Recorded 19 March 1987
From a CBC tape, transcribed by Monika Lee. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Host Peter Gzowski interviewed Northrop Frye on his CBC program Morningside, aired 30 March and 1 June 1987, to celebrate Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986). The book was soon to be awarded the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction for 1986.
GZOWSKI: I could introduce Northrop Frye this morning by enumerating a long list of his honours and achievements, but I’ll forego that and I’ll mention his latest accomplishment: his book on Shakespeare, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, a collection of lectures on the great bard that were once the prize of the privileged few, more than a few, who’ve been Frye’s students. Now they can be enjoyed and shared by us all. Northrop Frye joins me in the studio now. Good morning, sir.
FRYE: Good morning.
GZOWSKI: Now, I’m intimidated. I don’t know how to deal with the fact of being intimidated in the presence of Northrop Frye. Are other people intimidated?
FRYE: Oh yes. My wife used to say to them, “You ought to see his baby pictures.”
GZOWSKI: [laughs] You’ve been known to comment on this before. Your reputation is, in fact, a handicap for you, isn’t it?
FRYE: Oh yes, yes it is. I suppose everybody who is a public character as well as a private one has a kind of schizophrenia to overcome.
GZOWSKI: But the publicity of your character is also the publicity of a giant intellect, of a man of ideas. Some of those ideas I find more intimidating in contemplation than I do when I run up against them. You’re not an intimidating writer. Your reputation’s more intimidating to me than some of your conversation.
FRYE: I’m very pleased if that’s true.
GZOWSKI: Do people run from you at cocktail parties?
FRYE: Yes, they do, and I’ve been told of occasions when people realized I was coming to a lunch and they all huddled in a corner at the other end. But they were people who don’t know me, I think.
GZOWSKI: How do you deal with that?
FRYE: Well, you just accept it as a fact of life and try to overcome it when you can do something about it positively.
GZOWSKI: You’re also very shy, I think, are you not?
FRYE: Yes, that is true, and that has worked against me all my life.
GZOWSKI: You are a minister of the United Church, a clergyman, but you chose not to pursue that career, as I understand it, because you’d have to have that social life, as well as preach.
FRYE: Social and administrative, those are two things I’m not as good at.
GZOWSKI: The preaching part?
FRYE: That I think I could have done.
GZOWSKI: You think you could have done?
FRYE: Yes.
GZOWSKI: I was just wondering. I’m still somewhat in the same sentence, in the same part of it. Perhaps we’d be less intimidated if we knew that … Did you come to Toronto because you’d won a typing contest? Is that what brought you to this city?
FRYE: Not because I’d won it, but I came up here to win it and I came second.
GZOWSKI: Who out-typed you? Do you remember?
FRYE: A girl from Orangeville.
GZOWSKI: What happened to her?
FRYE: I don’t know, but she was a very good typist at that age.
GZOWSKI: Is your typing ability connected with your ability to play piano?
FRYE: I suppose so. I had started on the piano earlier, and found that the two didn’t really clash a great deal, although some unkind people said that I played the piano as though I were typing.
GZOWSKI: You weren’t a great scholar, Biblical scholar, as a child. You weren’t a great student.
FRYE: No.
GZOWSKI: You got marks of the kind I got when you went to school.
FRYE: Yes. I remember pointing out to my parents with some pride that, as I’d come twenty-eighth out of a class of thirty-two, there were four that were below me.
GZOWSKI: What was that in? When was that?
FRYE: That was around grade 7.
GZOWSKI: Do you know how many people it makes feel good to know that Northrop Frye came twenty-eighth in a class of thirty-two?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know, but … I thought that public school was one of the milder forms of penal servitude.
GZOWSKI: But you also began your first contact with, understanding of the Bible. Would there be any glimmerings at that time of the ideas that you would later bring to everyone’s understanding? Did you think of it at all as a work beyond parts of the penal servitude of learning?
FRYE: Well, no. I’d been given an evangelical upbringing and I’d been soaked in the Bible from infancy, and at university or even a year or two earlier I came across William Blake, who made an amount of imaginative sense of the Bible that I never dreamed could be made.
GZOWSKI: Was there a real epiphany? People who write about you talk about epiphany at one time or another, but was there ever a moment in your life of which it’s possible to say, “There was something before and something else after”?
FRYE: I don’t know whether it would be as complete as that, but there certainly were moments when I realized I was turning a corner. When I stayed up all night to write a paper on Blake for graduate school, I knew, at the end of it when I went out for breakfast, that I was going to write a book on Blake, and fifteen years later it appeared.
GZOWSKI: Can you describe that understanding? How would you know that?
FRYE: Well, I had the very bad habit, in those days, of writing my assignments the night before I was to deliver them, and somewhere around three in the morning something very funny started happening in my mind. I was commenting on one of Blake’s most complex and difficult poems [Milton] and I began to get glimpses of a world that I had never imagined could exist in that many dimensions before, and nothing came clear at that point except that crystal clear determination: someday or other, I’d write a book about this.
GZOWSKI: That’s Blake. I mean … you were Blake.
FRYE: Yes.
GZOWSKI: I want to talk about Shakespeare. I have been going through your Northrop Frye on Shakespeare and I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know where he is. Is it fair to say that after the Bible, Shakespeare is second in our consciousness, or is it in the same level, or where are we? What does Shakespeare mean to me?
FRYE: Well, I suppose that he conditions the way we speak. His turns of phrase get into the idioms of the language and, because he conditions the way we speak, he conditions the way we think too, because we think along the grooves suggested by our language and by the bits and pieces we remember. It’s a power of articulateness that keeps going past you and every once in a while you catch on to it, and then [on to] the kind of characters it creates, like Hamlet and Falstaff and King Lear, who are so titanic in relation to what we are in their power of expression, and yet they’re recognizable as human beings.
GZOWSKI: You say in the introduction that we make a mistake if we try to think of Shakespeare’s being exclusively relevant to our world or exclusively relevant to his time. Where is Shakespeare’s time?
FRYE: I was thinking really of the Tudor Shakespeare, the man who wrote for audiences in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I; he had to be intelligible to those audiences, and he carries down to us the atmosphere and the assumptions of that audience. So it’s unfair to kidnap him and judge him in entirely twentieth-century conventions. But, on the other hand, if we don’t make him relevant to our time, then we lose all that dimension.
GZOWSKI: And yet he’s all within himself. He’s all on the stage, as you say. I mean this is a charming idea—if he were a twentieth-century playwright we’d have him as a regular on Morningside. Morningside would at least phone him up, right?
FRYE: Oh, yes.
GZOWSKI: And say, “What do you think of what’s happening in Afghanistan now, Will?” Tudor England didn’t do that.
FRYE: No.
GZOWSKI: What he said on the stage was enough?
FRYE: Well, it was all he was allowed to say for one thing. The great mystery about literature is how the great writers communicate over centuries out of totally different cultural environments and frameworks, and that’s been a mystery to me about Shakespeare as about everyone else. The Tudor mystique of royalty and so forth, and the sense of social stratification, the fact that degree and rank is so very important, all that is unintelligible in the twentieth century, but it makes sense in a Shakespeare play.
GZOWSKI: There are three plays not normally associated with each other, but which become associated with each other in the way you’ve thought about them and put them together. Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra have almost a chronological context for us, right? Hamlet is the nineteenth-century play, central to the understanding of the nineteenth century. Can you explain that a bit?
FRYE: Well, I think that the nineteenth century was preoccupied, almost obsessed, by the paradoxical relationship between acting and thinking about action. I mean acting in the general sense, not stage acting. They seem to feel that that was the central paradox of being a human being and that consciousness was a kind of death principle that fought against the power to act spontaneously, and yet it was the human birthright, it was the human trademark, so to speak. There’s no end to the number of people who kept revolving around Hamlet, as the play that dealt with that. The French symboliste poets, for example, Mallarmé and Laforgue and so forth, are all possessed by Hamlet. I think the play just sat in the middle of all that nineteenth-century preoccupation with the riddle of consciousness.
GZOWSKI: Would there have been a nineteenth century if there had not been a Shakespeare and Shakespearean Hamlet?1
FRYE: Certainly not the nineteenth century we have, no. But the nineteenth century began with figures of action like Napoleon, who didn’t do much thinking, and a little earlier with people like Rousseau who brought in a very intense kind of subjective sensibility, and the way in which these things kept colliding all through the century was what made Hamlet relevant to the nineteenth century. But, of course, if it hadn’t had a Hamlet, it would have done something else.
GZOWSKI: Then King Lear. We’re in King Lear’s time.
FRYE: I think that that has more of a political than a psychological sense. The world, in these days of terrorism and violence, is really a world set up for the benefit of the Cornwalls and the Gonerils, who know how to take advantage of it. It’s that contrast between the world of love and loyalty, which is so helpless, the world of Lear and of Cordelia, and the world of aggressive action, of Goneril and Regan and Edmund, that seems to have made its particular impression on the twentieth century. It’s a very human world. It’s a very spooky play, King Lear is, but nothing really supernatural happens in it. What happens is the direct result of human behaviour and I think that that speaks more directly to the world since about 1945.
GZOWSKI: Finally, we’re going toward an Antony and Cleopatra world.
FRYE: Well, I just threw that out as a suggestion: that the world of the Roman triumvirates is really a lot more like our world than it’s like Shakespeare’s world.
GZOWSKI: How?
FRYE: Well, the feeling of the world as a global unit and the feeling that your loyalty is to certain world leaders, but not necessarily to a nation primarily. That is, in Antony and Cleopatra, the loyalties are to Antony or to Caesar, whereas with the historical plays like Richard II, the loyalty is to the person within a national unit, within England. You can get a patriotic speech at the end of King John, but you don’t feel that they’re in order in a play about the Roman world.
GZOWSKI: By definition, can there only be one Shakespeare?
FRYE: Oh, yes. That’s the way that literature is set up. There can be only one of every writer. We may get writers in the future as good as Shakespeare, though they’d be very different writers, but he’s one of the writers who represent the limits of imaginative expression. The arts don’t improve in the way that the sciences do.
GZOWSKI: Is it possible to imagine that another writer could reach the same limits?
FRYE: It’s possible to imagine that and I think some of the great tragedians did.
GZOWSKI: And yet, they don’t resonate for us the same way.
FRYE: Well, I’m not so sure. I remember at Stratford after hearing King Lear for an hour and forty minutes, and then hearing Antigone for forty minutes,2 my wife said to me, “There’s a lot to be said for a play that just gives you the bad news.”
GZOWSKI: I want to talk about public critic and private critic, because you are both, and the essays about you occasionally dwell on that. Do you think of yourself as one or the other? Does either of those phrases have any meaning for you?
FRYE: Not a great deal of meaning. One tries to be the same person in both capacities and one does a critic’s job, whatever the context suggests. I suppose I’m a public critic in the sense that I’m concerned partly with the theory of criticism and also with the teaching of literature.
GZOWSKI: “Popular critic”: I wonder if that would be another way of saying what I’m trying to get at with “public critic.” A popular critic who guides us through the literature of our times hot off the press. A reviewer maybe in some ways, who says, “Pay attention to this. Don’t pay attention to that. Here’s a way to get into …” Is that an important role or one that you’ve ever seen for yourself?
FRYE: It’s quite an important role to me. I spent ten years reading every poem published in English Canada, and doing a review for the University of Toronto Quarterly [1951–60]. That was certainly a reviewing activity and I regarded it as quite an important one, because Canada was just beginning to take hold as a literary unit at that time.
GZOWSKI: Was that a different mind-set you would bring as you would do those reviews of Canadian poetry? Would you say, “Oh, I gotta put on that coat now and do that”?
FRYE: I didn’t really feel it as different. I realize that reviewing is, to some extent, a contraceptive job, and that was what rather got me down about it, that you were saying, “This is a permanent thing, which you will want to go back to, and this is something which is expendable.” I dislike making that kind of judgment very much, but you can’t avoid it, of course.
GZOWSKI: You disliked it, why?
FRYE: Well, it made me too much of a judge, and while the judge is the traditional metaphor for a critic, I never believed in it. I’ve believed that the critic was not there to judge literature, but to put the people he was writing to or talking to in possession of what he was talking about.
GZOWSKI: But in not making the judgments … the judgments are made. When you approach Blake, Shakespeare, the Bible, you’re not taking any chances here.
FRYE: No. It’s also true, of course, that when the critic is up against something that size, he’s the one that’s being judged, because the best he has to offer is none too good.
GZOWSKI: That’s, of course, true, isn’t it? How do you spend your time now? Are you having a good time, generally?
FRYE: Well, I’m in labour with a book. I shall probably keep on being in labour for a long time, and I am teaching one course, but that means I work a great deal at home now.
GZOWSKI: In labour with more books to come and more teaching. Northrop Frye, thank you so much for joining us on Morningside today.