Although his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), rehabilitated the reputation of William Blake from the status of minor eccentric to that of major Romantic poet, Northrop Frye in fact identified Blake as a poet and himself as a critic not with Romanticism but with the Renaissance. Fearful Symmetry speaks of Blake as attempting to revive the tradition of
the great cosmopolitan humanist culture which arose in Europe between the Renaissance and the Reformation. The writers and scholars who form this culture—Erasmus, Rabelais, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Reuchlin, the More of Utopia, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola being the most conspicuous names—seem to have emerged into a kind of visionary Christianity to which the present meanings of neither “Protestant” nor “Catholic” wholly apply. (FS, 150; FS2, 154)
For all their obvious differences, such writers are united in the attempt “to understand the central form of Christianity as a vision rather than as a doctrine or ritual, preserving a tertium quid which, without detracting from the reality of the religion, would also avoid both the iconic and the iconoclastic pitfalls” (FS, 151; FS2, 155). Frye sums up his discussion of Blake’s tradition as follows:
But it is already evident that Blake’s affinities with [the] Renaissance go much deeper than a few Shakespearean echoes in his early songs. Had he been born at any time between, say, 1530 and 1630, he would have found a large public able to speak his language, his premises would have been accepted on their own merits, and he could have offered to the world, in Spenser’s phrase, “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” without being told that poets should not invent a private symbolism. (FS, 161; FS2, 164)
Moreover, it is clear that Frye identifies himself along with Blake as belonging to this Renaissance via media with its centre of gravity in a Word that is interpreted imaginatively rather than doctrinally or historically. For this reason, his second writing project, before it insisted on turning into Anatomy of Criticism, was planned as “a comprehensive study of Renaissance Symbolism” in three volumes, one on Spenser, one on Shakespeare, and one on prose fiction.1 Along with some notes about lyric poetry, this represents the division of material in the present collection of Frye’s holograph notebooks and typed notes.
In 1949, Frye applied for a Guggenheim Foundation grant to research and write his three-volume study, beginning with a book on Spenser and Renaissance allegory. This part of his proposal follows closely the first part of Notebook 7, in which Frye is thinking about the evolution of the epic from its pagan beginnings to the Protestant epics of Spenser and Milton. Because this was the notebook in which Anatomy of Criticism was born, it is by necessity being published elsewhere, with the notebooks connected with that project, but it casts much light on what the unwritten study would have been like. As preparation for writing the Spenser volume, Frye, recovering from a broken arm in late 1950, dictated to Helen Kemp Frye the bulk of a canto-by-canto commentary on books 1, 3, and 4 of The Faerie Queene, included here as Notebook 43. Thus, Notebook 7 provides the theme of the volume, Notebook 43 some of the material that would have fleshed it out, and the Guggenheim application its place in a larger structure.
One of the most important texts in the present collection is Notebook 8, from the late 1940s to early 1950s, in which Frye kept notes for a major study of drama and Shakespeare, which eventually became the second volume of the Guggenheim proposal. Many of his early essays on drama, such as “The Argument of Comedy” (1949) and “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (1951), germinated within the rich subsoil of this notebook. Also included in the present volume are notes towards the lectures that resulted in the four published books on Shakespeare: the Bampton Lectures that became A Natural Perspective (1965); the Alexander Lectures that became Fools of Time (1967); the Tamblyn Lectures that became The Myth of Deliverance (1983); and the undergraduate lectures that, in revised form, became Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986). Additionally, Notebook 13 contains notes towards “How True a Twain” (1962), Frye’s essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
The third volume in the Guggenheim proposal was to be concerned with prose fiction. Although they come from decades later than the Renaissance project, Frye’s typed notes for “Natural and Revealed Communities” (1987), his essay on Thomas More’s Utopia, herein designated Notes 58–6, may hint at something of the unwritten contents of the third volume. What is not evident in the Guggenheim proposal is that its three studies were to be part of a still larger endeavour. Along with a volume on the Romantic and post-Romantic periods, they would have formed the first half of a double tetralogy of books that Frye christened the ogdoad, which was to be his magnum opus. Whatever their ostensible subject, almost all of Frye’s notebooks and notes over forty-five years attempt to relate themselves at some point to the ogdoad project. Because of their ubiquity, Frye developed a private code for referring to the eight volumes: each book is designated by both a single-word title and a code symbol. For the first tetralogy, these are as follows: Liberal (L), Tragicomedy (⌉), Anticlimax (∧), and Rencontre (λ). Briefly, the first three books of the ogdoad were intended to provide the outlines of the subject of anagogy, the study of the Word, and of the order of words that is what Blake would have called its emanation. The study of the Word has Renaissance, specifically Reformation origins, but needs to be updated in the light of modern scholarship. The Guggenheim proposal claims that “The position adopted is close to that of Cassirer’s conception of symbolic forms,”2 but Spengler, Toynbee, Frazer, the Cambridge school of anthropology, Jung, and many other modern theorists of symbolism also make frequent appearances in the notebooks and notes. The Spenser study was alternately conceived as either Liberal or Anticlimax, depending upon whether Frye was thinking of its focus fictionally, as Scriptural and epic narrative, or thematically, as allegory and levels of meaning. Tragicomedy was more consistently a study of drama and Shakespeare. The tetralogy’s fourth volume, Rencontre, was to have explored the effects of the breakdown of the anagogic vision, leading to the fragmentation and alienation of modern culture. The most important symptom of this breakdown was Romanticism.
The most exciting promise of the unpublished material, however, is not that it will provide answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Frye’s writing, but that it may enable us to reformulate some of the questions in a more productive way. Without wishing to place Frye’s work beyond criticism or controversy, which would only mean embalming it, one grows frustrated with refutations that are reductive, ill informed, wrongheaded, or ideologically motivated. Such pseudo-criticism may be easy enough to rebut, but it tends to pre-empt the really exciting debates. The valid arguments are those in which we find ourselves taking both sides, because both sides, though contradictory, are somehow right. These are the controversies through which we might expand our own mental horizon, for “Without Contraries Is no Progression,” according to Blake. These are the debates that Frye conducted with himself, more openly in the notebooks and typed notes than anywhere else. The fact that he was willing to embrace genuine contraries helps make him so inexhaustibly suggestive a writer—as well as a witty one, for wit arises from the perception of paradox. It also gives rise, of course, to the allegations of inconsistency, evasion, mysticism, irrationality, and fear of reality that have always dogged him.
What I think will emerge gradually from Frye studies is a double vision, having historical affinities to the Renaissance and Reformation on the one hand and the Romantic revolution on the other, with Blake as a hinge between them. From the Renaissance and Reformation comes a vision of the Word as informing both nature and language with what physicist David Bohm calls an implicate order:3 the world in a grain of sand, articulated by an interpenetrating “order of words.” The source of this compelling and redemptive order is neither reason nor nature, much less the ideological conditioning of social institutions. It emanates from “some kind of force or power or will that is not ourselves, an otherness of spirit” (SeS, 60; SeSCT, 43). Frye is aware that “Not all of us will be satisfied with calling the central part of our mythological inheritance a revelation from God,” yet he goes on to admit that
I cannot claim to have found a more acceptable formulation. It is quite true that if there is no sense that the mythological universe is a human creation, man can never get free of servile anxieties and superstitions, never surpass himself, in Nietzsche’s phrase. But if there is no sense that it is also something uncreated, something coming from elsewhere, man remains a Narcissus staring at his own reflection, equally unable to surpass himself. Somehow or other, the created scripture and the revealed scripture, or whatever we call the latter, have to keep fighting each other like Jacob and the angel, and it is through the maintaining of this struggle, the suspension of belief between the spiritually real and the humanly imaginative, that our own mental evolution grows. (60–1; SeSCT, 43)
We now know that intellectual maturity burst in on Frye in the shape of two simultaneous projects: the ogdoad scheme based on the revealed order of the Word, and a book on Blake, who believed that there is no reality that is not created by the human imagination. To Frye’s sceptical critics, the insistence that we have to maintain a “suspension of belief” between divine creation and human recreation is another of his many attempts to prevent his vision from collapsing into an aporia through the power of incantatory and authoritative rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is what Frye in his late notebooks (and briefly in Words with Power) calls the dialectic of Word and Spirit. Nor are his the only incantations maintaining the suspension. “We say God and the imagination are one,” murmurs Wallace Stevens. “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”4
For reasons that are perhaps already clear, the chief task of this introduction is less to show how Frye’s published books and articles on Renaissance topics grew out of his unpublished notebooks and notes, which is fairly obvious, than to show how both published and unpublished work have been summoned into existence by a pre-existing imaginative framework. My wording here is deliberately chosen to indicate that the imaginative framework is thus in the position of God, the Word as Logos or pattern of order and meaning, which is the paradigm for the human order of words. Blake identified this Word with “the Human Imagination Divine” to a greater degree than any Renaissance writer, but the notion is implicit in his statement that the Bible is “the great code of art.” At any rate, for Frye, the larger pattern came first, and the local insights followed; his general attitude seems to be: if you build it, they will come. As he got older, he became aware that his “ogdoad” was not a double tetralogy of actual books: rather, it was the schematic shape of his total vision, a myth to write by.
The ogdoad plan seems to have emerged sometime in the 1930s as a response to the first great influence of Frye’s life, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In the 467 pages of the collected Student Essays, there is only minor evidence of Blake, but the influence of Spengler is pervasive and powerful. The young Frye simply adopted much of Spengler’s framework of cultural history as his own. What he did with it, however, is original. Spengler apparently had little interest in literature: his chief aesthetic interest was in contrasting what he saw as the pre-eminence of Classical culture in the visual and plastic arts with the pre-eminence of Western European or “Faustian” culture in music. Frye’s ogdoad scheme took over Spengler’s historical cycle, in which Europe had its spring or dawn in the Middle Ages, its summer or zenith in the Renaissance, its autumn or afternoon around the eighteenth century, and its winter or twilight beginning around the time of Napoleon (the German title of the Decline of the West translates literally as “the going-under of the evening lands”). He also found congenial Spengler’s judgment that Baroque music represents the height of Western culture. Beyond that, he had to look elsewhere for clues about the evolution of art forms within a Spenglerian scheme.
Where he looked is indicated by a “Bibliographical Note” to an essay on “Religion and the Art Forms of Music and Drama,” written about 1936: in one direction to Frazer’s The Golden Bough and to the school of “Cambridge ritualists” that developed out of its influence; in the other direction, to Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious and Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. The synthesis Frye achieved in this essay continued to serve him through the Guggenheim proposal of 1949; a good deal of it makes its way into Anatomy of Criticism over twenty years later. The essay’s thesis is that all human cultures grow out of what Frye calls “a universal subconscious language of symbolism” (SE, 327)—the “symbolism of the unconscious” is the phrase used in 1959, twenty-three years later, as title of his essay on Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (NFCL, 84–94). Animals, emerging out of nature, operate by instincts that are based on cyclic recurrences, and these instinctual patterns are at least quasi-ritualistic, as we can see in courtship “rituals” and the agon or patterned struggle that determines hierarchy in the group. Animals do these things unconsciously, or at least not self-consciously. According to the Cambridge school of anthropology, a group that included, among others, Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, and Francis Cornford, human culture begins in ritualized behaviour that organizes a good deal, perhaps most, of early human social life. Out of these dromena, or “things done,” comes religion. Humanity is innately social and interdependent, and religion, which is derived from religare, “to bind together” (SE, 328), is what replaces animal instinct, binding human groups together on the basis of shared rituals. Out of religious ritual grow myths and symbols, which, by representing and to some extent explaining the rituals, begin to make conscious what was formerly unconscious.
Art in turn grows out of religion as the attempt to give form to religion’s mythmaking and symbolization: thus “A work of art is a formal expression of a religious impulse” (SE, 322). Because the process of form-giving individualizes the collective myths and symbols, art eventually achieves independence of religion, and a process of secularization sets in. But art never entirely forgets its communal and religious origins, and this is especially true of music and drama, which are “group art forms: that is, they are ensemble performances for audiences” (SE, 328). “Music and drama, then, belong to an era of integrated cultural development, and their communal nature brings them into line with religion” (SE, 329). The moment when music and drama achieve a balance between the communal and the individualized, between unconscious symbolism and conscious form, is a culture’s greatest moment. In the West, this has occurred twice. Out of the matrix of the ritual of Dionysus, Greek tragedy was born, as Nietzsche put it, from the spirit of music. Again, during the Renaissance, music and drama gradually freed themselves from subordination to the Church.
But to be free of religion is not necessarily to be cut off from it. As one is free of the law not by breaking it but by internalizing it, so art becomes liberated from religion by a process of the internalization of ritual, myth, and symbol, a process that liberates religion itself from bondage to unconscious collectivity: this was probably one intended meaning of the title of Liberal. The climax of the discussion of drama is Shakespeare, who, “by the intuition of transcendent genius, approached nearer and nearer the sacerdotal drama as his genius developed” (SE, 336). And, for Frye, the climax of a discussion of Shakespeare is always the same: “As for the last play of all, The Tempest, that has now been fairly proved to be an extraordinarily faithful presentation of the Greek ideas of initiation and of the ritual that accompanied them” (SE, 337). This is an allusion to another significant influence on Frye’s theory of drama, Colin Still’s Shakespeare’s Mystery Play.5 Frye may already have been contemplating a book on Shakespeare by this time. At any rate, the essay contains the germ of Tragicomedy, later expounded in both Notebook 8 and the Guggenheim proposal: tragedy is an imaginative transformation of ritual sacrifice; comedy is an imaginative transformation of Carnival and Saturnalia. We do know from his correspondence with Helen Kemp Frye that he planned to develop the ideas on music from this essay into a Bachelor of Divinity thesis (NFHK, 1:199).
A complication meets us at the next stage of Frye’s thinking. While drama is an episodic form, myth develops towards “the encyclopaedic (in the literal sense of establishing a cycle)” (NB 7.82). Individual rituals may seem senseless enough if their connection to a larger pattern of significance has been lost, as it often has with folk rituals. But myths and symbols increasingly crystallize as ritual becomes conscious: “the archetype is the emergence of consciousness of nature,” Frye says at one point (NB 7.53). As various mythic narratives coalesce into a mythology, the symbols connected with them become an encyclopedic structure of meaning. The result is a total pattern that is both cyclic and encyclopedic, and is the potential basis of scripture. Narratively, this pattern is the death of a God-Man and his resurrection in a greater, redemptive form. Thematically, it is the loss of an original identity and the gaining of an expanded one.
Aside from the obvious resemblance to the Bible, what suggested to Frye the idea of a cyclic vision? The developing science of comparative mythology, for one thing: despite innumerable critics, then and now, who insist that the comparative method is not scientific, in The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer managed to discover, for all his Victorian prejudices, a mythical pattern that influenced everyone from Sigmund Freud to T.S. Eliot. Frazer’s breakthrough came through his study of the so-called “dying god” figures of various agricultural rituals, and both he and his Cambridge cohorts often tended to reduce all of mythology and literature to the vestiges of seasonal vegetation deities, year-gods, or other seasonal merchandise. But he got a glimpse, in one bright flash, of something with an importance far beyond all superstitious reductions of it, including his own. We have to examine the death-and-resurrection cycle in some detail because it is the basis, not only of Frye’s criticism, but of comparative mythology and the supposedly discredited “myth criticism” of literature. As Frye found true of the various schools of literary criticism in the time of the Anatomy, the various theories and types of myth criticism turn out to be not contradictory but synoptic. We may even construct, on the analogy of the five phases of symbolism in the Second Essay of the Anatomy, a sequence of five levels of meaning of the death-and-resurrection pattern, which together form something like a total vision of mythology:
1. First is the level on which the revival of the sacrificial figure represents the fulfilment of human primary concerns on a basic physical level. On this ground level, so to speak, Dionysus, one of Frazer’s dying gods, is a vegetation deity, and his revival means renewed fertility, saving the world from starvation and sterility. But the fact that “tragedy” means “goat song” reminds us that animal sacrifice somehow or other also got integrated into Dionysian symbolism, and the symbolism of animal sacrifice in hunting cultures is far older than the vegetation symbolism of Frazer’s dying gods, reaching back into the Palaeolithic. In Mesopotamian countries, water is a threatened primary concern, so the god Baal, according to Theodore Gaster’s Thespis, becomes identified with life-giving rain, a symbolism still going strong in Eliot’s The Waste Land.6 A mass civilization, insulated by technology from direct contact with nature, may think it can afford to dismiss anxiety over the primary physical concerns, but Frye tells us in The Myth of Deliverance that the fundamental theme of romance is still “survival.” In Words with Power, the mythical ascents and descents of chapters 4–8 lie down where all the ladders start, in the primary concerns of psychosomatic human nature.
2. On a more psychological level, what Abraham Maslow called the safety needs7 are satisfied because the sacrificial figure’s death is expiatory, and lends a sense of renewed order and coherence to the cosmos, by purging the guilt of violating that order. Hence mythical theories of taboo, purification, atonement, and catharsis.
3. Order and taboo are linked with the Freudian Oedipal level of myth. Here, Frye accepted Jung’s revision of Freud in Psychology of the Unconscious.8 In that case study, a young woman tries to break her ties of dependency on her mother and become an adult—this is the level represented in traditional societies by rites of adolescent initiation. When we break with the natural ground of being represented by the maternal, incest-longing becomes the desire for a lost paradise of regressive ease, Spenser’s Bower of Bliss. The neurotic crisis comes when we seem caught between repression of these longings, which is sterile, and acting them out, which is regressive. In literature, this is played out in the young-versus-old conflict of New Comedy. Jung saw that the hero in traditional mythology dives back into the ground of being, breaks the incest taboo in doing so, but fights an agon that achieves freedom on a new level of spirit rather than nature, and so is twice-born. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is largely written in this tonality.9 In Notebook 7, Frye notes at length the solar symbolism that Jung borrowed from Leo Frobenius: the hero, as an embodiment of psychic energy or libido, disappears into the dark cave or sea of the unconscious only to dawn again (NB 7.17–22). Now and again he notes the resemblance of the pattern to the rhythm of “withdrawal and return” that Arnold Toynbee saw as the basis of cultural creativity (NB 7.11; NB 8.47, 93).
4. On the social level, Frazer in The Golden Bough and Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) emphasize the binding of the group by the rite of sacrifice. Here we have what Frye calls the royal metaphor, the leader being the incarnation of the group (GC, 87; GC2, 106). He is the charismatic leader, and his charismatic energy is what unites the group into a single identity, but he only achieves that charisma by dying to his individual form—or at least he has to recharge his batteries, so to speak. His old form becomes the pharmakos, the rejected scapegoat. To this level also belong the myths of Carnival and Saturnalia, of a disruption of social order that renews or recreates that order, that were to be the starting point of Tragicomedy, Frye’s big book on Shakespearean comedy.
5. On the transcendent level, we have the “mysteries.” Here, there is not worship and atonement, but at-one-ment and communion, metaphorical identification. Dying to their limited ordinary identities, nature, humanity, and divinity resurrect into a single universal form. This is the message Frye calls kerygma, the vision of anagogy, the transcendence of the fallen human condition and the assumption of our true spiritual humanity. This is neither an antinatural nor a posthuman condition, since nature is not left behind but raised up with us to become part of the universal spiritual-yet-physical body of a God-Man who is all human beings equally, not just Jesus. Here, as in some poems by Dylan Thomas, such as Vision and Prayer, the Incarnation repeats itself with every human birth. On this level, we realize what initiates in the ancient mystery religions came to realize: our identity with the divine, the Hindu “Thou art That,” Paul’s “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.” Along with such interpenetration, time is metamorphosed into eternity, not as endless time but as what Jung called synchronicity, all times present in an eternal now. This level is the quintessence of the first four, or what Blake called the Everlasting Gospel, the level (and the only level) on which it is true that “All Religions Are One.” Frye’s favourite Renaissance version of it is what he calls the interchange of reality and illusion in Shakespeare’s mystery play, The Tempest.
Each of the five levels has a demonic parody. Level one: stereotypical savages praying to rain gods, or whatever. Level two: religion as obsessive-compulsive neurosis, bound up with ritual laws of purity. Level three: Oedipal neurosis, intimidated by the authoritarian claims of Papa God and Mama Church. Level four: the mass collective hysterias of various religious cults, up to and including outbreaks of mass psychosis like Nazism. Level five: either an Apollonian-Platonic-Christian ascetic desire to renounce the body, or a Dionysian desire to melt into the oceanic or the orgiastic.
The commonest objection to both myth criticism in general and Frye’s version of it in particular is that there is no evidence that such a total ritual ever existed, or that either folk customs or literary forms were ever derived from it. However, a reputable Classical scholar, Jeffrey Henderson, speaking in a new introduction to Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy of the origin of comedy in death-and-resurrection ritual, says:
Though most classicists have been from the beginning very suspicious of, and even hostile to, this kind of approach, it has been in recent years both sympathetically reevaluated and taken up again in exciting new directions. The Origin of Attic Comedy is still worth reading today because its basic approach is still valid and its results, though wrong in many details, prove essentially right in others, establishing the book as a solid starting point for further research.10
We may seem to have wandered from Frye’s approach to Renaissance literature, but in fact we have only backed up to a middle distance in order to see it against its backdrop of a larger theory of literature grounded in a still larger theory of myth. The Third Essay of the Anatomy assumes that all literary plots derive from four pregeneric mythoi, or plot patterns. In what A.C. Hamilton calls “the central theory of the Anatomy,”11 Frye says, “The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth” (AC, 192; AC2, 179). Agon or conflict is linked with romance; pathos or catastrophe with tragedy; sparagmos or fragmentation with irony and satire; anagnorisis or recognition with comedy. These terms for the parts of the universal death-and-resurrection pattern are taken, with some modification, from Gilbert Murray via Cornford. Later, in his notes towards A Natural Perspective, Frye shows some interest in the simplification of this pattern by Theodore Gaster in Thespis into rites of kenosis and plerosis, of emptying and filling (NB 9.85).12 By this time he was perhaps already becoming interested in the contrast between myths of ascent and descent, between the way of plenitude and the way of vacancy, that he will explore in the second half of Words with Power.
But to return finally to the complication in Frye’s theory of Renaissance literature, while drama may be a communal and socially integrating form, its episodic nature makes it difficult for it to manifest the complete cyclical pattern. Certain highly concentrated forms of drama may suggest it: Cornford finds its outlines in Old Comedy, Frye in Shakespearean romance. Dramas may be bulked up, like Goethe’s Faust, or linked into cycles, like the medieval mystery plays, to achieve a similar effect. But the real purpose of drama is not comprehensiveness but epiphany, or what C.L. Barber captures in his formula “Through release to clarification.”13 Drama puts both the characters and, vicariously, the audience through an experience that results, not merely in new knowledge, but also in some kind of reversal of ordinary consciousness and ordinary life. In The Myth of Deliverance, where this reversal is the central theme, Frye notes the resemblance of this pattern to “conversion” in Christianity, to paravritti (turning around) in Buddhism, even to “revolution” in politics: “Other words, such as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘salvation,’ emphasize rather the sense of recognition that accompanies this process” (MD, 13; cf. also NB 7.53). Blake’s version of it, the “vortex” by which the imagination turns ordinary perception inside out, is occasionally associated by Frye with the reversals of drama (NB 7.81). He sometimes thinks of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Regained, and Blake’s Milton as a trio of “vortical” works, in turn related to the Bible’s closest approach to drama, the Book of Job (TBN, 72, 74, 75, 282).
The title of Colin Still’s Shakespeare’s Mystery Play derives from his sense that vortical reversal, which is the form catharsis takes in comedy and comic romance, is a form of the death-and-resurrection pattern, undergone in the ancient mystery religions not just by a god but by the initiates themselves. Still’s book was an influence on the work of G. Wilson Knight,14 who in turn influenced Frye during a short period in which they were colleagues at the University of Toronto. Frye says, “Like most students of my generation, Knight’s books had much the effect on me that Chapman’s Homer had on Keats, and the method indicated, of concentrating on the author’s text but recreating it by studying the structure of imagery and metaphor, seemed to me then, and seems to me still, the sort of thing that criticism is centrally about” (SM, 13). Knight’s study of the Shakespearean imagery of tempest and musical harmony as symbols of chaos and order, The Shakespearian Tempest (1932), is no mere New Critical exploration of texture, however. Behind it stands Knight’s sense, articulated in his first published work, Myth and Miracle (1929), that the plays of Shakespeare are parables of death and resurrection, of which the imagery of tempest and harmony is the key.
In any case, Frye increasingly realized that his youthful theory had left out the second major Renaissance literary form, the epic. As the full cyclical myth is originally embodied in scripture, epic inherits the cyclical myth from scripture and recreates it in terms appropriate for a later age. It was most likely his work on Blake that drove him to make this addition. At any rate, he says in Fearful Symmetry, “The true epic is a cyclic vision of life, and the true drama, including narrative and heroic poetry, is an episode of that cyclic vision” (FS, 111; FS2, 115). The Bible is the “great code of art” because it provides a comprehensive version of the cyclic pattern, but an epic does not have to recreate the Bible directly, only to recreate the Bible’s kind of vision: “And the greater the work of art, the more completely it reveals the gigantic myth which is the vision of this world as God sees it, the outlines of that vision being creation, fall, redemption, and apocalypse” (FS, 108; FS2, 112). The Bible provides an individual form of the same cycle in the quest of the Messiah, whose agon, pathos, sparagmos, and anagnorisis follow the ritual pattern.
The ogdoad scheme struggles to fit the epic within its first tetralogy, which sometimes begins to seem like a classroom with too few seats. Tragicomedy was taken up with drama, and Rencontre with Romanticism and modernity. This left the first and third titles, Liberal and Anticlimax, to accommodate three subjects: (1) Scripture and “the anagogic habit of mind” (NB 7.10); (2) the epic considered as a cyclic narrative, a human counterpart to divine revelation; (3) the epic considered as a pattern of significance, with Renaissance “allegory” expanded, on the model of Dante, to include at least four levels of meaning. Originally, both Scripture and epic were to be included in Liberal, and the study of allegory and levels of meaning was to be the content of Anticlimax. However, by the time of Notebook 7, epic and allegory were combined in Anticlimax, now conceived as a book on Spenser. Notebook 43, the commentary on The Faerie Queene included in the present volume, belongs to this stage of the project. Later in Notebook 7, the epic line is split for reasons that will be discussed further on, with Liberal covering the part that runs from Scripture through Dante and Milton, and Spenser wandering in search of a home—at one point even being considered a compatible roommate with Shakespeare in Tragicomedy on the grounds of a mutual interest in romance (NB 7.95, 109, 136).
Since none of these works was ever written, the struggle to organize them may seem irrelevant. Yet the first tetralogy is Frye’s Four Zoas, its individual volumes the Vehicular Forms of four “concentred” powers of vision. Changes in their relationship imply an evolution of Frye’s vision. At any rate, we are now able to see that the preoccupations of Liberal are the ultimate source of The Great Code and Words with Power, Anticlimax the direct source of Anatomy of Criticism. What is interesting is the eventual exclusion, Blake notwithstanding, of epic from its central position as the firstborn son of Scripture, its position being filled by its younger brother, romance. After Fearful Symmetry, treatment of the epic poet’s visionary ambition survives in Frye’s book on Milton, The Return of Eden, especially in its first chapter, “The Story of All Things,” and in the section of the Anatomy’s Fourth Essay titled “Specific Encyclopedic Forms,” which describes the shape epics take in the romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic modes of literary history. But another factor has begun to complicate the picture.
There were two types of epos or long poem descending from the oral period of literature, one thematic and encyclopedic, one fictional and heroic. Each was “didactic” in its way. An encyclopedic poet such as Hesiod preserved “the myths, legends, maxims, proverbs, magic, and practical science of the community” (SeSCT, 370).15 A heroic poet like Homer was educational in a more experiential sense, his tales of the deeds of heroes providing role models and inspirational exempla for his society. What The Return of Eden calls “the ideal, the huge, impossible ideal” (RE, 6–7; M&B, 38) was to put them together: “The combination of the long didactic poem and the long heroic narrative produced what became in Renaissance critical theory the supreme genre that only the greatest poets could hope to succeed with: the encyclopedic epic poem, the poem that summarizes the learning of its time as well as telling one of the central stories in its society’s mythology” (SeSCT, 370).
A Christian visionary like Blake has affinities with the encyclopedic poems: for all their obvious differences, Hesiod’s Theogony, the mythological poems in the Elder Edda, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (minus its irony), and Dante’s Divine Comedy (minus its Catholicism) are possible models of what he wants to do. An English equivalent is the series of Old English poems directly recreating the Bible, from Genesis A and B to The Judgment Day I and II. Nevertheless, because of the prestige of Homer and his descendants, this is not the type of poetry we think of as “epic”: it is in, or harks back to, the mythical mode. It is the heroic epic that Blake finds indigestible, rejecting it in favour of the form he called “Prophecy.” Behind him is a line of Christian poets who, in sticking with the Homeric and Virgilian heroic model, were forced to redefine the nature of a heroic act in a radically, sometimes a contortedly, different fashion. But Christian ideology is a relatively minor obstacle; the major one is that to move from myth to heroic epic is to move from eternity to time, from the divine to the human, from the unlimited to the limited. Blake’s characters, though human, are “Giant Forms,” but, whatever enemies he fights, the real battle of the epic hero is with the constrictions of the fallen human condition. History enters the heroic epic, and epic heroes are “fools of time”—the fact that Frye uses the phrase (from Shakespeare’s sonnet 124) as the title for his book on tragedy shows how heroic epics such as the Iliad or the Nibelungenlied are akin to the tragic vision.16 Slowly, Frye finds himself following Blake in the attempt to refine this element out of the visionary tradition, or, rather, to subordinate it to a larger vision of redemption. By the time of The Secular Scripture, heroic epic and tragedy are said to belong to a cycle of forza, of the violence that comes from the struggle against the limits of fallen time. A literary evolution is taking place in which the cycle of forza is giving way to a cycle of froda, the cunning creativity that cheats time and undoes the fall.
Anatomy of Criticism has not yet reached this point—which would mean returning to some of the emphases of Fearful Symmetry-—but even its more formalistic treatment contrasts the full cyclic “epic of return” with three varieties more hostage to fallen time: the “epic of wrath” in which “the ironic or ‘all too human’ cycle, the mere cycle of human life without redemptive assistance” (AC, 317; AC2, 297) remains predominant (as in the Iliad); the “contrast epic” that contrasts the redemptive and ironic cycles (as in Piers Plowman); and the “analogical epic” that relates the two cycles on the basis of analogy.
The characterization of epic as the place where history and mutability break into the cycle of eternal myth leads up to a recognition of what has almost entirely dropped out of the discussion of encyclopedic forms in Anatomy of Criticism: namely, that epics do not merely succeed one another in time, but are part of an evolutionary expansion of vision. That is, a new epic is not merely the reappearance of an eternal form outfitted in a more fashionable wardrobe, like a contemporary remake of an old movie. According to Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History, cultures that never venture beyond the mythic mode have, in a sense, no history: they live in a kind of cyclically eternal now.17 When the Babylonian king read the Creation myth during the New Year festival, time was born anew, as if the old time never existed; the old year was abandoned like the shell of an egg after it has hatched. There is little doubt, to be sure, that individual fear of mortality and institutional desire to reinforce the social order by uniting it to a changeless cosmic rhythm can lead to a great deal of pretence: whole cultures have gone to great lengths to behave as if it were possible to live in a cyclically eternal “cosmic time.” But the ideological hysteria of our time will probably have to pass away before the question of transcendence can be examined honestly and sanely. Whatever the case, Eliade believes that it was the three Biblical religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which broke into the conservative cycle with a revolutionary sense that history was linear and moving towards a, goal.
Actually, the Bible’s vision of history combines the cyclical and the linear: this is in fact the basis of Biblical typology. The first cycle of human history ends at the eleventh chapter of Genesis, when God drowns a humanity grown totally corrupt from the effects of the fall. Since the first thing we hear about after the flood is the tower of Babel, it is clear that humanity, left to its own devices, is capable only of endlessly repeating what, in Blake’s myth, Frye calls the Ore cycle. Natural energy, symbolized by the fiery-haired Ore, rises up with each new generation, determined to renew, recreate, or replace the exhausted and corrupt mode of life of the previous generation, symbolized by the white-haired tyrant Urizen. But, with every turn of the cycle, Ore either dies young—sometimes self-destructing, sometimes being sacrificed by the forces of reaction—or he merely ages into Urizen. So, having promised never to destroy the world again, God sets in motion a counter-movement, a reversal of the Ore cycle, which begins with his promise to Abraham. Our redemption does not occur once and for all: the wheel of history keeps turning, and humanity keeps rising and falling. But the intervention of a counter-force means that some kind of evolutionary transformation is at least possible in each cycle, that humanity and the universe alike are in fact growing, and not just growing older. It means a faith in life as a chrysalis, a hope for metamorphosis, a love that endureth all things for the sake of this faith and this hope.
What is the counter-force? The traditional theological name for it is grace, but we experience it as an influx of imaginative energy, resulting in an expansion and clarification of vision. Blake embodied it in the figure of his real hero, Los, who is creative time, and as such the invisible hero of Shakespearean romance. It is easy to call such a notion New Age and reduce it to something banal—easy enough to find evidence for such a reduction as well. It is easy to mistake it for a merely intellectual evolution, though the fact that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is haunted by the ghost (or Geist) of its dynamism makes it an important book for Frye. It is easy to attack in the name of dialectical materialism, though the revolutionary hopes of Marxism are inconceivable without some such sense of creative time. Yet Blake’s idea that the apocalypse comes about through the progressive clarification of error may not be as naive as it seems. If we protested that enlightenment or insight has no effect on the desperately crippled human will to evil, Blake would agree, but would contend that what he has in mind is rather the countering of the egocentric will of the natural man by a still more powerful creative will, which we may call either grace or imagination depending upon whether we experience it as coming from outside or inside. Every imaginative act, every educational act, every act of love and compassion is a manifestation of a creative will that can and has changed the world, by changing our perception of the world.
The basis of Biblical typology is progressive revelation, a process that has shaped not only history but also Scripture itself. Fearful Symmetry says of the Bible: “It records a continuous reshaping of the earlier and more primitive visions, and as it goes on it becomes more explicitly prophetic, until the confused legends of an obscure people take the form of the full cyclic vision of fall, redemption, and apocalypse. … The imaginative recreation of Old Testament visions in the New Testament, reaching its climax in the dense mosaic of allusions and quotations in the Apocalypse, merely completes a process which goes on to a considerable extent within the Old Testament itself” (FS, 317; FS2, 311).
The point of all this for Renaissance epic is that the epic tradition is charged with the same recreative dynamism, each epic attempting not merely to repeat but to clarify its precursor’s vision. Yet all that survives of the epic’s progress in vision in the section in Anatomy of Criticism on “Specific Encyclopaedic Forms” is a single sentence: “Hence there is, as we go from the Classical to the Christian epic, a progress in completeness of theme (not in any kind of value), as Milton indicates in such phrases as ‘Beyond the Aonian mount’” (AC, 320; AC2, 300). Frye has said that a chapter on epic was eliminated at the last moment from the Anatomy, so perhaps some of the preceding discussion hints at its content (TBN, 74, 330).
There is, it must be admitted, a shadow side to this evolution: an increase in self-consciousness, which can result in what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence, an Oedipal agon in which the poet misreads his precursor in the attempt to prove that his own tower of Babel is bigger.18 This feeling of “belatedness” is a variety of the self-conscious alienation that has been the burden of modernity at least since the Romantics made Hamlet into a central Western archetype. In his student work, Frye calls it skepsis, and says it is characteristic of the final phase of the Spenglerian cycle, when culture dies and is replaced by mass urban civilization beginning around the Romantic period (SE, 36). In Blake, it is the struggle of Los with the Spectre of Urthona, creative time with ordinary time, the imaginative will with the egocentric will. But the other side of the story is the counter-movement itself: “If … one man’s vision returns to another and is recreated with final clarity, a permanent eternal form will appear in time and the fallen perspective of time as a vanishing current will be arrested” (FS, 323; FS2, 316). This is the building of the ruins of time into the mansions of eternity (FS, 318; FSz, 311): “Complete awareness on the part of the poet that the tradition of poetry behind him is not a purely linear sequence but an evolution of a single archetypal form is thus the same thing as a vision of Golgonooza, the whole of human life seen in the framework of fall and redemption outlined by the poets” (FS, 323; FS2, 316).
The process of recreation cannot be fully ascribed to the influence of Biblical typology, because it can already be seen in the Classical line of epics. In book 11’s meeting in the underworld between Odysseus, man of froda and inveterate survivor, with the dead and disconsolate heroes of the Iliad, the Odyssey may already be reconsidering the heroic code of honour that brings about such futile suffering in the earlier poem. Hesiod’s Theogony justifies the ways of Zeus to men in the face of the Olympian indifference of Homer’s deities, and Aeschylus perhaps attempted to revise Hesiod by showing Zeus learning and maturing through his struggle with Prometheus. Virgil’s Aeneid creates a new kind of hero in the pins or dutybound Aeneas, and a new sense of providential history that will become an inspiration to Dante. The Christian poet’s pilgrimage reaches heights of vision beyond the reach of his pagan guide. It fell to English poets, at least as they considered it, to produce a Protestant epic clarifying the errors of Dante’s Catholic one.
Two aspects of Roman Catholicism, greatly valued by many Catholics, have a particular pertinence to the arts. One is a rich iconography articulated in the art of the medieval cathedrals, the symbolism of the Mass and other rituals, the sacraments, the festivals of the Church year, and the lives of the saints, not to mention the Divine Comedy, perhaps the most encyclopedic epic ever written. Compared with this, Protestantism has seemed to some people impoverished by an iconoclasm and fear of “idolatry” that is really a disguise for a prudery subject to outbreaks of moralizing censorship; behind such prudery lurks a fear of imagination itself. The other aspect is a sense of community and human interdependence, compared with which Protestant individualism can appear joyless and lonely, perhaps in the end a cloak for mere egotism and pride. The Protestant response to these charges is that Catholic symbolism, however rich and encyclopedic, is imprisoned within the structure of an institution that, to buttress its temporal power, insists upon interpreting it literally and supernaturally rather than imaginatively, despite protests from its own theologians as early as Origen. When Frye composed his early notebooks, the Catholic Church had long since stopped persecuting people like Galileo, but it was still condemning “Modernism,” which included interpretations of the Bible informed by modern scholarship. The Protestant rebuttal of Catholic communalism is that it is crippled by a hierarchical authoritarianism. Rationalizing such tyranny is always some version of what Frye calls the legal analogy, the deducing of social structure from the analogy of the fallen human body. The king or Pope is the head, the aristocracy or clergy are the body, and we are the lowly members, whose duty is to obey without question. For Frye and Blake, true community can only be based on the spiritual body, which is interpenetrating rather than hierarchical, and is the basis of what Milton, following Paul, calls Christian liberty.
The fact that these stereotypes are far from being the whole truth about either church does not mean that there is not a partial truth pointing in both directions. The criticisms were taken seriously by that “cosmopolitan humanist culture” in the Renaissance with which Frye associates both Blake and himself. The task of a Protestant epic poet was to help bring about the apocalypse by consolidating and casting out the errors on both sides, uniting the truth of Catholicism to the truth of Protestantism. To understand the goal of Frye’s proposed book on Spenser, and to see what he was looking for when he wrote his canto-by-canto commentary in Notebook 43, we have to consult certain passages in Notebook 7.
There were two great English Protestant epic poets, Spenser and Milton, and Frye often tries to understand the former by way of contrasting him with the latter. He even says once, “I think Spenser & Milton may both be epic failures, a gigantic fragmentation of an unwritten Protestant Dante whose St. Thomas philosophical articulation I have to try to establish in L [Liberal], or A [Anticlimax], or whatever the hell it is. That non-existent epic poet & non-existent philosopher are balanced by a dramatist who really did exist, so that ⌉ [Tragicomedy] will have a follow-through the others lack” (NB 7.44). Earlier, he characterizes the split by saying, “I can clarify absolutely the social & political form of the Bible in Milton, & I think I can clarify the rhetorical or symbolic form of it in Spenser. Blake does both, & my epic book is beginning to split” (NB 7.26). What this means in practice is that he is attempting to find a recreated counterpart of Dante’s Catholic iconography in Spenser and a recreated counterpart of Catholic communalism in Milton. He identifies these respectively with the Ore and Los themes in Blake.
In book 1 of The Faerie Queene, Spenser recreates Biblical symbolism on a Protestant basis. Even here, a difference from Catholic symbolism is evident. Catholic symbols have a vertical reference: they point upwards towards a transcendent supernatural reality, to which they are related according to the Thomistic “analogy of being.” This makes allegory almost an inevitable method for a medieval poet. Yet although Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle, Protestant allegory is in fact more Aristotelian and less Platonic: the reference of the symbols is immanent, horizontal, and teleological rather than transcendent, vertical, and participatory. To put it less abstractly, St. George is the knight of Holiness, but not everything he does participates in and exemplifies that virtue. In fact, some of his most crucial actions are those which betray that virtue. It would be more satisfying to say that St. George is on a quest in which, through great struggle in this world, he longs for, develops towards, and increasingly verges upon the ideal of holiness. Characterization in Dante may in many respects be far more realistic than Spenserian stylization, but it remains true that the figures in the Divine Comedy outside of Dante himself exist in an afterlife in which their character has been eternally decided and judged; the fate of even the souls in Purgatory is a foregone conclusion. Spenser’s characters dwell in Faerie, but Faerie is another aspect of this world, and it is no accident that their careers follow the general pattern of something like Jung’s process of individuation. For Spenser, this life is something like Keats’s “vale of soul-making.”
Yet Frye was interested in Spenser for reasons beyond the recreation of the Bible in book 1, however well that fits his epic thesis. In order to recreate the encyclopedic symbolism of the death-and-resurrection cycle in its true form, before it was kidnapped by a conservative ideology, Spenser has to descend back to the level of the “symbolism of the unconscious” as exemplified in ancient ritual. He finds that symbolism, however, not in ritual or drama but in its narrative equivalent, romance. Frye chose Spenser as the subject of his second book because at that point he saw romance as the half-conscious matrix of the cyclic pattern that achieves full consciousness as epic: “romance is full of Ore quests & that’s why it approaches & develops into the epic” (NB 7.58). Romance at this stage is seen as a kind of naive pre-epic, which may help to explain the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism. There, the literary mode between the mythic and the high mimetic is “romance,” which subsumes the traditional epics of the oral and heroic period. Epic belongs rather to the high mimetic period of the Renaissance. As literary history, this is debatable: it is disconcerting to hear that the Iliad is not really epic but a kind of romance. What is more important, though, is Frye’s search for a kind of deep substratum of archetypal symbolism and narrative in the area of romance rather than epic.19 And many of the scholarly works that influenced Frye in his formative years are what he called “Ore encyclopaedias”: “Curious,” he observes, “how many Orc-encyclopaedias there are in modern symbolism: Jung, Frazer, Frobenius, Hartland’s Legend of Perseus, & all the work on Jesus assimilating him to dying gods and sun myths. And how few Los ones there are—perhaps none” (NB 7.14). Of all these, Jung was Frye’s chief guide to the cyclic and encyclopedic symbolism of romance—so much so that the original version of the Second Essay of the Anatomy, as it is laid out in Notebook 7, makes the first phase of symbolism a psychological one whose chief exponent is Jung.
What would a Los encyclopedia look like? For one thing, its form would probably not be the cycle but the dialectic: we here, verge upon Frye’s change of allegiance in the second half of his career from cyclical to dialectical schemes. Here also the Protestant epic shifts from Spenser to Milton, for it is the transition from Ore to Los as hero that Spenser could not manage. Notebook 7 says: “Anyway, if Spenser breaks down about p 246 of FS Milton just gets nicely going there. His clarified view of the prophet gives him his Los, & his doctrine of liberty clears up the legal analogy as thoroughly as Blake” (NB 7.43). To translate: so long as Spenser remains in the Faerie otherworld of archetypal symbolism, as he does through books 1–4, his intuitions are resonant and suggestive. It is no accident that Notebook 43 breaks off here. But he bungles the transition to history in book 5, in which justice is reduced to a ruthless suppression of any members of society’s body that rebel against the authoritative head. In Spenser, as in Dante, we are at liberty only to obey external authority, however arbitrary or panic-stricken.
Milton’s distinction between liberty and license is the great leap that makes someone like Blake or Frye possible. Liberty is not freedom from external rules—that is only license, which results in enslavement to internal compulsions and neuroses. We truly liberate ourselves, realize our latent powers, only through a process of internalization that involves discipline. We are liberated into the capability of being a musician, an athlete, a writer, only through relentless practice. Here we are obedient to an inner law of our own being, not to an external authority. That inner law emanates from an even deeper source, a light shining in our inner darkness. If we are an Inner Light Protestant, we may call it God. We may call it a Muse, or some other variety of the Goddess. Jung called it the Self, as distinguished from the ego or ordinary personality. In Blake, it is Los, the imagination, the inner pulse of creative time. It is this inner source that clarifies, transforms, and makes personal and artistic evolution possible. But true community is possible only if it too is founded upon inward discipline rather than outward compulsion—a society that is held together only by rules and coercion will fall apart in the long run. And on the deepest level, community becomes communion, and we realize that we are not specialized component parts of a larger machine. Any act of imaginative empathy, whether it derives from reading a work of literature, from falling in love or forming a friendship, or from some intense social emergency, breaks down those walls of partition that give the illusion that we are separate and alienated. The struggle between egocentric alienation and imaginative empathy is the true evolutionary dialectic in human life. Milton understands all this better than Spenser, and Blake better than Milton. Yet the time spent on Spenser was not wasted, for he, along with Shakespeare, helped show Frye that there was one remaining factor in his argument, and that it lay in the area of romance.
Frye’s theory of the ritual cycle, the derivation from it of myth and scripture, the derivation of epic from scriptural myth, the dialectical evolution of the epic vision, the place of The Faerie Queene in the history of epic, the relationship of all these to the forever-about-to-be ogdoad project—such various elements have had to be gathered together from various sources, published and unpublished, and spliced together into a complete picture. Frye’s unpublished writing on Shakespeare can be discussed more briefly, although it forms the largest portion of the present volume—in fact, partly because it forms a larger portion. His work on Shakespeare is more comprehensive, coherent, and easily grasped than his thinking about epic, which tends to fade into the landscape of his criticism, or non-Shakespearean romance, about which his opinion altered a good deal over the course of his life. He probably came closer to writing Tragicomedy in a shape something like its original conception than to writing any other volume of the ogdoad: from what we can tell, not much seems to be missing from it when his published books are considered collectively. Nonetheless, as the Guggenheim proposal makes clear, his writing on Shakespeare was never intended to stand alone, and we can gain a new understanding by returning it to its place within the larger visionary and theoretical context out of which it was born.
Most of Frye’s earlier work on Shakespeare, up to and including the Anatomy, seems to have been quarried from Notebook 8, one of the longest and most interesting of all the notebooks. Frye burst upon the Shakespearean scene in 1949 with an essay that caused a considerable amount of excitement, “The Argument of Comedy.”20 It begins with New Comedy, which descends from the Greek Menander and the Romans Plautus and Terence, because of its dominant position not only on the Elizabethan stage but also in the history of comedy generally. Something about his description of the fairly simple pattern it is based on has seemed suggestive to many readers; Frye’s purpose is to show what exactly it suggests, which turns out to be the “symbolism of the unconscious” of the old ritual pattern. The formulas are well known to any reader of Frye, especially as he repeated them many times over the years. In terms of character, New Comedy is a conflict between eiron and alazon, the sympathetic and blocking characters. The comic plot begins with the alazon in ascendance, but through some sort of reversal (peripeteia), often produced through the agency of two secondary eiron figures, the vice and the “retreating eiron,” a happy ending is brought about on individual, erotic, and social levels. The theme of comedy is an epiphany (anagnorisis) of realized desire on a double level: of fulfilled primary concerns and of the expansion of energy and consciousness that such fulfilment brings about. The latter is what Frye calls “deliverance.”
Tragedy is an inversion of this pattern. Instead of alazon, eiron, and vice, it has an order figure, a rebel figure, and a nemesis figure respectively. The tragic plot is also based on reversal, though in an opposite direction, towards social, erotic, and individual unhappy endings; these result in tragedies of order, passion, and isolation respectively. The theme of tragedy is an epiphany of desire thwarted, of “being in time” and therefore subject to the limitations of natural and social law. Corresponding to comic deliverance is tragic catharsis, the individualizing detachment of the spectator.
“The Argument of Comedy” adds to this:
Many things are involved in the tragic catharsis, but one of them is a mental or imaginative form of the sacrificial ritual out of which tragedy arose. This is the ritual of the struggle, death, and rebirth of a God-Man, which is linked to the yearly triumph of spring over winter.… Comedy grows out of the same ritual, for in the ritual the tragic story has a comic sequel. Divine men do not die: they die and rise again. The ritual pattern behind the catharsis of comedy is the resurrection that follows the death, the epiphany or manifestation of the risen hero. This is clear enough in Aristophanes, where the hero is treated as a risen God-Man.…21
It follows that “New Comedy is thus contained, so to speak, within the symbolic structure of Old Comedy,”22 and Old Comedy is contained within the still older ritual pattern. The latter is the thesis of Francis Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy, to which Frye is attaching his discussion of New Comedy. This is indicated by his use of the terms alazon, eiron, etc., whose source is in Aristotle and the Tractatus Coislinianus, a pamphlet that possibly summarizes Aristotle’s lost lectures on comedy (an outline of its contents appears towards the end of Notebook 8). However, John Ayre has observed that Frye probably took them originally from Cornford.23 Frye’s premise in “The Argument of Comedy” is that “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”—and the fact that this statement is quoted from the Guggenheim proposal submitted in the same year as that essay demonstrates that it was to be the premise of Tragicomedy as well.
An unexpected development, though, as the argument of comedy swims upstream toward its origins, is the emergence of a dialectical pattern that begins to compete in prominence with the cyclical one, not just here but in all Frye’s work. “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951; FI, 7–20), designed as a kind of “trailer” for the Anatomy, bases the whole study of literature on the cycle; so does the Third Essay of Anatomy itself. Anatomy was to be followed by what Frye referred to as the Third Book, whose centrepiece was a cyclical diagram of literary patterns called the Great Doodle. The Great Doodle was apparently constructed by importing a “circle of archetypes” for drama out of Notebook 8 and fusing it with a set of horizontal and vertical axes (NB 8.274). The never-written Third Book is the moment of reversal in Frye’s career. It underwent its own death-and-resurrection process, out of which emerged two books, The Secular Scripture and Words with Power, in which the cyclic pattern of the Great Doodle was restructured into a series of ascents and descents along a vertical axis between two poles. The conflict between these two poles becomes the “dialectic of Word and Spirit” in the Late Notebooks and, at least implicitly, in Words with Power.
The “Argument” essay notes the dialectical structure in Aristophanes: “his comedy, unlike Menander’s, is Platonic and dialectic: it seeks not the entelechy of the soul but the Form of the Good, and finds it in the resurrection of the soul from the world of the cave to the sunlight.”24 New Comedy sets up an Oedipal situation in which young eiron lovers triumph over an alazon who is often a tyrannical paternal senex, which is Greek for old fart. The triumph of young love is teleological in that it looks towards a goal in the future; it represents both natural fertility and social renewal. For the lovers, it is an adolescent rite of passage, initiating them into mature sexuality and the social order. Such a happy ending and such a future orientation is appropriate to the first half of life. Yet it is still contained within the cycle of nature, and will therefore be subject eventually to mutability and death. During a second rite of passage, the midlife crisis, the question looms that Jung poses in his essay “The Stages of Life”: What is the use of the second half of life, after the youthful quest for love, family, and career has been accomplished?25 The commonest protagonist in Aristophanes is an older man, a senex who is somehow revitalized, often to triumph over his own son or a younger crowd. In this, he is preceded by Odysseus, who in the Odyssey not only conquers 108 suitors half his age but who regains wife and kingdom while his son does not get so much as a girlfriend. The older generation in Shakespeare’s romances also upstages the younger lovers, though the emphasis is thrown not upon their rejuvenation but upon a coming to terms with their past. In our time we have Yeats’s Wild Wicked Old Man, not to mention Yeats’s attempt to enact the role in his own life. While all these victories of the grey-haired crowd are within this world, the symbolism points to something beyond inevitable decay and death, to a resurrection from nature to spirit. As such, the dialectical process is a dramatic version of the dialectical counter-movement of recreation, against the movement of fallen time, which we have seen in the epic tradition.
Long before the final period of the romances, Shakespeare shows an interest in the dialectical movement. He is conservative enough to contain the dialectic’s potentially revolutionary upheavals within an overall cyclical plot structure: the social order is improved, but never overturned or more than temporarily disrupted. Nonetheless, the dialectical tendency shows itself in the pivotal comic reversal, which takes two different forms, one with affinities to satire and the other to romance.
The discussion of Old Comedy in “Romance as Masque” (1975; SM, 148–78; SeSCT, 125–51)26 shows clearly that Old Comedy is not merely close to satire but a dramatic form of it. The high-spirited lunacy unleashed in a comedy of Aristophanes is identical to “the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and Apuleius” (AC, 235; AC2, 220) in prose satire. It is out of this plunge back into primal chaos that the new creation of the happy ending comes, miraculously or ridiculously depending upon one’s point of view. Shakespeare lived in far too conservative a society to revive Old Comedy in any overt way: the uninhibited language, physical humour, and political incorrectness of Aristophanes would never have been allowed upon the Elizabethan stage. But Frye, like C.L. Barber in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, notes that English comedy developed in part out of native folk customs like the “feast of the ass,” the “Boy Bishop,” and the “lord of misrule.” Both critics have been influenced by the standard discussions of such customs in E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, and Enid Welsford, The Court Masque, where they are explained as manifestations of a licensed period of carnival or revelry, analogous to the Roman festival of Saturnalia, in which the normal social order was turned upside down.27 Favourite dates for such periods of controlled reversal are the two poles of the year: hence the springtime festivities of Carnival (or Shrovetide, including Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras) and the winter revelry of the twelve days of Christmas alluded to in the title of Twelfth Night.28 Such customs are the opposite of revolutionary; they are release valves to relieve social tensions on a regular basis before they can build up any real pressure for social change. Anyone who persists in misrule out of season must be cast out of the society, like Falstaff by Henry V. But they retain a transformative potential that Shakespeare is able to exploit: Notebook 8 says that “The dramatic comedy is a Saturnalia, a festival coinciding with Christmas and designed to restore the Golden Age by subverting the Iron one” (NB 8.172).
In addition to coming about through a Saturnalia within the social group, comic resolution in Shakespeare can also occur when the characters leave ordinary life and enter into a strange, enchanted other world, often symbolized by a forest. The “green world” comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It also derive from native tradition, going back through the romantic dramas of Peele, Lyly, and Greene to roots in folk rituals dramatizing the contest of summer and winter, and so forth. Like all true contraries, the Saturnalian and green world varieties of comedy are related in a yin-yang pattern. What happens in the green world is a kind of Saturnalian creative chaos; conversely, the overturn of normal order transforms society itself into a kind of uncanny otherworld. Oddly enough, the sophisticated and artificial form of the Court masque resembles the folk rituals by having two dialectical poles, one the anarchic Comus-rout of the antimasque, the other the idealized society of the Court itself, decorated with the rhetorical glitter of the Chain of Being.
As the Saturnalian pattern gives Shakespeare a kinship with Aristophanes, the green world pattern gives him a kinship with Spenser, a kinship much on Frye’s mind in “The Argument of Comedy,” where he speaks of
the green world of the Faerie Queene. The latter is a world of crusading virtues proceeding from the Faerie Queene’s court and designed to return to that court when the destiny of the other world is fulfilled. The fact that the Faerie Queene’s knights are sent out during the twelve days of the Christmas festival suggests our next point.29
Spenser’s letter to Raleigh explaining the plan of his poem does not actually say that the twelve days of the Faerie Queene’s festival are the twelve days of Christmas, but the important point, made also in Notebook 7, is that Faerie is both a green world and a Saturnalia (NB 7.90). While there is no time to follow it up here, the insight that romance, whether in Spenser or elsewhere, may have something greater to offer than a museum display of the naive “symbolism of the unconscious,” will eventually lead Frye towards a reconsideration of romance and Romanticism in his later career. The romance otherworld, for all its ambiguities, dangers, and temptations, seems somehow a necessary part of the process by which the visionary imagination rebuilds the ruins of time.
An important implication at this point is that Shakespearean romantic comedy and comic romance do not run away from history and tragedy. Rather, they ultimately comprehend history and tragedy, in the sense of both containing them and clarifying them. In Notebook 8, Robert Greene is said to have resented what looked like Shakespeare’s assuming a laureate role by writing his history plays (NB 8.11). It is easy enough to see the double tetralogy on the Wars of the Roses, bracketed by King John and Henry VIII, as a dramatic attempt to approximate the encyclopedic epic form. But Shakespeare’s epic tendencies do not stop there. Also in Notebook 8, the observation is made, still being repeated in The Myth of Deliverance, that history in Shakespeare expands to include a prior sequence of plays between Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline (NB 8.32). Geoffrey of Monmouth records the legend, or propaganda, that Britain is the third Troy. The second Troy is Rome, founded by the Trojan Aeneas after the fall of the first; Britain is also said to have been founded by Trojan migration, the alternative name for London being Troynovant. In Cymbeline, the second and third Troys are reconciled during the time of Christ in a play that ends on the word “peace.” In between come plays of ancient British history (King Lear, Macbeth) and plays of Roman history (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus).
To push back further is to leave legend for mythology. In traditions alluded to by Milton in Comus, the unfallen England is identified with the islands of the Hesperides in the far West, and even with Atlantis (NB 8.35). The fall of Troy repeats the earlier fall of Atlantis, and was regarded as a Classical equivalent of the fall of man. But in Blake’s mythology, the earliest fall was that of the universal God-Man, of which both the garden of Eden story and the fall of Troy are repetitions. Therefore, in undisplaced mythical vision, Britain before the fall would have been united as a single gigantic human body, Blake’s Albion. In the following passage, Frye imagines that Shakespeare had some intuition of the larger fall:
But as I reach the periphery of the “ancient British history,” huge schemes of how Shakespeare must have conceived it begin to form like shapes in clouds. The record of a gigantic primitive civilization & vast Völker-wanderungen30 preserved in Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, & Cymbeline … pushing on into the Tempest-Atlantis business, both limits by surrounding & at the same time bursts the whole Spenser epic scheme. (NR, 16)
Controlling the argument here is Blake’s belief that, in his fall, the God-Man shattered into wandering hordes that created an “original world-culture” of Druidism (FS, 174–5; FS2, 176–7), including the first epics.31 When Lear and Hotspur propose to divide England, it amounts symbolically to a repetition of the original sparagmos (NB 8.2); Prospero undoes such fragmentation by uniting his island as a single social body once again.
“The Argument of Comedy” tells us that the visionary goal of Spenser’s poem is the transformation of the red and white world of history by the green world of the Faerie Queene.32 Frye adds that “Shakespeare, like Spenser, is moving towards a synthesis of the two worlds, a wedding of Prince Arthur and the Faerie Queene.”33 Such an outcome would be what Frye’s last book calls a double vision, the ordinary world and the otherworld seen as the same reality in a double aspect, like samsara and nirvana in Mahayana Buddhism.
One of Frye’s most useful ideas is that occasionally a lyric poem may achieve “a concentration that expands it into a miniature epic” (AC, 324; AC2, 303). His standard Renaissance examples are Spenser’s Epithalamion and Milton’s Lycidas, but he seems to have thought of Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and Turtle as being in the same category. Such a lyric would contain in microcosm not only the full range of imagery of a larger epic, but the cyclical and dialectical patterns of the encyclopedic epic as well. Every once in a while, Frye entertained the idea that he could write a whole book as “a tour de force commentary on The Phoenix & the Turtle” (NB 7.1) due to its “microcosmic completeness” (NB 7.109; cf. TBN, 282).34 He makes the passing comment that “PT, like the late comedies of which the problem comedies are analogies, seems to me the real ‘tragicomedy’” (NB 7.109). Unfortunately, we do not have a full-length commentary by Frye on that miniature epic. The best we have is the section of Notebook 14 containing an analysis of Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr, included in the same memorial volume as Shakespeare’s poem.35 The expansion of Eros symbolism in an encyclopedic direction is clear, however, even in that very limited poem.
Notebook 13 also preserves Frye’s notes towards his essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets, “How True a Twain” (1962; FI, 88–106). A sequence of lyrics can also develop into a miniature epic; in fact, with the departure of full-length narrative into prose fiction, this has perhaps become what remains of epic ambition in our time, as evidenced by The Waste Land, Notes towards a Supreme Fiction, The Sea and the Mirror, and some of the intricately organized collections of Yeats. The narrative sequence Frye finds in the sonnets again contrasts the cycle of fallen time, in which the narcissistic beautiful youth and the Dark Lady revolve on their way towards death, and a dialectical separation of worlds above and below the cycle, a world of annihilation and nonexistence below and an eternal state above achieved by emancipated love and imagination.
Frye’s essay on Thomas More’s Utopia, “Natural and Revealed Communities” (1987; MM, 289–306), took him both directions in the cycle of time.36 As he notes in his introduction to the published essay, Utopia was practically the first work he taught to undergraduates as a young instructor. But he probably wrote the essay as a way of working up material towards the book he imagined as the successor to Words with Power. He says in a late notebook:
My next book has the central theme of education and Utopia. The axiom that a Utopia is really a projection of a theory of education has been borne out so often I don’t need to query it: just find examples of it. I have four papers on More, on Castiglione, on Butler’s Life and Habit, & on William Morris, to draw on, along with a lot of intuitions about Plato and the symposium form of dialogue. (LN, 1404)37
This is actually a return appearance of Frye’s conception of Anticlimax during the period of the Third Book project, where he says: “Anticlimax is at present vaguer than the other?, but will be concerned with: prose forms; contracts and Utopias; the relation of these to the theory of education; communication, community and communion as progressive stages in identity; conceptual displacements of myths” (TBN, 338). The More essay takes off from a point Frye made in The Return of Eden, that the Renaissance considered there were major genres for prose as well as for poetry (RE, 11–12; M&B, 42). Two forms tended to coalesce because they did so in Plato: the Socratic dialogue and the description of the ideal commonwealth. Contrasted with them was the educational treatise, focusing on the ruling-class figures whom it was important to get educated, the prince, courtier, or magistrate. More’s Utopia belongs to the first category, but it has important connections with the second category as well. Utopia means “noplace” for a good reason: either it is impossible to establish one in real life, or, if it were established, its reduction of human life to the laws of nature and reason would turn it into a dehumanizing tyranny. The real use of a Utopia is as a model in the wise person’s mind. A Utopia thus becomes the mental model for the goal of education.
In the process of developing this theme, Frye establishes a resemblance with Spenserian romance:
It [More’s Utopia] has much in common with another educational treatise written later in the century, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Here the whole apparatus of chivalric romance is consolidated into a world called “Faerie,” which is a moral model of England itself, and is therefore, as Spenser indicates in his introduction to the second book, “nowhere,” that is, not in space. Both More’s Utopia and Spenser’s Faerie have affinities with Dante’s Purgatorio, another construct that brings out the moral shape of the life on Dante’s side of the world. (MM, 295)
Utopia is thus another form of the romance otherworld, though urban and rational rather than pastoral and aesthetic.
However, there is a connection between Utopia and Shakespeare as well, via The Tempest. One of the themes of Tragicomedy that regrettably did not get developed has to do with a frequent linking in Notebook 8 of The Tempest with Aristophanes’ greatest play, The Birds.38 Of Shakespeare’s climactic play, he says: “Its counterpart is The Birds, also of course a Utopia-play” (NB 8.97). Well, we can see how Prospero creates, though not a Utopia, a society that, though far from perfect, is at least transformed on the basis of a Utopian model. But the Cloud-Cuckooland of The Birds is rather the inverted parody of a Utopia. What Frye intended is conjectural, but seems to be bound up with one of his oracular repeated phrases, “the reflection of a reflection.” In Notebook 7, he says, “The scherzo of comedy is the reflection of the reflection, the catching of Saturn’s reign from its analogy” (NB 7.94). If comedy holds the mirror up to nature, the ideal gestured at by that phrase is not, as has been commonly supposed, some kind of photographic realism, but—with the pun fully intended—quite the reverse. Mirrors draw external reality down inside themselves, into a kind of otherworld. In doing so, they reverse it. Allegedly ideal states projected in the external world are either absurd or sinister—yet if we put their “analogy” through a mirror reversal in imagination, we catch a glimpse of the true ideal. A Natural Perspective says that “Such comedy does not hold a mirror up to nature, but it frequently holds a mirror up to another mirror, and brings its resolution out of a double illusion” (NP, 111–12). Frye elsewhere notes a pattern of mirror imagery of similar import in the Divine Comedy (see TBN, 38m. 12), and even thinks that Prospero’s name is etymologically related to the thematic complex, spero being Italian for mirror (NB 8.98, 170). He also notes the bird as archetype of transcendence, showing up in Aristophanes’, Shakespeare’s (Ariel), and Mozart’s greatest comedies (NB 8.252). The Phoenix and Turtle is also based on the escape of a burning bird (NB 8.264), as in its modern descendent, Dylan Thomas’s A Winter’s Tale (TBN, 196).
We seem to have characterized the third volume of Frye’s Guggenheim proposal, on Renaissance prose forms. Yet something seems to be left out. Where is the prose form that Frye adopted as his own, the anatomy, whose greatest Renaissance example, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, gave him a name for the entire category? The anatomy is an encyclopedic prose form, an intellectual and critical equivalent of cyclical scriptural myth. As such, it must be a genre of genres, drawing the whole order of words into itself. We have seen that the ogdoad project, the “excluded initiative” or “retreating eiron” that organizes, from behind the scenes, Frye’s whole writing project, published and unpublished, has one of its two foci in the Renaissance, the other in Romanticism. We have also witnessed his failure—though that is not the right word—to realize this project: it remains, like Utopia, “nowhere.” But one of the themes of Words with Power is that out of “nothing” come all things. The ogdoad is nowhere; yet the ogdoad is also everywhere: it interpenetrates everything Frye ever wrote. It is the Vehicular Form, the imaginative fiery chariot of his imagination, its one wheel Renaissance and traditional and its other wheel Romantic and revolutionary. The four Zoas that draw it are, from one point of view, the literary genres that chiefly preoccupied him through a career of over fifty years; from another perspective, they are aspects of his own writing. Of all literary critics, Frye gives us the most eloquent description of a Word that is on the one hand an encyclopedic order of words and on the other a vast cyclic narrative, as revealed in myth and epic, a vision that is not just synchronic and static but also historical and transformative, the basis of all real social change. Even people who disagree with him continue to read him for what he characterized as the essence of drama: the sudden revelation, the vortical twist. He is one of the great critics of romance, knowing that that twist occurs through the hidden dimension of an otherworld that is not “there,” yet is true nevertheless. And he is the great satiric anatomist, lover of wit and paradox, advocate of an education that teaches us how literature gives us something that he captures in a phrase appearing in Notebook 8, over forty years before it became the title of his second book on the Word of the Bible: by articulating the symbolism of the unconscious, literature gives us “words of power” (NB 8.146).