This is the narrative portion of Frye’s application for a Guggenheim fellowship, submitted 31 October 1949. The complete application and related correspondence are in the NFF, 1988, box 39, file 4.
[1] 5. Plans for Work
In 1947 I completed a study of Blake’s prophetic books (Fearful Symmetry, A Study of William Blake, Princeton University Press, 1947) which raised critical questions of much broader scope than the criticism of Blake. I discovered that the only critical methods that would work on Blake were those that had been explicitly recommended for allegorical poetry in general by medieval and Renaissance criticism. Thus Blake proved to be, not a special kind of poet, but a typical allegorical poet. As these methods have been largely ignored by critics since Dryden’s time, I was left at the end of the book with two further problems to solve, or rather, tasks to carry out. One was to incorporate the neglected statements of earlier critics about allegory into modern critical theory. The other was to leave Blake and apply the methods of exposition I had learned from studying him to poets of the Renaissance, where the methods could be justified by documentation from contemporary rhetorical textbooks, mythological handbooks, critical treatises and introductions to epic poems.
[2] For the last four years I have been engaged in collecting and sorting out material for a comprehensive study of Renaissance Symbolism. I soon discovered that the study of allegorical technique was impossible unless the form which the technique was adopted to produce was made the basis of study. Form has therefore been the basis for classifying my notes, which are now in three main groups, one concerned with epic, one with drama, and one with prose fiction.1 The total project is thus a three-volume study, but the third volume does not enter into my plans at present. I have written a draft of the first volume, a study of Renaissance epic based mainly on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and need some free time for footnoting and documentation. The second volume will be mainly a study of Shakespearean comedy, and as background research on Spenser, from my point of view, is inseparable from background research on Shakespearean comedy, I should like to work on these two studies simultaneously.
[3] The plan of the first volume is as follows. I first trace the evolution of the primitive elements of the epic, as we find them represented not only in the ancient epics themselves but in romance, ballad and myth. I see these primitive elements as originating mainly, by way of religious ritual, from a certain kind of psychological response to the cyclic phenomena of nature. The position adopted is close to that of [Ernst] Cassirer’s conception of symbolic forms. I then try to trace, with the help of Classical scholarship, the evolution of the heroic epic and of its function as an encyclopaedia of tribal history, mythology, primitive observation of nature and proverbial philosophy. I then discuss the Bible as having grown from epic materials, and of the place of scripture in literature, specifically of course of the Bible in Western literature, as a kind of definitive epic or “monomyth,” to use a recent term.2 I then trace the development of medieval allegory and the theory of fourfold meaning from theology and Biblical commentary, dealing chiefly with Dante. After this, a full commentary on The Faerie Queene attempts to weave all these strands together.
[4] I see a developing central argument or dialectic in the epic tradition, concerned chiefly with the fact that the Homeric epic is a celebration of heroic acts, and that later influences, including Christianity, will force later poets to consider more carefully what a heroic act really is. I see Spenser as having failed to solve the problems in this, and hence am forced to write a concluding note on Milton as an epic poet who in a sense began where Spenser left off, and provided a clear, consistent and complete analysis of the heroic act in his two epics. The book ends in a careful study of Paradise Regained.
[5] The treatment of Shakespearean comedy in the second volume rests on the application of the traditional distinction between the Old Comedy of Aristophanes and the New Comedy of Menander. Old Comedy, as Cornford and others have conclusively shown, develops out of certain ritual practices in Greek religion. I see early Elizabethan comedy as beginning with a New Comedy structure derived from Terence, but gradually infusing this structure with traditional folklore elements, some derived from ritual drama such as the St. George play. Shakespeare follows the Peele tradition, in contrast to Jonson, who sticks more closely to the Terence pattern. The romantic elements, like the use of folklore and fairy tales, in Shakespearean comedy may be explained as an expansion of a New Comedy formula which results in a kind of unconscious return to the ritual elements of Old Comedy. (See “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays, 1946, Columbia University Press, forthcoming shortly.)
[6] Implicit in my study is an attitude to criticism which is being explicitly stated in a series of essays I am now engaged in writing. I regard literary criticism as a science temporarily deprived of its scientific status by a deficiency of theory. Attempts at critical theory have usually relied on philosophy instead of on an inductive survey of literature itself. My present project contains, first, a theory of verbal meaning which tries to unite traditional theories of meaning, such as Dante’s scheme of four levels, with modern ideas about symbolism. Second, a theory of literary symbolism which will present all the essential possibilities of literary symbols in a single form, in other words a kind of grammar of symbolism. I have already produced one of these grammars in Fearful Symmetry, and the testimony of many complete strangers, some of them well-known writers, leaves me in no doubt about its value to practising artists. But Blake is too isolated a figure for a study of him alone to complete my ambition of restoring authority to literary criticism.