192–204; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 39–51, and in CW 21: 254–66.
4 Presented as a paper at Harvard University, April 1960; published as “New Directions from Old,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York: George Braziller, 1960; Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 115–31; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 52–66, and in CW 21: 307–21.
5 “The Structure of Imagery in the Faerie Queene,” University of Toronto Quarterly 30 (January 1961): 109–27; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 69–87, and in CW 28: 53–72.
6 “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature 23 (1959): 44–55; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 119–26, and in CW 16: 24–34.
7 “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23 (June 1956): 144–52; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 130–7, and in CW 17: 7–15.
8 “Blake after Two Centuries,” University of Toronto Quarterly 27 (October 1957): 10–27; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 138–50, and in CW 16: 290–302.
9 “Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” American Journal of Psychiatry 119 (October 1962): 289–98; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 151–67, and in CW 21: 420–35.
10 “What I say in this connection will be familiar enough to you, but I need to establish some common ground between an association of psychiatrists and a literary critic” (CW 21: 420).
11 “George Gordon, Lord Byron,” in Major British Writers, vol. 2, enlarged ed., gen. ed., G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), 149–234; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 168–89, and in CW 17: 50–71.
12 “Emily Dickinson,” in Major Writers of America, vol. 2, gen. ed., Perry Miller (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 3–46; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 193–217, and in CW 17: 245–70.
13 “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 17 (October 1947): 1–17; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 218–37, and in CW 29: 54–73.
14 “How True a Twain,” in The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Edward Huber (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Basic Books, 1962), 25–53; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 88–106, and in CW 28: 95–113.
15 “The Realistic Oriole: A Study of Wallace Stevens,” Hudson Review 10 (Autumn 1957): 353–70; rpt. in Fables of Identity, 238–55, and in CW 29: 129–46.
16 “curved dominions never found in fables”; “Hail of identity” (ll. 7, 38). See Collected Poems of E.J. Pratt, 2nd ed., ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), 346.
1 Frye became principal of Victoria College in 1959, a post he held until 1967.
2 The Ontario education system had five years of secondary education, the final one known as Grade XIII, from 1921 to 1984.
1 See Snow, Two Cultures.
1 The three essays are: (1) “The Instruments of Mental Production,” given at the University of Chicago’s seventy-fifth anniversary liberal arts conference on the topic “What knowledge is most worth having?” 1 February 1966; published in Chicago Review 18, nos. 3–4 (1966): 30–46; rpt. in The Knowledge Most Worth Having, ed. Wayne C. Booth (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967), 59–83, in The Stubborn Structure, 3–21, and in CW 7: 261–78. (2) “The Knowledge of Good and Evil,” given at the inauguration of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, 27 October 1966; published in The Morality of Scholarship, ed. Max Black (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1967), 1–28; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 22–37, and in CW 7: 281–96. (3) “Speculation and Concern,” presented as a lecture at a conference titled “The Humanities and the Quest for Truth” at the University of Kentucky, 22–3 October 1965; published in The Humanities and the Understanding of Reality, ed. Thomas B. Stroup (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1966), 32–54; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 38–55, and in CW 7: 242–58.
2 “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts,” in The Hidden Harmony: Essays in Honor of Philip Wheelwright, ed. Oliver Johnson et al. (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 13–22; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 56–65, and in CW 27: 228–37.
3 I deeply regret having to say now the late Philip Wheelwright. [NF]
4 “On Value Judgments,” Contemporary Literature 9 (Summer 1968): 311–18; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 66–73, and in CW 27: 258–65.
5 “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” was given at a conference at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut—“Sequence and Change in the College Curriculum: Northrop Frye’s Critical Methods,” April 1964; published in College English 26 (October 1964): 3–12; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 74–89, and in CW 27: 147–61.
6 “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” was presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 29 December 1963; published in PMLA 79 (May 1964): 11–18; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 90–105, and in CW 7: 192–206.
7 “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Dædalus 94 (Spring 1965): 323–47; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 109–34, and in CW 27: 191–214.
8 “The Revelation to Eve,” in Paradise Lost: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1969), 18–47; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 135–59; and in CW 16: 134–55.
9 “The Road of Excess,” presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association and the Central Renaissance Conference, University of Nebraska, April 1962; published in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963), 3–20; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 160–74, and in CW 16: 316–29.
10 “The Keys to the Gates,” in Some British Romantics: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye et al. ([Columbus]: Ohio State UP, 1966), 3–40; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 175–99, and in CW 16: 337–59.
11 “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” in Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), 1–25; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 200–17, and in CW 17: 75–91.
12 “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” presented at the English Institute, September 1967; published in Experience in the Novel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia UP, 1968), 49–81; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 218–40, and in CW 17: 287–308.
13 “Old and New Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 1–5. Incorporated into part 1 of “Romance as Masque,” in Spiritus Mundi, 148–56, which is rpt. in CW 27: 285–92.
14 “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century,” in Literary Views: Critical and Historical Essays, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964), 145–58; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 241–56, and in CW 17: 271–86.
15 “The Top of the Tower: A Study of the Imagery of Yeats,” presented at the Sligo (Ireland) conference on Yeats, 12 August 1968; published in Southern Review 5 (Summer 1969): 850–71; rpt. in The Stubborn Structure, 255–77, and in CW 29: 283–303.
16 The study of image-clusters was to be one of the features of the book that Frye planned to write following Anatomy of Criticism and that he laboured over with a great deal of intensity—the “Third Book.” For the full story of this unfulfilled project, see Michael Dolzani’s edition of The “Third Book” Notebooks (CW 9).
17 “Conclusion,” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., 3 vols., ed. Carl Klinck (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976), 3: 318–32; rpt. in Divisions on a Ground, 71–80, and as “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada,” in CW 12: 448–65.
1 Telephone conversation with Jane Widdicombe, 5 January 1993.
2 A Gnostic text embedded in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas; also known as The Hymn of the Pearl.
3 A link to the scenes on Keats’s Grecian urn, with all of its piping and other revelry.
4 In the Cherry Tree Ballad, a Christmas carol, the infant Jesus commands the tree to yield its fruits to Mary.
5 Father of Nausicaa and King of the Phaeacians who welcomes Odysseus after he is shipwrecked on their shore.
6 Frye says nothing more in these notes about The Wise Woman.
7 “Three phases in Daphnis and Chloe: first, the exposed infant and the talismans of recognition. These are laid out as burial ornaments, as the child isn’t expected to live. Cf. the frankincense and myrrh in the birth of Christ. Second, the pre-sexual love of hero and heroine. Fear of incest hangs about this because of uncertain parentage and such. Third, the world of experience, symbolized by pirates and the like, though they don’t come to anything. Daphnis and Chloe can’t fuck until their parentage is established, and Chariclea in Ethiopica says explicitly she won’t until she knows who the hell she is. Virginity as something magical: Tempest, Comus, etc.; Marina in brothel. It has two aspects: deliberate lifelong virginity and virginity preceding a marriage that can’t take place until the anxiety of continuity has been looked after” (CW 15: 197–8). See also the final paragraph of the next entry, notes on Hadas’s Three Greek Romances.
8 “But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians” (Acts 19:34).
9 “So Silla was now constrained perforce her will to yield to love, wherefore from time to time she used so great familiarity with him, as her honour might well permit, and fed him with such amorous baits as the modesty of a maid could reasonably afford; which when she perceived did take but small effect, feeling herself outraged with the extremity of her passion, by the only countenance that she bestowed upon Apolonius, it might have been well perceived that the very eyes pleaded unto him for pity and remorse. But Apolonius, coming but lately from out the field from the chasing of his enemies, and his fury not yet thoroughly dissolved, nor purged from his stomach, gave no regard to those amorous enticements, which, by reason of his youth, he had not been acquainted withal” (126–7).
10 Shakespeare changes the name of the lovestruck shepherd in Lodge’s Rosalind from “Montanus” to “Silvius.”
11 See n. 7, above.
12 The underlying reference here is to the similarities and differences between As You Like It and Rosalind, which was the source of Shakespeare’s play. Thus, the “usurping duke” is Duke Frederick, the brother of Duke Senior in As You Like It. The parallel character in Lodge’s Rosalind is the King of France.
13 The reference apparently is to Rosamond (also Rosamund) Clifford, a woman of exceptional beauty who became the mistress of Henry II. In order to keep her hidden from Queen Eleanor, the king placed her in a palace at Woodstock that was surrounded by a labyrinth.
14 The links here are between Rosalind and As You Like It.
15 “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale,” in Fables of Identity, CW 28: 115.
16 “But, when a lady descends to marry a groom, is not the groom her head, being her husband? And does not the difference strike you? For what lady of quality ought to respect another, who has made so sordid a choice, and set a groom above her? For, would that not be to put the groom upon a par with themselves?” (Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 447).
17 “Pandosto, calling to mind how first he betrayed his friend Egistus, how his jealousy was the cause of Bellaria’s death, that contrary to the law of nature he had lusted after his own daughter, moved with these desperate thoughts, he fell into a melancholy fit, and, to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem, he slew himself; whose death being many days bewailed of Fawnia, Dorastus, and his dear friend Egistus, Dorastus, taking his leave of his father, went with his wife and the dead corpse into Bohemia, where, after they were sumptuously entombed, Dorastus ended his days in contented quiet” (85).
18 Frye is referring to ll. 77 ff. of the “Introduction,” not the “Prologue,” to The Man of Law’s Tale.
19 Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1904). Freckles, who had lost a hand, was a plucky waif who guarded the Limberlost timber leases and dreamed of angels.
20 Emaré is a Middle English lay that preserves one version of the Constance saga. There are more than sixty versions of the tale.
21 That is, the tale of Constance in Nicholas Trivet’s Anglo-Norman Chronicle.
22 We learn of Thisbe’s death in book 2.
23 At this point, Frye turns to Lamb’s translation.
24 A reference apparently to the quotation, not in the second, but in the third of Frye’s Norton lectures, “Our Lady of Pain”: “I may be sure by Theagenes’ oath, that he shall not fleshly have to do with me, until I have recovered my country, and parents, or if the gods be not content herewith, at least until I by mine own free will be content he shall marry me. Otherwise never” (CW 18: 49).
25 John Ford, ’Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1633).
26 B.E. Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary-Historical Account of their Origins (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967).
27 That is, Laurence Twine, The Pattern of Painful Adventures (ca. 1594), a prose romance based on a story in the Gesta Romanorum.
28 Horace Meyer Kallen, The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1918).
29 The reference is to Harold Bloom’s theory that the initiating force behind all strong poetry is misprision or misreading. The pastoral, Frye speculates, may be a misreading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
30 DeWitt was a professor of Latin at Victoria College when Frye was an undergraduate.
31 An apparent reference to Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1966).
32 It occurs in the Second Period, First Narrative, ch. 8, and in the Third Narrative, chs. 5 and 8.
33 That is, from Plautus’s play Rudens (The Rope), the archetype of the girl reunited with her father after having been stolen by pirates.
34 Just before meeting Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking-Glass, Alice comes upon a “wood of no names,” where she realizes that she doesn’t know the name of anything around her, and she doesn’t even remember her own name.
35 Horkos: the spirit of oaths, who inflicted punishment upon perjurers.
36 “Most of us feel that there is something else in Dickens, something elemental, yet unconnected with either realistic clarity or philosophical profundity. What it is connected with is a kind of story that fully gratifies the hope expressed, according to Lewis Carroll, by the original of Alice, that ‘there will be nonsense in it.’ The silliest character in Nicholas Nickleby is the hero’s mother, a romancer who keeps dreaming of impossible happy endings for her children. But the story itself follows her specifications and not those of the sensible people. The obstructing humours in Dickens are absurd because they have overdesigned their lives. But the kind of design that they parody is produced by another kind of energy, and one which insists, absurdly and yet irresistibly, that what is must never take final precedence over what ought to be” (“Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” CW 17: 308).
37 The Three Cuckolds, Anonymous, 79–144.
38 “When I wish for some general idea which will describe the Great Wheel as an individual life I go to the Commedia dell’Arte or improvised drama of Italy” (Yeats, A Vision, 83–4).
39 “The Werewolf” in Hope Arnott Lee and Alvin A. Lee, ed., Wish and Nightmare (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 78–81. Frye was general editor of the thirteen-volume set of textbook anthologies of which this was volume 1. The Lees got the story from French Legends, Tales & Fairy Stories, retold by Barbara Leonie Picard (New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1955).
40 See The Secular Scripture, CW 18: 96.
41 George Polti quotes Goethe as saying, “Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller took great pains to find more, but he was unable to find even so many as Gozzi” (Polti, Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, 7).
42 In As You Like It, Touchstone remarks to Audrey that “honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar” (3.3.31).
43 “They rowed her in across the rolling foam, / The cruel crawling foam, / The cruel hungry foam, / To her grave beside the sea” (Charles Kingsley, The Sands of Dee, ll. 19–21).
44 Green Mantle, the beautiful young woman with whom both Alan and Darsie fall in love.
45 That is, the story of Blondel the Minstrel and King Richard the Lionheart.
46 “‘Tis weakness, / Too much to think what should have been done” (5.2.339–40).
47 The reference is to Frye’s brief study of Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross in Notebook 41, published in CW 15: 87–9.
48 Violence and fraud.
49 “No white nor red was ever seen / So amorous as this lovely green” (ll. 17–18).
50 That is, the archetype of the Battle of Bosworth Field, the penultimate battle in the War of the Roses.
51 Frye’s comment on the problem he is having with his electric typewriter.
52 Sten Bodvar Liljegren and William Empson.
53 An apparent reference to Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet El Desdichado.
54 An apparent reference to Alfred Lord Tennyson.
55 The reference is to Margaret Alice Murray, The God of the Witches (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960).
56 If Frye had checked, according to Michael Dolzani, he “would have found that the Te igitur is one of the service-books of the Catholic Church, so called from the first words of the canon, ‘Te igitur, clementissime Pater’ ” (“Therefore, most merciful Father”) (CW 15: 430).
57 “In Scott’s Anne of Geierstein the heroine engages in a certain amount of moonlight flitting, and it is suggested that she is descended from a fairy or elemental spirit, and has acquired by this heredity the ability to transport herself through space without the usual physical movements. A long inset tale is told about her grandmother to lend emotional weight to this suggestion; but eventually everything she does is explained on more or less plausible grounds. The implication in such a device is that fairy tales are for children: the mature reader will want and expect a more matter-of-fact account. The fantasy here is introduced because the action of Anne of Geierstein takes place in the fifteenth century, and such fantasy illustrates the kind of superstitions that people at that time had. However, the real effect of the device is to put the undisplaced and displaced versions of the same event side by side. Its significance, then, is not in any child-and-adult value judgment about beliefs, but in the fact that undisplaced versions present the narrative structure more abstractly, just as a cubist or primitive painting would present the geometrical forms of its images more directly than straight representation would do” (CW 18: 29).
58 The reference is to the word “los.” Earlier, Oxford has said, “Is there not immortal los and honour—the trumpet of fame to proclaim the sovereign, who, alone in a degenerate age, has united the duties of a generous knight with those of a princely sovereign?” (356).
59 “Unifable” is a term Frye uses throughout his notebooks—though not in The Secular Scripture—to refer to the basic underlying structure of all romance, or perhaps even all narrative. It is similar to what Joseph Campbell calls the “monomyth,” a term Frye does use elsewhere with some frequency.
60 The reference is to Hiawatha’s painting on birch bark a series of symbolic and mystic images: the egg of the Great Spirit, the serpent of the Spirit of Evil, the circle of life and death, the straight line of the earth, and other ancestral totems in the great chain of being. Frye elaborates his Great Doodle in a similar way, the Hiawathan “shapes and figures” becoming for him points of epiphany at the circumference of the circle—what he twice refers to as beads on a string (CW 9: 241, 245). The beads are various topoi and loci along the circumferential string. They can be seen as stations where the questing hero stops in his journey or as the cardinal points of a circle.
61 In one of the advertisements for White Rock sparkling water in the 1940s, a half-nude nymph is kneeling on the White Rock and peering into the water.
62 “By the way, there was a review of the Wood”—his romance of The Wood beyond the World, which had been issued from the Kelmscott Press the year before, and of which an ordinary edition had recently been published—“in last week’s Spectator, which was kind and polite, but amused me very much by assuming that it was a Socialist allegory of Capital and Labour! It was written with such an air of cock-certainty that I thought people might think that I had told the reviewer myself; so I wrote a note to explain that he was wrong” (Mackail, Life of William Morris, 2: 316).
63 Here a line is missing from the typescript.
64 Anodos: rising up; kathados: descending.
65 Robert Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750).
66 “In the course of developing his own style out of that of Hoffmann, MacDonald borrows many of Hoffmann’s images, but most of his borrowings are not true allusion since a study of the originals does not appreciably enhance one’s understanding of MacDonald’s text” (Docherty, “Sources of Phantastes,” 46).
67 Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat.
68 MacDonald had served Congregational churches earlier in his career.
69 Rimbaud in a letter to George Izambard, 13 May 1871 (Complete Works, 100).
70 Most likely MacDonald’s A Dish of Orts (1893)
71 Bzoom: bosom. Here’s the passage: “I saw the worm-thing come creeping out, white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential fire. Along the floor it crawled toward the settle, going very slow. Yet more slowly it crept up on it, and laid itself, as unwilling to go further, at the feet of the princess. I rose and stole nearer. Mara stood motionless, as one that waits an event foreknown. The shining thing crawled on to a bare bony foot: it showed no suffering, neither was the settle scorched where the worm had lain. Slowly, very slowly, it crept along her robe until it reached her bosom, where it disappeared among the folds” (ch. 39).
72 That is, the South to East quadrant in Frye’s chart of forms and themes, which he called his Great Doodle. In his Notebooks on Romance he writes: “This area (S to E) is the stage in the cave of Trophonius where one recovers the power of laughter; here goes also Baubo and the obscene jokes that made Demeter laugh. That’s the basis of Aristophanes, whose fundamental play, from this point of view, is the Frogs. Note on this play the theme of descent to a lower world to secure a poet as a palladium for the city. I don’t know why birds and frogs seem to haunt this area, but they certainly do. When not frogs, serpents” (CW 15: 233).
73 An apparent reference to John 12:24: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
74 Ernest Jones, Nightmare, Witches and Devils (New York: W.W. Norton, 1931). Frye owned—and annotated—the 1971 edition (New York: Liveright).
75 The reference is to Frye’s diagrammatic schema, described briefly in n. 72.
76 The reference is to the thirty-two dream-visions that De Quincey, according to a manuscript found after his death, intended to include in Suspiria de Profundis, a sequel to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. See paragraph 2 of Frye’s notes, above.
77 “The word motive is here used in the sense attached by artists and connoisseurs to the technical word motivé applied to pictures, or to the separate movements in a musical theme” (646).
78 The reference is to the furtive life of the German-born Canadian novelist and translator Frederick Philip Grove.
79 Timothy Leary, a central figure in the drug culture of the 1960s and proponent of the spiritual and emotional benefits of LSD.
80 A reference to the turbaned and mahogany-skinned Malay.
81 “Dreaming” is the second part of Suspiria de Profundis.
82 The number 32 had special significance for Frye. See Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary, 224–32.
83 This and the headings that follow—“Vision of Life,” “Savannah-la-Mar,” “Levana,” “Who Is This Woman that Beckoneth? Who She Is,” and “The Dark Interpreter”—are separate essays in Suspiria de Profundis.
84 The western point of Frye’s Great Doodle. See n. 72, above.
85 See above, notes on De Quincey, par. 2.
86 Stheneboea (“strong cow”): the daughter of Iobates, king in Lycia; she took a fancy to Bellerophon but was repulsed. As in the myth of Potiphar’s wife, she falsely accused Bellerophon of advances and even attempted rape; her husband sent him on a deadly mission to Iobates.
87 The opening line of ch. 5 of E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey.
88 The translator, S. Gaselee, says in a note, “Clitophon shewed a very proper spirit in waiting for Leucippe’s absence before propounding this dubbio amoroso” (Loeb edition, 122).
89 “And yet more med’cinal is it than that Moly / That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave. / He [the shepherd boy] called it Hæmony, and gave it me, / And bade me keep it as of sovran use” (John Milton, Comus, ll. 636–9). The plant seems to have been Milton’s invention.
90 The heroine of Scott’s Ivanhoe.
91 Menander, The Girl Who Gets Flogged and The Girl Who Has Her Hair Cropped (Perikeiromene).
1 “The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree” (“Letter to Robert Bridges,” 210).
2 William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924).
3 In CW 12: 490 Frye quotes the line from Nowlan’s Genealogy of Morals.
4 The essay in Opus Posthumous in which the phrase “wholly other” appears was not actually written by Stevens but copied out by him. See CW 29: 319, 411n.22.
5 The reference is to Crane’s Black Tambourine:
The interests of a black man in a cellar
Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door.
Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.
Aesop, driven to pondering, found
Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
And mingling incantations on the air.
The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
1 “The Search for Acceptable Words,” Dædalus 102 (Spring 1973): 11–26; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 3–26, and in CW 27: 310–30.
2 “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract,” in Higher Education: Demand and Response (The Quail Roost Seminar), ed. W.R. Niblett (London: Tavistock Publications, 1969), 35–59; (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970), 35–51; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 27–48, and in CW 7: 360–78.
3 Presented as a paper, “The Renaissance of Books,” at the Fergusson Seminar, Williamsburg, Virginia, 16 November 1973; published as “The Renaissance of Books,” Visible Language 8 (Summer 1974): 225–40; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 49–65, and in CW 11: 140–55.
4 “The Times of the Signs: An Essay on Science and Mythology,” in On A Disquieting Earth Five Hundred Years after Copernicus (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1974), 59–84; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 66–96, and in CW 27: 357–68.
5 “Expanding Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 2 (Winter 1975): 199–216; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 99–122, and in CW 27: 391–410.
6 “Charms and Riddles” was first published in Spiritus Mundi, 123–47; rpt. in CW 27: 369–90.
7 “Romance as Masque” was first published in Spiritus Mundi, 148–78; rpt. in CW 18: 125–51.
8 “Old and New Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 1–5. Incorporated into part 1 of “Romance as Masque,” in Spiritus Mundi, 148–56; rpt. in CW 27: 285–92.
9 “The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler,” Dædalus 103 (Winter 1974): 1–13; rpt. as “Spengler Revisited,” in Spiritus Mundi, 179–98, and in CW 11: 287–314.
10 “Agon and Logos: Revolution and Revelation,” in The Prison and the Pinnacle, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 135–63; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 201–27, and in CW 16: 156–78.
11 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job,” in William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969), 221–34; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 228–44, and in CW 17: 366–86; rev. version, 387–401.
12 “The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” in An Honoured Guest: Essays on W.B. Yeats, ed. Denis Donoghue and J.R. Mulryne (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 8–33; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 245–74, and in CW 29: 252–77.
13 “Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form,” in Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1973), 395–414; rpt. in Spiritus Mundi, 275–94, and in CW 29: 309–25.
1 That is, the faculty at Emmanuel College, which, along with Victoria College, makes up Victoria University.
2 The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, often referred to as the “Massey Commission,” was established by Privy Council Order on 8 April 1949 and was chaired by Vincent Massey, who later became the first native-born Governor General of Canada. The report can be found at: http://canadachannel.ca/HCO/index.php/Report_of_the_Royal_Commission_on_National_Development_in_the_Arts,_Letters_and_Sciences,_Part_One_I-III.
3 George Ross, the organist at St. John’s Presbyterian (later United) Church in Moncton, NB. He had been a student of Sir Hubert Parry.
4 Lantern slides allowed photographic images to be projected from glass plates, thus permitting the viewing of the images by a large audience.
5 Grace Irwin, a teacher and novelist, graduated from Victoria College in 1929, the year that Frye entered as a freshman.
1 Annotated copies of both novels are among the books in Frye’s own library, now housed at the Victoria University Library, University of Toronto.
1 That is, the fictional form arising from people sitting at a banquet and pouring out all manner of erudition. Such an encyclopedic farrago was a favourite of the Menippean satirists and would include such works as Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists and Macrobius’s Saturnalia.
2 Frye is referring to Byron’s remark that history is the devil’s scripture (The Vision of Judgment [1821], l. 689 [stanza 87]).
3 The Italian abbot Joachim of Floris (also Fiore or Flora) (ca. 1132–1202), who makes more than three-dozen appearances in Frye’s published and unpublished writings. Joachim developed the doctrine of the Three Ages—the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the impending Age of the Spirit.
4 Above “linked to” Frye wrote “cognate with.”
5 DBR YHWH: Dabar Yahweh or Word of God.
6 Keats’s ode was said to have been inspired by a Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase. See The Double Vision, CW 4: 196.
7 Such numbers at the end of entries refer to the number of the lecture that Frye would be giving at Emmanuel College. The three lectures became the first three chapters of The Double Vision, to which Frye added a fourth, “The Double Vision of God.”
8 That is, the imagination feeds on the paradox of the “is” and the “is not,” which dialectic is the fundamental principle of metaphor.
9 “To be is to be perceived.” The phrase appears throughout Bishop Berkeley’s writings. See, e.g., The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson, 1953), 1: 53.
10 See Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1983).
11 “Then there’s the whole complex I stumbled over in the Wiegand lecture: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the revival of the notion I’ve been avoiding about the beauty of nature, Jung’s geometrical mandalas as symbols of the integrated mind, and the kind of creation that meets nature halfway in Poe’s Domain of Arnheim. Notable by the way in that story how insistent Poe is on finding one particular spot somewhere—the Utopian fallacy—instead of realizing that in an interpenetrating world everywhere is the one particular spot” (CW 6: 431).
12 The reference here may be to the concluding line of chapter 8 of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (Harcourt, 2007): “If you can’t even decide what the story is, better stick to editing books on philosophy” (57).
13 “Only connect” is the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910).
14 See Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), a novel in which three characters investigate the idea of a Templar conspiracy, along with other esoteric and occult lore, and eventually develop their own plan of the hidden history of the world. An annotated copy of the novel was in Frye’s own library, now housed in the Victoria University Library.
1 “[M]an possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit” (Aldous Huxley, “Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita” [New York: Penguin, 2002; orig. pub. 1944], 13).
2 “Midway in life’s journey”: the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
3 Temenos: sacred space. For Jung temenos was the inner space where soul-making occurs.
4 “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!”: Cleopatra’s joke in Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.21.
5 Two Noble Kinsmen (1612–13) by John Fletcher, a romantic comedy on which Shakespeare is thought to have collaborated.
6 A domestic tragedy published in 1608. Thomas Middleton is the leading candidate for authorship.
7 “The great tragic roles [in Shakespeare] were mostly taken by the actor Richard Burbage, and when he died a contemporary wrote a eulogy of him that mentioned some of the roles he had acted, including ‘the grieved Moor’ (Othello) and ‘kind Lear.’ When a book appeared recently that misquoted this passage as ‘king Lear,’ a reviewer remarked that the change in the one letter, a ‘g’ for a ‘d,’ had wiped out the whole of the contemporary criticism of the play” (CW 28: 466).
8 Parliament closed the theatres in 1642.
9 In the quarto of Henry IV, pt. 2, the second scene of act 2 begins with Prince Henry saying, “Before God, I am exceeding weary.” In the folio version his speech begins “Trust me.”
10 The phrase is Wilhelm Reich’s. See his Character Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1963), 44, 145–9, 314–27.
11 See Knight’s How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (Cambridge: G. Fraser, The Minority Press, 1933).
12 Frye is castigating himself for making a mistake after “guilty of,” where he began to write the wrong word, which he then marked through.
13 If Frye included this point in his “Introductory Lecture,” it was edited out of the published version.
14 Here Frye changes to a pen with a finer nib.
15 In a note on p. 241 of The Great Code (CW 19: 306n.28), Frye says: “I am treating, in Matthew Arnold fashion, ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ as a contrast, because that is what they were as a joint influence on Western culture, increasingly from the sixteenth century on. It does not follow that they were a contrast in origin: see Cyrus H. Gordon, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1963).”
16 Frye’s note on p. 243 of The Great Code (CW 19: 337n.3) cites the source of “unhandy people” as “Josephus, contra Apion, bk. ii. 15.” Frye’s own source for this is likely not Josephus’s Against Apion but a footnote to vs. 117 of “The Letter of Aristeas” in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R.H. Charles, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 106. See Frye’s notes on his reading of Aristeas in CW 13: 317, where he cites the same passage from Josephus on “the mechanical ineptness of the Jews.”
17 See note to p. xii, line 39, of The Great Code (CW 19: 269–70n.2).
18 The reference is to 2 Baruch: “One of the pseudepigrapha, II Baruch, speaks of the law among us and the wisdom within us (48:24)” (The Great Code, 131; CW 19: 151). 2 Baruch is technically an apocryphal, not a pseudepigraphal, work.
19 The reference is to G.B. Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History (1931), which Frye cites for a passage about the tension between Buddhism and the Shinto religion in Japan. See The Great Code, 115; CW 19: 134.
20 The reference is to the passage in Isaiah (11:16) prophesying a highway to bring the people of Israel back from Assyria. See The Great Code, 160; CW 19: 181.
21 The references are to Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3: “and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
22 Cf. The Great Code, 178; CW 19: 199: “The visit of the wise men to Christ is the antitype of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon, the connecting link being Isaiah 60:6.”
23 Cf. The Great Code, 119; CW 19: 139: “Closely associated with the purge is the idea of the saving remnant, a curiously pervasive theme in the Bible from the story of Gideon’s army in Judges 7 to the exhortations to the seven churches of Asia Minor in Revelation.”
24 The saying of Christ from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri that Frye has in mind is: “Raise the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there.” See The Great Code, 167: CW 19: 188.
25 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Frye’s discussion of this passage did not get into The Great Code, but he examines it in other places, e.g., Myth and Metaphor, 98–9.
26 See The Great Code, 91; CW 19: 110.
27 Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1976). Frye owned and annotated a copy of this book.
28 Recapitulation (“summing up” or “restoring”) is a central theme in Irenaeus. He takes the idea from St. Paul (Ephesians 1:10, “to gather together in one”) but attaches his own meaning to it: the new beginning that brings about communion between God and man. See Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, trans. Joseph P. Smith (New York: Newman Press, n.d.), 51, 67, 71, 108.
29 “Natural and Revealed Communities,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 288–306; CW 28: 625–41.
30 “Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 307–21; CW 28: 346–60.
31 “Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 356–74; CW 29: 356–74.
32 “The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 322–39; CW 17: 309–25.
33 “The World as Music and Idea in Wagner’s Parsifal,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 340–55; CW 17: 326–40.
34 “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 168–82; CW 18: 230–44.
35 “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 28–43; CW 18: 327–41.
36 “Some Reflections on Life and Habit,” published in Myth and Metaphor, 141–54; CW 17: 341–53.
37 “Approaching the Lyric,” published in The Eternal Act of Creation, 130–6; CW 18: 245–51.
38 “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult,” published in The Eternal Act of Creation, 109–29; CW 29: 350–70.
39 Some Protestants referred sarcastically to marriage as the “bastard sacrament.”
40 Frye is referring here to his plans for his post-Anatomy book, the “Third Book.”
1 Luther’s answer at the Diet of Worms to Charles V, who had demanded that he recant: “If the emperor desires a plain answer, I will give it to him. It is impossible for me to recant unless I am proved to be wrong by the testimony of Scripture. My conscience is bound to the Word of God. It is neither safe nor honest to act against one’s conscience. Here I stand. God help me. I cannot do otherwise.”
2 Cf. “An original purchaser, standing at a bookstall with the surge and thunder of the mighty poem breaking over him, might well have asked: But this is a blind, defeated, disillusioned, gouty old man: where did he get all this energy? It is a fair question, even if it may not have an answer” (The Return of Eden, 110; CW 16: 110).
3 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in The Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Robert Fletcher (London: Westley and Davis, 1835), 130.
4 James Carscallen, an accomplished musician and Frye’s colleague at Victoria College, may have been playing the organ for the service.
5 A reference, apparently, to the English organist and composer (1766–1837), sometimes referred to as the “English Mozart.” He was the son of Charles Wesley, nephew of John Wesley.
6 “No! by the Rood, we will not join your ballet.” The final line of E.J. Pratt’s The Truant.
7 In 1696 Newton left Cambridge for London, where he became Warden of the Royal Mint.
8 On the first page of this series of notes, Frye has typed out three quotations, which he labelled in pencil “Speeches.” Two are by Newton. The first is “We are, therefore, to acknowledge one God, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, the creator of all things, most wise, most just, most good, most holy. We must love him, fear him, honour him, trust in him, pray to him, give him thanks, praise him, hallow his name, obey his commandments, and set times apart for his service” (Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts, ed. H. McLaughlan [Liverpool: University Press, 1950], 51). The second is the “great ocean of truth” passage reproduced in the next note. The third is from Blaise Pascal’s “Mystic Amulette”: “The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November … From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve, midnight, FIRE.”
9 See the Introduction.
10 Susanna Annesley was John Wesley’s mother. Frye may be suggesting the connection between Wesley’s mother and Victoria University’s Annesley Hall, the oldest women’s residence in Canadian higher education.
11 John and his brother Charles sailed to the Province of Georgia in 1735 at the request of the governor, James Oglethorpe.
12 Wesley had proposed marriage to Sophia Hopkey but broke off the engagement. His relationship with her came to a head when he refused her communion, after which she and her new husband filed suit against Wesley. After the proceedings ended in a mistrial, Wesley escaped back to England, his sojourn in Georgia having been more or less a disaster.
13 The motto is apparently the words encircling Wesley’s head in the stained-glass window: “the best of all is, God is with us.”