used by NF here does not appear in the standard Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon of Classical Greek. Wallace McLeod observes that it looks like a plausible adjective derived from 
, and speculates that NF might mean 
or 
, “observant of law.”1 See Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3–18.
1 See “Guggenheim Application,” par. 2.
2 “Guggenheim Application,” par. 3.
3 See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983); annotated copy in the NFL.
4 From Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, in Collected Poems (1954), 524.
5 See Colin Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of “The Tempest” (London: Cecil Palmer, 1921); annotated copy in the NFL.
6 See Theodore H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East, new and rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961); annotated copy in the NFL.
7 The second level of his hierarchy of needs: physiological needs, safety, love, self-esteem, self-actualization. These have much in common with NF’s primary concerns.
8 See C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963; orig. pub. 1916); annotated copy in the NFL. Later revised, retranslated, and published as Symbols of Transformation, vol. 5 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung.
9 See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949); annotated copy in the NFL.
10 See Francis Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, ed. Thedore H. Gaster, intro. Jeffrey Henderson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), xi–xii. An annotated copy of the 1961 Doubleday edition is in the NFL.
11 See A.C. Hamilton, Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 130.
12 See Theodore H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East, new and rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 26.
13 See G.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 6–10.
14 As Knight himself says: see G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (New York: Methuen, 1965; orig. pub. 1947), viii.
15 See The Harper Handbook to Literature, ed. Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). The entries contributed by NF have been reprinted in SeSCT, 357–89.
16 The emergence of timebound heroic epic out of a break with eternal cyclic ritual is the subject of G. Rachel Levy, The Sword from the Rock: An Investigation into the Origins of Epic Literature and the Development of the Hero (New York: Grove Press, 1953), annotated copy in the NFL, which influenced NF during the period of AC and the Third Book notebooks.
17 See Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959); annotated copy in the NFL.
18 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
19 In his 1950 Diary, NF recounts getting a letter from the Guggenheim committee, “saying that their ‘advisors’ wanted to know about my knowledge of existing scholarship on Spenser & my view of the difference between my own & other studies of him. I thought the first question was insulting and the second fuddy-duddy, & I suddenly realized how disappointed I’d be if I didn’t get the fellowship & if an incompetent committee decided against me. It’s very lonely being a genius: you’re just an arrogant crank who happens to be bright” (D, 260). The next day he writes, “I spent the next two hours (in quite a nervous state) typing out a crowded two-page single-space letter to the Guggenheim people” (D, 261). The contents of that reply, as synopsized in a later entry, are illuminating in the present context: “The thing I was trying to say to that fool Guggenheim committee was this: Spenser scholarship is still stuck at the second level, where the narrative runs parallel to a historical and a moral allegory. There are acres & acres of Spenser where there just isn’t any second-level pattern at all. Book III is entirely on the third level of myth & archetype, & so is IV. The fact that V isn’t buggered V, & the whole epic with it. What’s more, once one understands Spenser on the third level, second-level interpretations even where they’re possible cease to be interesting. In fact, I’m really committed to avoiding second-level interpretation altogether, as was Milton” (D, 272). Additionally, three paragraphs of the 1949 Diary draft the opening of a preface to a book on the Faerie Queene (D, 105–6).
20 See English Institute Essays, 194.8, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–73. Much of the essay was incorporated into AC, Third Essay. It is forthcoming in the Collected Works in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance.
21 “The Argument of Comedy,” 64–5.
22 “The Argument of Comedy,” 66.
23 John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), 106–7. Ayre’s discussion of Frye’s Guggenheim proposal appears on pages 220–2.
24 “The Argument of Comedy,” 65.
25 C.G. Jung, “The Stages of Life,” in Collected Works, vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 387–403. Jung’s answer to this question is illuminating in the present context, as he maintains that psychological health in the second half of life depends in part upon a relationship to something beyond the natural cycle.
26 Notes 58–7, included in this volume, is a series of typed notes towards pts. 2 and 3 of “Romance as Masque,” the sections that discuss masques. Pt. 1 was originally published as “Old and New Comedy” in 1969. See the headnote to Notes 58–7 for full details.
27 See E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1903); Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927).
28 Festivities tended to spread out amorphously at both poles, however, with similar or related rituals and revelries taking place in spring and summer on May Day and Midsummer’s Eve (June 24, also known as St. John’s Eve, linked to the summer solstice as Christmas is to the winter solstice); in autumn on Halloween and All Souls’ Day. The Renaissance sometimes recognized a kinship between the winter festivities and two Roman festivals, the December Saturnalia and the New Year’s celebration, the Kalends.
29 “The Argument of Comedy,” 70.
30 Mass migrations; the term is used through Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History.
31 The link between heroic epic and wandering tribes is not just mythical: both Bertha Phillpotts in The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama (1920; see NR, 7) and G. Rachel Levy in The Sword from the Rock make it as well.
32 “The Argument of Comedy,” 70.
33 “The Argument of Comedy,” 72.
34 The actual title is The Phoenix and Turtle. NF, like many people, consistently inserted “the” into the title, even in his published books.
35 For information about the memorial volume, see NB 14b.1, below.
36 NF speaks of writing the More essay in LN, 1:188–9.
37 See also LN, 1:232–6.
38 See NB 8.10, 45, 47, 97, 124, 130, 136, 139, 149, 252, 269.
1 The notes concerned with epic are in NB 7; those concerned with drama are in NB 8; those concerned with prose fiction are in various notebooks collected in pt. 1 of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15).
2 See “Prologue: The Monomyth,” in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Princeton University Press, 1949), 3–46.
1 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. However, NF’s annotated copy in the NFL is the Doubleday paperback (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), and page numbers in brackets will refer to this edition.
2 See The Tempest, 4.1.14–22, where Prospero says to Ferdinand, “But / If thou dost break her virgin-knot” before the wedding ceremony, then “barren hate, / sour-ey’d disdain, and discord shall bestrew / The union of your bed …”
3 See Beowulf, ll. 2596–9. Beowulf’s hand-picked troops desert him during his fight with the dragon. Only Wiglaf stands by him.
4 See Ovid, Fasti, bk. 3, ll. 23–696, the entry for 15 March.
5 He does: see Frances Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993; orig. pub. 1912), annotated copy in the NFL, 44: “A Cook who can perform such miraculous operations is manifestly a magician, and his profession coalesces with that of the Doctor in the primitive functions of the medicine-man—a figure who, as we shall see later, stands out in the dim past behind the Doctor who revives the slain in the folk-plays.”
6 See E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), 2:33.
7 See Robert Eisler, Orpheus—The Fisher (London: J.M. Watkins, 1921).
8 The first of Vishnu’s ten incarnations was as the avatar Maysya, a fish or dolphin. As the Buddha is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu, this presumably includes him as well.
9 W.W. Baudissin, Adonis und Esmun: Eine Untersuchens zur Geschichte des Glaubens an Auferstehungsgotter und an Heilgotter (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1911).
10 See Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; orig. pub. 1950); annotated copy in the NFL.
11 See Arthur E. Waite, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (London: Rebman, 1909); The Book of the Holy Grail (London: Watkins, 1921); The Holy Grail: Its Legends and Symbolism (London: Rider, 1933). Also, The Holy Grail: The Galahad Quest in the Arthurian Literature (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961); annotated copy in the NFL.
12 See Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man: A Popular Account of the Lives, Customs and Thoughts of the Primitive Races, trans. A.H. Keane (New York: Meridian, 1960; orig. pub. 1909); annotated copy in the NFL.
13 Handwritten sideways on the bottom half of the manuscript.
1 This note is written in the top margin. Insofar as we imagine NF going through The Faerie Queene and making comments consecutively, it refers to the phrase “antique rolles” in Proem, st. 2, 1. 4, meaning the Muse’s genealogical rolls or records going back to earliest times. Cf. FI, 73: “Spenser means by ‘Faerie’ primarily the world of realized human nature. It is an ‘antique’ world, extending backward to Eden and the Golden Age …” However, the actual phrase “antique world” does occur in bk. 1, canto 11, st. 27, 1.1, and bk. 1, canto 12, st. 14, 1. 8, with much the same connotations.
2 I.e., the Proem of four stanzas which introduces the poem as a whole.
3 Added in pencil: “change of sex theme already; lady as lord.”
4 At this point, NF moves to bk. 1, canto 1, st. 2, 1. 8: “But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad.” A.C. Hamilton says: “The mood marks man’s settled fallen state in contrast to the sanguine temperament of unfallen man” (30).
5 Written above: “is, I think.”
6 Added in pencil: “Lamb good e.g. of symb. [symbolism] with no place in narrative.”
7 Added in pencil: “Picked up in IV as Slander.”
8 See William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, Erdman, 543: “The Strong man represents the human sublime. The Beautiful man represents the human pathetic, which was in the wars of Eden divided into male and female.
The Ugly man represents the human reason. They were originally one man, who was fourfold; he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God.”
9 Bk. 1, canto 1, st. 6, ll. 6–7.
10 Bk. 1, canto 1, st. 8, ll.1–4.
11 Bk. 1, canto 1, st. 14, ll. 4–5.
12 Bk. 1, canto 1, st. 21.
13 The reference is to Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1923; orig. pub. as Das Heilige, 1917).
14 See The Book of the Duchess, ll.161–2.
15 Sts. 34 and 41.
16 Bk. 1, canto 1, st. 40, ll.1–3.
17 Satan tempts Eve with a dream in Paradise Lost, bk. 4, ll. 801–2.
18 Gorgon is mentioned in st. 37. In Boccaccio, “Demogorgon” combines “demon” and “Gorgon.”
19 Bk. 1, canto 2, st. 1.
20 I.e., canto 2, st. 9, in which it is said of Archimago that “his guests / He saw diuided into double parts.” In addition to the meanings NF gives, it can mean that the Redcrosse Knight is divided within himself.
21 I.e., “And Vna wandring in woods and forrests,” which got into AC, 260 (AC2, 242) (slightly misquoted), as an example of verbal opsis or imitative harmony.
22 See bk. 1, canto 2, st. 10.
23 Fradubio and his lady Fraelissa are turned into trees by Duessa, and can be restored, he tells the Redcrosse Knight in canto 43, only by water from a “living well.”
24 See canto 2, st. 40, 1. 4. “Prime” means the spring.
25 See canto 2, st. 44, ll. 6–7.
26 Cf. “the theme of the harmless lion” in SE, 232. The reference is to Lull’s The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, trans. with introduction Allison Peers (London: SPCK, 1923), 39.
27 See 1 Henry IV, 2.4.271–2.
28 See ll. 5–6: “With paines farre passing that long wandring Greeke, / That for his loue refused deitie.” Similarly, the journey of Dante in the Divine Comedy is likened to a sea voyage, though it too is on land; there is an implicit contrast with the pride-driven voyage of Ulysses recounted in Inferno, canto 26.
29 I.e., the old Archimago appears disguised as the Redcrosse Knight in st. 26.
30 In bk. 1, canto 2, st. 22, ll. 7–8, Duessa describes herself as “Borne the sole daughter of an Emperour, / He that the wide West vnder his rule has,” linking herself allegorically with the Church of Rome.
31 In st. 5, Lucifera’s castle is like the house of the foolish man in Matthew 7:26–7, built upon sand. Yet in st. 7, ll. 6–7, its outward appearance is so dazzling that “Ne Persia selfe, the nourse of pompous pride / Like euer saw.”
32 “More or less” means figuratively: NF is referring to the dragon under Lucifera’s feet.
33 See bk. 1, canto 1, st. 48, 1. 8.
34 See par. 12 and n. 22, above.
35 The battle between Sansjoy and the Redcrosse Knight is likened to the conflict of a griffen with a dragon in st. 8; Duessa’s crocodile tears are described in st. 18.
36 Duessa travels to the east to seek help for the wounded Sansjoy in the realm of Night, described as “that great mother” in st. 24.
37 See st. 22, 1. 6.
38 See C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1958; orig. pub. 1936), 314.
39 Cf. ll. 1–7:
And said, Deare daughter rightly may I rew
The fall of famous children borne of mee,
And good successes, which their foes ensew:
But who can turne the streame of destinee,
Or breake the chayne of strong necessitee,
Which fast is tyed to Ioues eternall seat?
40 See st. 28, 1. 5.
41 See st. 27, 1. 3.
42 See st. 31, ll. 6–8.
43 The story of Æsculapius bringing Hippolytus back to life, drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, bk. 7, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, bk. 15, is told in sts. 37–40.
44 See sts. 47–50.
45 The phrase “became what they beheld” occurs half a dozen times in Blake’s Jersualem, pis. 30, 32.
46 See st. 2, 1. 7.
47 See st. 7, 1. 4. Una is about to be raped by Sansloy when she is rescued by the satyrs.
48 A.S.P. Woodhouse (1895–1964), member of the English department at University College at the University of Toronto, 1929–64; chair of the department for about twenty years.
49 See st. 17.
50 See st. 21, 1. 6.
51 See st. 41, 1. 8.
52 In other words, the order of appearance of Sansfoy, Sansjoy, and Sansloy in successive cantos.
53 In st. 35, revealed to the reader as Archimago in st. 48.
54 Cf. par. 11, above. The reference is to the Redcrosse Knight’s drinking in st. 6 from the fountain which saps his strength, leading to his defeat by Orgoglio.
55 Cf. par. 14, above.
56 According to st. 5, the nymph’s waters are cursed because she offended Diana by stopping to rest in the middle of the chase, and is thus dis-graced, in a double sense, by her laziness.
57 NF means the sexual suggestiveness of st. 7, in which the Redcrosse Knight ignores his weakened state and lies on the grass with Duessa: “Yet goodly court he made still to his Dame, / Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd.”
58 See st. 9, 1. 2.
59 See st. 9, 1. 6.
60 See st. 10, ll. 7–8.
61 See st. 13.
62 Written above: “purple, actually.”
63 See st. 16.
64 See st. 17.
65 It must be NF’s ribaldry, as nothing seems particularly ribald in st. 26; indeed, Hamilton’s note says, “The semicolons divide the Knight’s ‘wofull Tragedie’ (24.8) into five Acts.”
66 Cf. Job 3:3–4: “Let the day perish wherein I was born Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.” It is not clear where NF thinks the Leviathan comes into st. 23.
67 See ll. 2–3: “She vp arose, resoluing him to find / A liue or dead.” Line 7 reads: “Long tost with stormes, and bet with bitter wind.”
68 The stone is actually one of the stones that shine “like twinkling stars” in st. 29 on the Knight’s bauldrick, the belt across his breast from which his sword hangs; “Shapt like a Ladies head” in 1. 3 of st. 30, it is also compared to Hesperus.
69 The “bunch of hairs” are the crest on Arthur’s helmet; they are likened to an almond tree “on top of greene Selinis” (1. 6), a reference to the Aeneid, bk. 3, 1. 705, where Selinus is the town of the victor in the games of Greece. Commentators have found various further symbolic meanings in the almond tree. The helmet, described in st. 31, has upon it the dragon crest of Uther Pendragon as described by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
70 A crucial passage in the poem, st. 36 says that Merlin fashioned Arthur’s armour, sword, and shield: “But when he dyde, the Faerie Queene it brought / To Faerie lond, where yet it may be seene, if sought.” NF means that, if “he” is Arthur, in the words of A.C. Hamilton, “Before ever Arthur acts in the poem, he is distanced from us by his death. Yet his virtue lives, as 9 suggests, potentially embodied in England” (104).
71 Lines 8–9: “No faith so fast (quoth she) but flesh does paire. / Flesh may empaire (quoth he) but reason can repaire.”
72 Una’s caterwaul is her recitation to Arthur of the events leading up to her present plight. The traditional “epic shape” is to plunge in medias res, into the middle of things, which The Faerie Queene has done; by adding in for the first time (in sts. 46–7) an account of her journey to Gloriana’s court to find a knight willing to deliver her parents from the dragon, she takes the action back to its chronological beginning.
73 “Tartary” here is a way of spelling “Tartarus,” the region of the underworld in which those who have offended the gods are punished.
74 Line 4 reads: “And Ecchoes three answerd it selfe againe.” AC, 261 (AC2, 244), states that “the so-called broken-backed line with a spondee in the middle has since Old English times (when it was Sievers’ type C) been most effective for suggesting the ominous and foreboding,” although the example given from Spenser is different. For the “Roland’s horn” reference, see Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairy-Tales, Folklore, and Mythologies, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), 123: “In French Romance the far-famed Horn figures as the property of the legendary hero ROLAND, and the Horn of Roland is said to have been a widely understood symbol of heretical preaching.”
75 In st. 10, ll. 8–9, Orgoglio’s blood gushes like water from the rock riven by Moses in Numbers 20:ll.
76 See par. 28 and n. 56, above.
77 Orgoglio’s fall is compared to the fall of a besieged castle.
78 Orgoglio deflates: because he was conceived when Aeolus, the wind-god, filled his mother Earth with air, his body in death becomes like an empty bladder; he was, as we would say, full of hot air.
79 NF means that “the souls of them that were slain for the word of God” in Revelation 6:9 are identified with the Protestant martyrs of the Piedmont massacre by Milton in his sonnet On the Late Massacre in Piedmont. See par. 53 and n. 122, below.
80 The name “Epimetheus” means “hindsight”: the keeper of the keys to the castle is a senile old man named Ignaro, whose face is turned backward from the direction of his feet.
81 Ignaro is so senile that he can only answer repeatedly to Arthur’s questions that “he could not tell.”
82 Cf. pars. 59, 166–7.
83 See st. 4, ll. 6–7: Rauran is a Welsh hill by the river Dee, the traditional boundary between England and Wales. In order to fit contemporary propaganda about Arthur as ancestor of the Tudor line, which claimed Welsh connections, Spenser has Arthur brought up in Wales rather than Cornwall.
84 In st. 15, Spenser leaves it ambiguous whether Arthur’s dream of the Faerie Queene was more than a dream: the grass is pressed down where she had lain.
85 See st. 15, 1. 9.
86 See st. 19.
87 Literally, a misbeliever.
88 See par. 21, above.
89 See canto 1, st. 2, 1. 8.
90 Despair has tried to hang himself a thousand times, but cannot die. See C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 315.
91 See par. 23 and n. 45.
92 Both Cælia and Corceca constantly say their prayers, but the latter thinks that virtuousness multiplies mechanically with the number of prayers, and has no concept of prayer as arising out of an inward spirit.
93 C.S. Lewis discusses Spenser’s Protestant use of Catholic imagery in The Allegory of Love, 322–4, though not specifically in connection with bk. 1, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene.
94 Hamilton says (136) that the Bead-men are the seven traditional corporal works of mercy, slightly modified: feeding the hungry, tending the sick, etc. They are “Catholic imagery” because Catholicism also demanded “works” for salvation, and not just the Protestant “faith alone.”
95 In other words, the Bead-man who feeds the hungry in st. 38 is at once paralleled with the Eucharist among the Seven Sacraments and implicitly contrasted with Gluttony among the Seven Deadly Sins, whose pageant occurred in the Castle of Pride. In st. 41, tending the sick is paralleled with Extreme Unction and contrasted with Sloth. In st. 40, ransoming captives, even guilty ones, is paralleled with Penance and contrasted with Wrath, and so on.
96 Presumably an allusion to Matthew 25:40: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
97 See ll. 1–2: “Strange thing it is an errant knight to see / Here in this place …,” where, because the House of Holiness is a place of repentance, “errant” means both “wandering” and “erring.”
98 The brazen serpent lifted up by Moses at the command of God in Numbers 21:8–9, typologically prefiguring Christ on the cross.
99 See Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes wherein A Short Survay is taken of the Nature and Value of true poesy and depth of the ancients above our moderne poets, in Literary Criticism of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Edward W. Tayler (New York: Knopf, 1967), 279: “Next, I must approve the learned Spencer, in the rest of his Poems, no lesse then his Fairy Queene, an exact body of the Ethicke doctrine: though some good judgments have wisht (and perhaps not without cause) that he had therein beene a little freer of his fiction, and not so close rivetted to his Morall…”
100 “For she was able, with her words to kill, / And raise againe to life the hart, that she did thrill.”
101 Fidelia holds “A booke, that was both signd and seald with blood, / Wherein darke things were writ, hard to be vnderstood” (ll. 8–9), echoing the book with seven seals in Revelation.
102 Here, NF means canto 10, not st. 10; the stanzas in question are 26–8, in which the Knight is said to undergo medieval ascetic practices so excruciating that Una can hear him roaring with pain: fasting, sackcloth and ashes, flogging, and bathing in salt water, etc. The text does not explicitly say that these are just metaphors, though that may perhaps be inferred by the fact that the mortifications are performed by Penance, Remorse, and Repentance.
103 “In that sad house of Penaunce, where his spright / Had past the paines of hell, and long enduring night.”
104 “His name was meeke Obedience rightfully ared.”
105 See st. 35, in which Mercie clears thorns and briars out of the Knight’s path on the way to the Hospital of the Bead-men; he is perhaps in a weakened state after his mortifications.
106 Written below: “did he read Par. i [Paradiso, canto 1] on Parnassus?”
107 That is, the Mount of Contemplation, on which the Knight sees the New Jerusalem, is compared in sts. 53–4 with Mt. Sinai in the Old Testament, Mt. Olivet in the New Testament, and Parnassus, which might have a link with the Holy Spirit, thus associating the Holy Spirit with the human imagination.
108 Written in margin: “cf. 63.”
109 See ll. 6–7: “that most glorious house, that glistreth bright / With burning starres, and euerliuing fire.”
110 The phrase is “bloud-red billowes.” In st. 57, ll. 4–5 speak of God’s “chosen people purg’d from sinfull guilt, / With pretious bloud.”
111 In st. 56, the Knight sees angels “to and fro descend” into the New Jerusalem, the reference to Jacob’s ladder matching that in Milton’s Paradise Lost, bk. 3, ll. 510–22.
112 When the Knight says that he had always imagined Cleopolis, the city of the Faerie Queene, to be the fairest city of all, but now sees that it cannot compare with the New Jerusalem, the “holy aged man” replies in st. 59 that Cleopolis is “for earthly frame,” indeed the fairest city, and that it is wise for knights who want to be “eternized” to haunt it and do service to the Faerie Queene.
113 “Till from her bands the spright assoiled is,” where “assoiled” means released.
114 “That hast my name and nation red aright, / And taught the way that does to heauen bound.” Written in margin: “67.3–4.”
115 According to the Golden Legend, the name “George,” in at least one of its derivations, comes from geos, “earth,” and orge, “tilling.” St. George is a changeling, an Anglo-Saxon exchanged for a Faerie child and left to be found by a a ploughman in a furrow.
116 “And wash thy hands from guilt of bloudy field.” This has already been a theme in bk. 1, as far back as when the Redcrosse Knight kills Sansfoy.
117 “Aboue all knights on earth, that batteill vndertake.”
118 Written above: “26.3.” Una’s parents, Adam and Eve, have been forced to take refuge from the dragon in a tower of brass. The dragon is seen as furnacelike in st. 26 when he “from his wide deuouring ouen sent / A flake of fire,” the “oven” being his mouth.
119 Written above: “44.”
120 When the dragon first sees the Knight, in st. 4, 1. 9, “He rousd himselfe full blith, and hastned them vntill.” In st. 15, he approaches, “And often bounding on the brused gras, / As for great ioyance of his newcome guest.” Job 41 is God’s portrayal of Leviathan as a terrible and yet magnificent creation.
121 It is “Those glistring armes, that heauen with light did fill” that first draw the dragon’s attention.
122 Lines 10–13 of Milton’s On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (Sonnet 18 in Hughes) speak of the blood and ashes of Protestant martyrs sown like the dragon’s teeth of Gadmus.
123 See st. 14. The alexandrine of this stanza, mentioned in the following sentence, is “Those glaring lampes were set, that made a dreadfull shade,” where the “lampes” are the dragon’s eyes, set in the “dreadfull shade” of their sockets.
124 Written above: “?”
125 In st. 21, the dragon roars, “as raging seas are wont to rore,” and the description of a storm goes on for the entire stanza.
126 St. 18, ll. 3–4, read: “And with strong flight did forcibly diuide / The yielding aire.” Likewise in st. 37, the dragon’s lashing tail is said to “scourge the buxome aire so sore.” The Ephesians reference is to the “prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2:2.
127 Both the eagle, which dives into the sea to renew its youth every ten years, and the hawk.
128 See sts. 40–2.
129 The anaphora, or repetition, of the phrase “So downe he fell,” is fourfold, the first three linking the dragon’s fall with the elements, and the last one likening him to a “heaped mountaine.”
130 The dragon is likened to a volcano in st. 44; Orgoglio is conceived when Aeolus, god of the winds, impregnates the earth with air. He is thus a personified earthquake, according to the Renaissance explanation of earthquakes as caused by air under the earth.
131 Written above: “8.7; 21–2.”
132 In st. 18, St. George reveals that he has pledged to return to serve the Faerie Queene for six years against “that proud Paynim king,” which will postpone his wedding to Una. Spenser has alluded to this glancingly in canto 11, st. 7, where he mentions his plans to write someday “A worke of labour long, and endlesse prayse” about these wars.
133 NF apparently means st. 21, ll. 5–6, in which Una appears “As bright as doth the morning starre appeare / Out of the East.” The first line of the next st. calls her “So faire and fresh, as freshest flowre in May.”
134 Fidessa/Duessa makes one last try, sending Archimago disguised as a messenger to make false accusations against St. George in sts. 26–8. Since the end of canto 8, in st. 50, she has been living in the wilderness, in rocks and caves: hence the comparison with Grendel’s mother.
135 The erotic dreams of the Redcrosse Knight, caused by Archimago, employ the Hymen io Hymen chant of the Roman marriage ceremony, with imagery of the Graces and Flora.
136 The “heauenly noise” heard through the Palace is likened to the nine orders of angels singing “In their trinall triplicities on hye.”
137 See par. 1 and n. 1, above.
138 Cf. par. 2, above.
139 Written above: “Dante’s “mente che non erra” [Inferno, canto 2, 1. 6].
140 Appears to indicate that NF is turning from the Proem to bk. 1 to the first canto again, though there is no paragraph break, or even much of a break in argument.
141 In the Argument before canto 1, the Knight is called “The Patron of true Holinesse.”
142 The anaphora or repetition of “upon” in lines 7–9: “in battell braue / Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne; / Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne.”
143 Peter Francis Fisher (1919–58), a student of NF, who directed his dissertation on Blake, published as The Valley of Vision; drowned in a boating accident in 1958.
144 In st. 21, the flooding of the fertile Nile breeds creatures “partly male / And partly female of his fruitfull seed.”
145 “Clownish” means “rustic.” St. George has been brought up by the ploughman who found him in a furrow.
146 See st. 30, 1. 7.
147 Archimago chooses the falsest two “sprights,” who are “fittest for to forge true-seeming lyes” to deceive the Knight.
148 See NB 32.54 (NR, 144).
149 Duessa is called “faire falshood” in the Argument to canto 2.
150 See st. 6, ll. 8–9. Sir Huon is a hero of medieval romance; Oberon is the father of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene.
151 Cf. par. 37, above/and pars 166–7, below. The golden chain appears in bk. 1, canto 9, st. 1.
152 The line refers to the cross on St. George’s shield, “Wherewith aboue all knights ye goodly seeme aguizd.”
153 In a stanza full of word play, Sir Guyon apologizes for allowing himself to be duped by Archimago into almost attacking St. George.
154 Guyon discovers St. George in a valley between two hills, beside a small river.
155 NF’s initial reading of st. 28’s “heauenly Mayd” (1. 7), which he corrects in the last sentence of the paragraph. Later passages make clear that it is actually an image of Gloriana; see for example canto 8, st. 43, 1. 3.
156 During their burial, Guyon commits not only himself but the orphaned baby to the task of revenging the deaths of Amavia and Mordant.
157 “The great earthes wombe they open to the sky” in order to bury Amavia and Mordant.
158 In st. 61, ll. 2–4, Guyon cuts locks of the dead couple’s hair, mingles them with blood and earth, and throws them into the grave while swearing his oath of vengeance; in bk. 1, canto 2, sts. 44–5, the Redcrosse Knight thrusts into the ground the “bleeding bough” he had broken off the tree that is Fradubio “That from the bloud he might be innocent, / And with fresh clay did close the wooden wound.”
159 St. 4 of the Proem to bk. 3 speaks of a “gracious seruant” who wrote verses to “Cynthia”; the consensus view is that it is indeed Raleigh being spoken of.
160 See ll. 7–9: “But either Gloriana let her chuse, / Or in Belphoebe fashioned to bee: / In th’one her rule, in th’other her rare chastitee.”
161 Venus seeks Cupid among Diana’s train in canto 6, and says to Diana that she is worried “Least he like one of them him selfe disguize” (st. 23, 1. 4).
162 See st. 8, 1. 9; the phrase refers to Merlin’s glass globe, in which Britomart has seen the image of Artegall. The phrase “the order of grace” has been underlined in pencil, and the following added in NF’s handwriting: “or is contained in Venus’ mirror.”
163 See st. 10.
164 Literally, “double thing”; whence the term “Rebis” in alchemy, a name for the Hermaphrodite enclosed within the Cosmic Egg, symbol of unified opposites. Cf. par. 206, below.
165 See st. 11.
166 In her flight, Florimell’s blond hair streams like a comet.
167 See st. 15, 1. 6. NF has added in pencil: “gold alchemical symb. [symbol] of hidden order in nature (golden age).”
168 NF is correct, as he has clearly realized by par. 72, below; the knight is referred to as the Redcrosse Knight in st. 42.
169 See, FJ, 75.
170 The “b” rhyme in st. 31 is Ioyeous / curteous / gracious / spacious; ll. 4–6 are a rare instance of double run-on lines.
171 Cf. st. 37, 1. 9: “For who can shun the chaunce, that dest’ny doth ordaine?”
172 Around the central chamber of Malecasta’s Castle Joyous” “many beds were dight, / As whilome was the antique worldes guize.” The images of fire and water are in ll. 8–9: “And swimming deepe in sensuall desires, / And Cupid still emongst them kindled lustfull fires.”
173 See st. 40.
174 When Britomart puts up her visor, her uncovered face is compared to Cynthia or the moon lighting up a dark night for the “poore traueller, that went astray” (1. 6). The alexandrine reads “With which faire Britomart gaue light vnto the day.”
175 The allegorical names of the six knights, from whom Britomart had rescued St. George, are catalogued in st. 45, where they are called “shadows” in 1. 9.
176 See ll. 3–4: “Whiles fruitfull Ceres, and Lyæus fat / Pourd out their plenty.”
177 In 1. 7, Britomart deems Malecasta’s love “too light, to wooe a wandring guest.”
178 The last four lines of st. 57 read: “By this th’eternall lampes, wherewith high Ioue / Doth light the lower world, were halfe yspent, / And the moist daughters of huge Atlas stroue / Into the Ocean deepe to driue their weary droue.” The “daughters of Atlas” are the Hyades.
179 One of the six knights attendant upon Malecasta, Gardante’s name refers to the gaze or glance of the Courtly Love ritual.
180 Added in pencil: “repeated in 12–33.”
181 See st. 66, 1. 2.
182 See st. 67, 1. 7.
183 Spenser spends the first three stanzas of canto 2 blaming men not only for failing to give the martial exploits of women in history due praise, but for passing laws, out of envy and fear, to curb women’s liberty. Yet in bk. 5, canto 5, st. 25, faced with the female tyranny of Radigund, Spenser says that those women who “haue shaken off the shamefast band, / With which wise Nature did them strongly bynd, / T’obay the heasts of mans well ruling hand” are trying “To purchase a licentious libertie. / But vertuous women wisely vnderstand, / That they were borne to base humilitie.”
184 See st. 4, 1.1.
185 The colors Britomart turns when Sir Guyon brings up the subject of Artegall.
186 Britomart says she has come “Withouten compasse, or withouten card.”
187 In st. 11, Britomart is happy as a loving mother to hear Sir Artegall praised; in st. 17, her love is said to be engrafted on her, its root and stalk bitter but its fruit sweet.
188 See par. 66 and n. 162, above.
189 Lydgate (ca. 1370–1450) was the author of The Temple of Glass.
190 See st. 20. Spenser says that the Egyptian Phao, hidden in a tower, spied on men with a magic mirror. Her gaze is erotic, but st. 21, which follows, says that Merlin gave his mirror to king Ryence, “That neuer foes his kingdome might inuade, / But he it knew at home before he hard / Tydings thereof, and so them still debar’d” (ll. 3–5).
191 Sir Francis Walsingham (ca. 1530–90), Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, 1573-90.
192 See st. 24, ll. 6–7: his face “Lookd foorth, as Phœbus face out of the east / Betwixt two shadie mountaines.” For the “figure in the doorway,” see TBN, 311, 430n. 129.
193 Added in pencil: “contest of Ajax and Ulysses.” A reference to the contest, after Achilles’ death, for his armour, in which Ulysses won out over Ajax.
194 The “Ermilin” is an ermine, traditional symbol of both chastity and British royalty.
195 In st. 32, ll. 6–7, Glauce says that Britomart’s love is like a huge Aetna of “deepe engulfed” grief, which nevertheless is “heaped” in her chest.
196 Glauce says in sts. 41–2 that she had been afraid that Britomart was portraying her love so darkly because it was some kind of unnatural lust, citing Myrrha, Biblis, and Pasiphaë, all from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who lusted after father, brother, and a bull respectively.
197 Britomart compares her love for the “shadow” image of Artegall in Merlin’s glass to the love of Narcissus for his own image in the water, “For which he faded to a watry flowre,” (st. 45, 1. 4), as Adonis was turned into a flower.
198 The lamp which has drunk down its oil during the scene of Britomart’s confession of her passion.
199 The ingredients of Glauce’s potion include milk and blood; performing her magic, she turns thrice “contrarie to the Sunne” (st. 51, 1. 2), as mentioned below: “So thought she to vndoe her daughters loue,” says 1. 6.
200 LN, 1:15 reads, “Dante has something he calls the sprone or spur: I wonder if this is the function of the erotic in starting off the exuberant perception, the sense of the beautiful, sublime, heroic, & finally the divine? Perhaps there are two spurs, the other being the social spur, the voice of others where “conscience” starts off, wherever it ends. This would include the church, of course, and ancestral voices. Perhaps Eros is the radical spur and Adonis (chorus of women around a dying god) the conservative one.” RT, 395, speaks of “the prick or spur or goad to righteousness which is an image running all through the Purgatorio,” for example in canto 6. See also NB 8.196.
201 John Donne, Love’s Deity, 1. 5.
202 St. 11 actually ends a digressive anecdote that began in st. 8. Before leaving to meet the Lady of the Lake, Merlin commanded his “Sprights” to construct a brass wall around Carmarthen in Wales, site of his underground lair. Because of the Lady’s treachery, Merlin was buried and never returned, yet the sprights, obedient to orders, can still be heard underground working to this day.
203 Altering material he found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Spenser has Merlin fathered by an incubus who lay with a nun.
204 In st. 22, Merlin speaks to Britomart of the line which will descend from her and Artegall as a tree whose “embodied braunches” will not cease “Till they to heauens hight forth stretched bee” (1. 4).
205 “Till vniuersall peace compound all ciuill iarre” (1. 9).
206 Artegall is said to be renowned “From where the day out of the sea doth spring, / Vntill the closure of the Euening” (ll. 4–5). The second half of the stanza prophesies for him a rotary movement from England to Faeryland and someday back to England again.
207 See st. 30, 1.1.
208 In Notes 54–4.145 (NR, 247–8), NF speaks of the “Feltro or Emperor figure,” apparently a reference, as here, to the first canto of Dante’s Inferno, ll.103–5. This is confirmed by a reference to a 28 June 1950 Diary entry which speaks of “Dante’s Feltro or super-Constantine” (D, 392). In a veiled allegorical prophecy that is various interpreted, Virgil claims that the She-Wolf who has threatened Dante on the mountain will finally be conquered by a “Greyhound” who will be born “between Feltro and Feltro.” The commonest gloss on this is that it is a reference to Dante’s patron, Can Grande della Scala, whose name means “big dog,” and who was lord of Verona, which lies between Feltro and Montefeltro in northern Italy. However, this topical reference to a ruling type who will bring a final order to the world also resonates with larger apocalyptic overtones. See also NB 33.64 (NR, 82).
209 I.e., Merlin’s long speech to Britomart chronicling the legendary British line from Artegall and Britomart to the Tudors.
210 When the Saxons take over England, Merlin says, woe to the British king “Banisht from Princely bowre to wastfull wood” (1. 6).
211 St. 48 notes the birth of Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, on the Isle of Anglesey, traditionally named Mona.
212 Their morale restored by Merlin’s chronicle, Britomart and Glauce return to their original quest to locate Artegall, “And diuerse plots did frame, to maske in strange disguise” (1. 9). Hamilton notes (334) that “Love masks in strange disguise throughout Books III and IV,” and that Britomart will disguise herself in bk. 5.
213 See sts. 55–9.
214 Added in pencil: “cf. St. George.”
215 See st. 60.
216 See st. 6, 1. 8: “Following the guidaunce of her blinded guest.”
217 See st. 9, 1. 6.
218 “On the rough rocks, or on the sandy shallowes.” Lines 1–4 are quoted in AC, 260 (AC2, 242), as an example of verbal opsis or imitative harmony.
219 “Strongly the straunge knight ran, and sturdily / Strooke her full on the brest, that made her downe / Decline her head …” (ll. 7–9).
220 Marinell’s mother is said in 1. 3 of st. 20 to raise him up in a rocky cave “as wight forlorne.”
221 Neptune has thrown up the treasures sunk in the sea upon Marinell’s Rich Strond.
222 See sts. 36–9.
223 “Now that he had her singled from the crew.”
224 See sts. 55–60. Arthur hates the night not only because it has interrupted his pursuit of Florimell, but because night brings him melancholy thoughts: “Our life is day, but death with darknesse doth begin” (st. 59, 1. 9).
225 According to Hamilton (348), they represent “‘the luste of the flesh, the luste of the eyes, and the pride of life’ (1 John 2:16).”
226 Added in pencil: “boar-spear.”
227 See st. 19.
228 See st. 22. Saxo Grammaticus tells of a giant named Starkath whose head bit the grass after being struck off.
229 The word “Continent” appears only once in canto 5 (st. 25, 1. 7), but NF may be remembering two occurrences of the word in canto 4 (st. 10, 1. 2 and st. 30, 1. 5).
230 It is compared to a theatre in st. 39, 1. 5, and to an “earthly Paradize” in st. 40, 1. 5.
231 See st. 42, ll. 3–4: “She his hurt thigh to him recur’d againe, / But hurt his hart, the which before was sound.”
232 The phrase “Dye rather, dye” forms the refrain in sts. 45–7.
233 A “u” is written above the “o” in “son,” to make the pun on son/sun. As explained in sts. 6–9, Belphœbe and Amoret are conceived when their mother Chrysogone falls asleep in the sun.
234 St. 30, ll. 4–5.
235 See st. 31, 1. 8: “Old Genius the porter of them was,” referring to the two gates of the Gardens of Adonis.
236 St. 34 says that all things grow in the Gardens of Adonis according to the word of the Lord that bade them to “increase and multiply” (1. 6).
237 St. 35, ll. 3–4: “And euery sort is in a sundry bed / Set by it selfe, and ranckt in comely rew.”
238 See st. 36, ll. 3–5: “Yet is the stocke not lessened, nor spent, / But still remaines in euerlasting store, / As it at first created was of yore.”
239 See st. 36, ll. 8–9: “An huge eternall Chaos, which supplyes / The substances of natures fruitfull progenyes.” “Whereas st. 9, ll. 3–4, says that the moon “Ministereth matter fit” in natural creation.
240 Hamilton’s note for st. 39 indicates how deeply controversial its meaning is, and how controversial is the interpretation of the Gardens of Adonis. NF is assuming that, in the four-level cosmos of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Gardens are intended to represent the paradisal or unfallen world at the top of the natural cycle. In that case, they cannot be, like heaven itself, beyond time altogether. But, as with Dante’s Garden of Eden at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, although the Gardens should be in time, they should exist only in unfallen time, not the “wicked Time” of the fall (st. 39, 1. 3). It is in that sense that NF can, say that “time simply does not belong in the Gardens of Adonis.” Unfallen time should allow change but not mutability: that is, not destruction, loss, or death. Spenser’s portrait of the Gardens of Adonis thus seems ambiguous, or, in NF’s negative view, “muddled”: at one moment, Adonis is said to lie in “eternall blis” (st. 48, 1.1); yet just previously, he is said to be “subject to mortalitie” (st. 47, 1. 4). And what is true of him is true of everything in the Gardens. How far does the reign of Mutability extend? That is the question that Spenser would take up again in the Mutabilitie Cantos.
241 In st. 44, 1. 4, the trees are said to be “knitting their rancke braunches part to part,” thereby resembling the banyan tree in Milton’s Paradise Lost, bk. 9, ll.1101–10.
242 “Amintas” in line 8 of st. 45 is usually assumed to refer to Sidney.
243 See st. 46, 1. 7.
244 The Argument to bk. 5, canto 12 speaks of the Burbon episode which actually is recounted in canto ll. That episode is topical, allegorically treating Henry IV’s conversion to Catholicism, and may have been a later addition.
245 Referring to Florimell in flight, the first line of canto 7 is “Like as an Hynd forth singled from the heard,” which echoes what is said of Britomart in canto 4, st. 45, 1. 3, “Now that he had her singled from the crew,” the “he” being Archimago.
246 I.e., a sexual symbol.
247 “Through the tops of the high trees she did descry,” which found its way into AC, 260 (AC2, 242).
248 “And hurt far off vnknowne, whom euer she enuide.”
249 The witch, in st. 11, at first thinks Florimell might be “some Goddesse, or of Dianes crew” (1. 7). It is Florimell who has walked in upon the witch and startled her, as Venus startles Diana herself in canto 6, st. 19.
250 “T’adore thing so diuine as beauty, were but right,” the witch thinks about Florimell.
251 The witch sends a hyena, or hyena-like monster, “That feeds on womens flesh, as others feede on gras” after the escaped Florimell in st. 22.
252 Florimell is likened both to the guilty Myrrha, fleeing the consequences of incest with her father, and the innocent Daphne fleeing from Apollo, both out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
253 See st. 28.
254 A momentary slip: Arthur usually appears in the eighth canto, though bk. 3 is an exception, Florimell being saved in canto 8 by Proteus instead. In canto 7, Satyrane does not really rescue Florimell, who has already pushed out to sea in the fisherman’s boat, but he does defeat and bind the hyena that has been pursuing her.
255 The hyena, i.e., lust, “Rored, and raged to be vnder-kept.”
256 The Parthians shot arrows behind them while retreating. In st. 44, Argante pretends to make ready to fight, then takes flight again the minute Satyrane stops to engage her.
257 As the sun fathers Amoret and Belphœbe upon Chrysogone in canto 6, sts. 7–8, Typhoeus fathers the giants Argante and Ollyphant upon his own mother, the earth, in canto 7, sts. 47–8. This makes Argante, in Spenser’s terms, “A-daughter of the Titans” (st. 47, 1. 3).
258 Argante and Ollyphant commit incest while still in the womb (st. 48). Canto 2, st. 41 consists of Britomart’s comparison of her own impossible love for the image of Artegall with the unnatural loves of Myrrha and Pasiphaë.
259 He searches for an “honest,” i.e., chaste, woman as Diogenes looked for an honest man.
260 The snow out of which the false Florimell is made has been gathered from a secret place in the Riphœan, i.e., Scythian, hills, where it is always winter. Also in st. 6, her flesh is made by mingling “virgin wax” with vermilion, white with red.
261 See st. 7, 1. 9.
262 The false Florimell’s body is animated by a spirit who (st. 8, 1. 3) is one of the fallen angels.
263 See canto 6, st. 23, where Venus tells Diana she is afraid Cupid may have disguised himself as one of Diana’s nymphs.
264 See st. 15, where Ferraugh, merely referred to as “An armed knight,” takes the false Florimell away from Braggadocchio.
265 Ironically, at any rate, since what is revived is the old fisherman’s “frozen spright,” that is, his lust.
266 When the fisherman tries to rape Florimell, Spenser calls out in sts. 27–8 to those knights who “boast this Ladies loue,” including (without explanation) Sir Calidore, and also Sir Peridure, one of Arthur’s knights out of Geoffrey of Monmouth.
267 He speaks of Florimell’s preservation of her chastity in the cave as “Fit song of Angels caroled to bee” (st. 43, 1.1).
268 The trick of making the transition to the next canto by saying that it “will further time require” to explain why Malbecco refuses to open the gate of his castle to anyone.
269 See C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 340–5.
270 St. 2, ll. 7–9, says that if a whole legion of spirits fell, what wonder if one woman did?
271 See st. 5, 1. 3: Malbecco is old and impotent, and the “privy guilt” he feels because of this, with a pun on “privy parts,” makes him eternally suspicious of Hellenore.
272 In st. 13, Paridell has refused to let her stay in the shed in which they have taken refuge from the storm. In st. 15, Paridell coming forth to fight her is compared to wind released from being pent up in the earth, i.e./ to an earthquake according to the Renaissance definition.
273 In st. 22, Britomart is said to resemble Minerva returning from her slaughter of the giants.
274 The oracular 1. 9, “A sacrament prophane in mistery of wine” refers to a Courtly Love game of using spilled wine either to divine the name of someone’s love or to write love messages. Paridell and Hellenore have been playing the game under Malbecco’s nose.
275 See 1. 9: “And Trovnouant was built of old Troyes ashes cold.”
276 St. 46 says that Troynovant, i.e., London, was first founded by Brutus, “That Albion had conquered first by warlike feat” (1. 9). NF seems to be assuming that “Albion” here is the legendary giant who gave England one of its ancient names. Troynovant and Lincoln, also said to be founded by Brutus in st. 51, are said to be the fairest cities after Cleopolis (st. 51, ll. 4–5).
277 Confused indeed. Lines 1–2 read: “For that same Brute, whom much he did aduaunce / In all his speach, was Syluius his sonne,” where the antecedent of “he” is clearly the Mnemon of the previous stanza, from whom Paridell says he learned all this. NF is assuming the lines mean “But that same Brutus, whom Mnemon praised, was Mnemon’s son Sylvius.” However, it could also mean “But that same Brutus, whom Mnemon praised, was the son of Sylvius.” Mnemon’s name is derived from the Greek word for “memory,” like that of Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses.
278 Presumably, the pun is on “angle” as corner or location and the Germanic tribe of the Angles.
279 See ll. 2–3: “That he Malbeccoes halfen eye did wyle, / His halfen eye he wiled wondrous well.”
280 See st. 22, ll. 4–5.
281 Procurer, go-between.
282 See ll. 8–9, in which Braggadocchio betrays the falseness of his fine sentiments with a bombastic alliterativeness worthy of Bottom the weaver: “But minds of mortall men are muchell mard, / And mou’d amisse with massie mucks vnmeet regard.” Quoted in AC, 261 (AC2, 243).
283 Malbecco expresses what seems a genuine concern for Hellenore’s safety, and says that if she is dead “Then all the world is lost.”
284 St. 35: Paridell casts off Hellenore because “He nould be clogd. So had he serued many one.” St. 42: “It pleased: so he did. Then they march forward braue.”
285 Malbecco pretends to be one of the satyrs’ goats in order to approach Hellenore.
286 Line 4: “And painefull pleasure turnes to pleasing paine.”
287 A repetition of the mistake in par. 122; Arthur’s appearance is typically in the eighth canto.
288 See st. 1, l. 2.
289 Claudian (ca. 370–ca. 404), author of The Rape of Proserpine.
290 St. 11, ll. 1–2: “My Lady and my loue is cruelly pend / In dolefull darkenesse from the vew of day.”
291 In a rare momentary loss of nerve, Britomart, confronted by the wall of fire, says to Scudamour in st. 22 that they are foolhardy as the Titans rising up against the gods. But when she boldly passes through the flames anyway in st. 23, they part as the air parts for Jove’s thunderbolt, “displacing” the clouds into showers.
292 The one at this point is in st. 26. Mulciber, or Vulcan, the smith, has made the fire. In the Odyssey, he is Hephaestus, the husband of Aphrodite, cuckolded by Ares.
293 See st. 28, ll. 8–9.
294 See ll.1–2: “Kings Queenes, Lords Ladies, Knights and Damzels gent / Were heap’d together with the vulgar sort.”
295 These appear around the border of the tapestry.
296 The second of the three rooms in Busirane’s castle is decorated with figures of gold rather than tapestry.
297 Over the door between the first and second rooms is the motto, “Be bold.” On the iron door between the second and third rooms is the motto, “Be not too bold.” According to Hamilton’s note (412), the mottoes are drawn from the story of Bluebeard.
298 See st. 7, 1. 9.
299 See st. 13, ll. 5–6: “and in her hand did hold / An holy water Sprinckle …”
300 Lines 8–9: “Faire Dame he might behold in perfect kind; / Which seene, he much reioyced in his cruell mind.”
301 For example, the first three figures behind Cupid are Reproach, Repentance, and Shame.
302 See ll. 3–5: “So many moe, as there be phantasies / In wauering wemens wit, that none can tell, / Or paines in loue, or punishments in hell.”
303 Lines 8–9: “A thousand charmes he formerly did prove, / Yet thousand charmes could not her stedfast heart remoue.”
304 In which Busirane’s knife wounds Britomart slightly in the course of her rescue of Amoret.
305 Returning back through the three rooms, Britomart finds their richness gone, and the flames at the porch are quenched.
306 See st. 43, ll. 7–9.
307 A repetition: this designation has already appeared before par. 162.
308 See st. 3.
309 In Seraphita, the title character appears as a male to the female protagonist and as female to the male protagonist.
310 In st. 13, Britomart unlaces her helmet, and her golden hair falls around her “Like as the shining skie in summers night, / What time the dayes with scorching heat abound, / Is creasted all with lines of firie light” (ll. 6–8). This leads some of the knights and ladies to think, in st. 14, that “some enchantment faygned it” (1. 7), and that Britomart is really Bellona, the goddess of war, in disguise.
311 See pars. 37 and 59, above.
312 In Henry Vaughan, The World, ll.1–2: “I Saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light.”
313 The “bloody feast” is that of the occasion of Hercules’ fight with the Centaurs in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The barren ground around Ate’s house is in sts. 25–6 sown with seeds of discord that are said to serve Ate for bread, “That she may sucke their life, and drinke their blood” (st. 26, 1. 5).
314 In st. 29, Ate’s hands are described as “vnequall”: one reaches, but the other pushes away; one makes but the other mars, and so on. When Paridell, in false friendship, agrees to fight in place of the injured Blandamour, he says, “the left hand rubs the right” (st. 40, 1. 9), an image of a false concord that is really a disguised discord. The “unequal horses” are those of the chariot of Night in bk. 1, canto 5, st. 28.
315 Ate, rejuvenated by her association with Blandamour, is described as a withered tree that has become “fresh and fragrant” again.
316 See st. 46, ll. 8–9, in which Duessa says, “For Loue is free, and led with selfe delight, / Ne will enforced be with maisterdome or might.” Cf. bk. 3, canto 1, st. 25, ll. 7–9, in which Britomart asserts: “Ne may loue be compeld by maisterie; / For soone as maisterie comes, sweet loue anone / Taketh his nimble wings, and soone away is gone.”
317 Scudamour and Paridell collide in st. 42 like “two billowes in the Irish sowndes” (1.1).
318 Scudamour believes Ate the way that Othello believes Iago, and falls into a wild jealousy over her supposed infidelity with Britomart, but is unable to bring himself to take revenge by killing Britomart’s squire, the disguised Glauce.
319 All in sts. 1–2, though the reference to the false tongue in James is implicit rather than explicit.
320 In canto 2, sts. 32–4, and canto 3, st. 45, respectively.
321 The false Florimell recompenses Paridell with “golden words” (st. 9, 1. 2), “Sometimes him blessing with a light eye-glance, / And coy lookes tempring with loose dalliance” (ll. 4–5).
322 Blandamour angrily complains to Paridell that friends are supposed to share everything, but that Paridell has not shared the false Florimell with him.
323 “For vertue is the band, that bindeth harts most sure.” The stanza has earlier spoken of false friendship as “forg’d and spred with golden foyle” (1. 4).
324 “That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.”
325 See Religio Medici, in The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman J. Endicott (New York: Norton, 1967), 17 (pt. 1, sec. 12).
326 See ll.1–2: “Their mother was a Fay, and had the skill / Of secret things, and all the powres of nature.”
327 See st. 47.
328 Cambell’s, or Cambello’s, magic ring revives him in st. 23, so that he appears as a snake that has shed its skin. In st. 45, Nepenthe is said to be of greater value than the fountain of love in the Ardennes in both Boiardo and Ariosto, though not Tasso.
329 In the Aeneid, bk. 7, Feronia is granted the boon of three souls for her son Erulus.
330 Cambell is compared to a withered tree repaired through the farmer’s toil.
331 See st. 27: the fight ebbs and flows as the tide flows up the Shannon, forcing back its current, but then falls back again.
332 See st. 42.
333 The exact phase is “that seemed borne of Angels brood” (1. 7).
334 The stanza speaks of famous men whom Jove has “aduanced to the skie, / And there made gods” (ll. 2–3).
335 Canace opens the “raile” of her chariot by smiting it with her rod in st. 46. NF is comparing this to the simile of the tide forcing back the waters of the Shannon in st. 27.
336 Antoninus Liberalis was a Greek grammarian around A.D. 150 who wrote a series of forty-one mythical tales of metamorphosis. Thomas Warton defends Antoninus Liberalis in Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (Westmead, Eng.: Gregg International Publishers, 1969), 1:93–4: “Thus this compiler is more valuable than is imagined, as he has preserved to us the fragments of many famous authors, all of whole works are supposed to be entirely lo κt.”
337 NF is slightly misremembering here. In Inferno, canto 23, ll. 61–7, Dante sees the Hypocrites wearing golden cloaks lined with lead. The next thing he sees is Caiaphas, crucified naked on the ground by three stakes (ll.109–230).
338 Britomart’s restoration of the prize to the Knights of Maidenhead is likened to the way a sudden shower refreshes a hot day.
339 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Essays on Politics and Society, ed. J.M. Robson, vol. 18 of the Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), chaps. 4 and 5. In chap. 4, Mill contends “that with the personal tastes and self-regarding concerns of individuals the public has no business to interfere” (285).
340 NF quotes this fourteenth-century poem, The Blacksmith, in AC, 262 (AC2, 244): “Swarte smekyd smethes smateryd wyth smoke / Dryue me to deth wyth den of here dyntes …”
341 See 1. 9: “The things that day most minds, at night doe most appeare.”
342 In st. 44, the wicked smith, when Scudamour finally begins to fall asleep, nips him “vnder his side” with red-hot tongs. Among the rhetorical tricks of st. 45 is the contrast between the light, tripping accents of the dawn in 1. 5, followed by the thudding rhythm of 1. 6: “With pearly dew sprinkling the morning grasse; / Then vp he rose like heauie lumpe of lead.”
343 The double (i.e., two-syllable) rhyme of st. 8 is bearing / hearing / fearing. St. 9, 1. 3: “Her selfe downe soust, she waked out of dread.” St. 4, 1. 7: “Feebly she shriekt, but so feebly indeed.”
344 See bk. 3, canto 7, st. 26.
345 In st. 26, the giant Lust uses Æmylia as a human shield against Timias, who nevertheless succeeds in wounding him, so that the blood stains Æmylia’s garments.
346 Lust rolls the stone away from his cave, in which he keeps his female captives.
347 Amoret asks: “But what are you, whom like vnlucky lot / Hath linckt with me in the same chaine attone?” (ll. 6–7).
348 Amoret is told in st. 19 that, to preserve Æmylia’s chastity, an old woman has repeatedly offered herself up to Lust as substitute victim. In st. 34, the old woman is called a “foule and lothsome creature” and “A leman fit for such a louer deare. / That mou’d Belphebe her no lesse to hate” (ll. 4–6).
349 Belphœbe killing Lust is likened to Diana slaying the children of Niobe.
350 In sts. 3–5, Timias befriends a turtledove that, like him, has lost her love. In st. 6, he ties the heart-shaped ruby to it, which eventually finds Belphœbe and guides her to Timias in his isolation in the wilderness.
351 See st. 15, ll. 7–8: “For he whose daies in wilfull woe are worne, / The grace of his Creator doth despise.”
352 Timias’s phrase to Belphœbe about what it is in her power to do for him.
353 See sts. 30–4.
354 Beauty is decayed now, except if “few plants preseru’d through heauenly ayd, / In Princes Court doe hap to sprout again” (ll. 3–4).
355 “Though namelesse there his bodie now doth lie.”
356 The rhyme is againe / slaine / maine / vaine / paine / gaine, etc. The two rhymes of st. 49 are aright / hight / bright / delight / light, and lie / outwardly / eie / skie.
357 It is difficult to know “When all three kinds of loue together meet,” says st. 1, ll.1–2. The kinds are named in ll. 5–7: “The deare affection vnto kindred sweet, / Or raging fire of loue to woman kind, / Or zeale of friends combynd with vertues meet.”
358 See sts. 1–2.
359 See ll. 8–9: “So loue of soule doth loue of bodie passe, / No lesse then perfect gold surmounts the meanest brasse.”
360 See st. 4, ll. 6–9.
361 In st. 8, the Squire of low degree comes forth from the prison “full weake and wan, not like him selfe to bee” (1. 9). This is in contrast to Corflambo’s failure to answer at all to Pœnia’s call in st. 7.
362 Amoret fears “In case his burning lust should breake into excesse” (1. 9).
363 “Sixe they were all,” says st. 20, 1. 3: Paridell, Blandamour, Druon, Claribell, Britomart, and Scudamour.
364 The quarrel is likened to a storm in st. 33; Arthur, however, quells it in st. 34.
365 “For from the first that I her loue profest, / Vnto this houre, this present luckless howre, / I neure ioyed happinesse nor rest, / But thus turmoild from one to other stowre” (ll.1–4).
366 Sir Claribell requests of Scudamour “That as we ride together on our way, / Ye will recount to vs in order dew / All that aduenture …” (ll. 6–8).
367 The letter to Raleigh says that on the third day of the Faerie Queene’s feast, a Groom comes in complaining of an enchanter named Busirane who holds captive a woman named Amoretta, and that Scudamour takes on the task of rescuing her. Bk. 4, canto 10, st. 4 simply says that Scudamour desired to win both Amoret and the shield. NF apparently has in mind the fact that he originally wins Amoret and the shield at the Temple of Venus, not at the later castle of Busirane.
368 At times a lion; at times broken arrows.
369 See bk. 3, canto 1, st. 8, 1. 9, where the phrase refers to Merlin’s glass, in which Britomart has first seen Artegall.
370 See st. 12, 1. 5.
371 As Scudamour explores, he hears a sound: “And vnderneath, the riuer rolling still / With murmure soft, that seem’d to serue the workmans will” (II.8–9).
372 See st. 21, ll. 6–9: “For all that nature by her mother wit / Could frame in earth, and forme of substance base, / Was there, and all that nature did omit, / Art playing second natures part, supplyed it.”
373 See st. 23, 1. 2: “It seem’d a second paradise to ghesse.”
374 See st. 23.
375 A catalogue of friendship: Hercules and Hylas, Jonathan and David, Theseus and Pirithous, Pylades and Orestes, Damon and Pythias, etc.
376 See ll. 5–6: “That being free from fear and gealosye, / Might frankely there their loues desire possesse.”
377 In st. 30, the Temple of Venus is exalted above both the Temple of Diana at Ephesus and the Temple of Solomon.
378 See st. 32.
379 See The Clod & the Pebble from the Songs of Experience, Erdman, 19. The Clod says, “Love seeketh not Itself to please”; the Pebble says, “Love seeketh only Self to please.”
380 See st. 39. The “christall glasse” (1. 7) of which the altar is made has rather puzzled commentators.
381 See par. 67 and n. 164, above.
382 The “b” rhyme is complayning / disdayning / fayning / constrayning.
383 Sts. 44–7 are a paraphrase of Lucretius’s invocation to Venus in the opening of De Rerum Natura.
384 In that stanza, Shamefastnesse never lifts her eyes from the ground, while Cheerfulnesse has eyes like twinkling stars.
385 See st. 54, ll. 8–9. This is Scudamour’s defence of his taking of Amoret.
386 When Scudamour leaves the island, Daunger no more threatens him than Cerberus did Orpheus.
1 This and the following list of topics are handwritten.
1 In pt. 2 of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” Eliot’s note to 1.138 (“And we shall play a game of chess”) reads “Cf. the game of chess in Middleton’s Women beware Women.” Shah mat = Arabic, “the king is dead,” origin of the word “checkmate.” See TBN, 112.
2 In 1513, Marcus Hieronymus Vida (1490–1566) wrote a poem on chess called Schacchia, Ludus, “The Game of Chess,” describing a game of chess played between Apollo and Mercury in the presence of other gods. It was published in 1525, anonymously and without the author’s permission.
3 See G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays (London: Methuen, 1960; orig. pub. 1930, rev. 1949), chap. 9, “The Lear Universe,” which opens: “It has been remarked that all the persons in King Lear are either very good or very bad. This is an overstatement, yet one which suggests a profound truth.”
4 As so often, NF draws his information about folk drama from E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1903). See 1:394.
5 “The Vision of Mirza” is Spectator essay no. 159, by Joseph Addison, an allegory in which the speaker, Mirza, is shown the vision of life as a bridge across the waters of Eternity. The bridge is broken, so that many who try to cross fall into the waters. However, the final vision is of a series of islands in the sea into which the river of eternity flows; these islands are “the mansions of good men after death.”
6 I.e., the union of the crowns of England and Scotland by the ascension to the throne of James VI of Scotland to become James I of England.
7 In bk. 6, canto 8 of The Faerie Queene, Serena nearly becomes the sacrificial victim of a tribe whose central religious rite is a cannibal feast with erotic overtones.
8 Tamburlaine, 2.5.49. See The Tudor Period, vol. 1 of Drama of the English Renaissance, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
9 Milton Cross says, in The New Milton Cross’ Complete Stories of the Great Operas, rev. and enlarged ed., ed. Karl Kohrs (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 634: “The brilliant overture is an established favorite in the concert repertoire. Prominent in it is a series of impressive chords sounded three times in groups of three, said to be symbolic of the knocking at the door of the temple as part of the Masonic rites of initiation. They will be heard again during the temple scene.”
10 In John Donne’s The Baite, the speaker tells a woman, “For thou thy selfe art thine owne bait” (1. 26): every fish “Will amorously to thee swimme, / Gladder to catch thee, than thou him” (ll.11–12). Thus, Enobarbus is caught by Cleopatra’s show; such fishing imagery appears at various points in Antony and Cleopatra.
11 The Ghibelline was the imperial and aristocratic party of medieval Italy; it opposed the papal and popular Guelph party. See also pars. 40, 135, below.
12 See Introduction, li-lii. Also par. 120, below.
13 See Allardyce Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (London: G.G. Harrap, 1937).
14 Paradox was the title of one of the volumes in the second tetralogy of NF’s “ogdoad.” See Introduction, xxiii, LN, xlii-xliii, and TBN, xl-xli.
15 The first documentary evidence of Shakespeare in the London theatre world is a comment by Robert Greene in his Groats-worth of Witte (1592): “for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes that he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.”
16 Robert Browning’s poem Prospice speaks of the imminence of death:
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all. (ll. 4–12)
17 The second Henri Estienne (ca. 1531–98) was the greatest scholar in a family of five generations of distinguished scholars who were also printers. His Tragoediae selectae (1567) was divided into three sections: one contained literal prose translations into Latin of four plays by Euripides (including two translations by Erasmus) and three by Sophocles, plus an essay on the nature of tragedy and comedy; a second section repeated the same seven plays and added an eighth by Aeschylus, printing the Greek and Latin on facing pages; and the third section provided a commentary on the plays in Latin.
18 The passage from Lodge paraphrasing Donatus is quoted in NP, 54–5.
19 The aphorism comes from Cicero’s De Republica, 4.ll. See Ben Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour, 3.6.204–9: “Cicero would haue a Comoedie to be Imitatio vitae, Speculum consuetudinis, Imago veritatis, a thing throughout pleasant, and ridiculous, and accomodated to the correction of manners.”
20 See Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse and A Short Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: A. Constable, 1895), 41. Gosson has named some plays he approves of, and concludes, “The ∫e Playes are good playes and Jweete playes, and of all playes the be ∫t playes and mo ∫t to be liked, woorthy to bee foung of the Mujes, or Jet out with the cuning of Ro∫cius himself, yet are they not fit for euery man’s dyet: neither ought they commonly to bee ∫hewen.”
21 See Introduction, lii.
22 The motto of the Globe Theatre was Totus mundus agit histrionem, often taken to mean “the whole world’s a stage.” It actually means something closer to “the whole world plays a part.”
23 I.e., in the Noah play of the Townley Cycle of medieval mystery plays.
24 In NFS, 82, NF says of the First or bad Quarto, “In it, Polonius is called Corambis, the Queen explicitly says that she knew nothing of Hamlet senior’s murder, a stage direction tells us that Hamlet leaps into Ophelia’s grave to struggle with Laertes, and Hamlet’s speech to the players refers to the ad-libbing of clowns.”
25 Hamlet, 4.5.48–66, a ballad about a pregnant maid.
26 See Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), Annex to vol. 1, sec. C (iii) (e), 449: “In the English version of the Western Drama, the plots had become differentiated, as early as the Elizabethan age, into a fictitious and a historical class. The division between these two classes roughly corresponded to the division between Comedy and Tragedy.” NF also mentions this in NB 42a. 17 (NR, 9).
27 See n. 15, above.
28 See Samuel S. Shoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 255–6: “[John] Aubrey, in touch with a living tradition through the actor Beeston, admired Shakespeare the more because ‘he was not a company keeper’ in Shoreditch—he ‘wouldn’t be debauched,’ excusing himself when approached (‘and if invited to, writ: he was in pain’). So Aubrey jotted down, helter-skelter, on a miscellaneous scrap. One cannot say with absolute certainty that these notes apply to Shakespeare—so disordered is the manuscript at this point—rather than to the biographer’s informant, William Beeston; but most responsible authorities, including Chambers, believe that Shakespeare is the subject.”
29 Philip Henslowe (ca. 1550–1616) was the most important theatre owner and manager of the Elizabethan period. His Admiral’s Men were the rivals of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He kept notoriously strict control of his actors and playwrights.
30 Frederick Gard Fleay (1831–1909), British Shakespeare scholar. It is not certain why NF names Fleay in this regard. Hershel Baker’s introduction to Henry VIII in The Riverside Shakespeare says that “there was no serious attack on the integrity of the text until 1850, when James Spedding published ‘Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Henry VIII?’ This famous article, first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine and reissued, with a different title, in the 1874 Transactions of the New Shakespere Society, posed a question for which a hundred years of scholarship has found no certain answer” (974).
31 James Howell (ca. 1593–1666) is best known for his Epistolae Ho-Elianae, the four volumes of which appeared in 1645, 1647, 1650, and 1655. The Phoenix’ Nest (1593) is an important poetry anthology of the Elizabethan period. The volume opens with three elegies to Sir Philip Sidney, who is most likely the phoenix of the title.
32 There was an unsuccessful attempt to marry Elizabeth to the French king’s younger brother, the Due d’Alençon. See also par. 223, below.
33 In George Peele’s pastoral drama The Arraignment of Paris (1584), the goddess Diana says: “The place Elyzium hight, and of the place / Her name that governs there Eliza is: / A kingdom that may well compare with mine. / An auncient seat of kings, a second Troy …” (ll. 67–70). See English Drama, 1580–1642, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1933), 19.
34 The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (first century B.C.) quoted from a now lost book by Hecataeus of Abdea from about 300 B.C. that said that there is a circular temple of Apollo on the island of the Hyperboreans, the people of the north, whence the north wind comes. See Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, bk. 2, sec. 47.
35 See n. 31, above.
36 The death and revival of Ahania are among the important events of the apocalypse in Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas. See Erdman, 391, 394.
37 See The Merry Wives of Windsor, at the end of the play, where Mrs. Page says, “Good husband let us every one go home, / And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire—/ Sir John and all” (5.5.241–3). See also pars. 89, 229, below.
38 Written above: “on the 3rd sound of the trumpet.”
39 Ijim and Tirel are characters in Blake’s Tiriel. See also par. 235, below.
40 See Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1951; orig. pub. 1927), 190–1: “Iago, the taurobolus of this sacrificial bull, the little David of this Goliath, or the little feat-gilded espada, is for Shakespeare nothing but Everyman, the Judas of the world, the representative of the crowds around the crucifix, or of the ferocious crowds at the corrida, or of the still more abject Roman crowds at the mortuary games.”
41 See par. 10 and n. 11, above.
42 Written above: “overtly.”
43 In the system of Samkhya-Yoga, the primordial substance, prakrti, manifests itself in three modalities or gunas: sattva (pure luminous intellect), rajas (physical and emotional activity), and tamas (inertia, confusion, animality); these are both objective qualities of nature and subjective modes of consciousness.
44 Greek name for Aeschylus’s The Suppliants.
45 A version of this sentence, including the phrase “ecstasy of bad taste,” appears in “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd ser., 46, sec. 2 (June, 1952), 49, preceded by NF’s explanation of the dramatic situation: “There is one scene in Plautus where a son and father are making love to the same courtesan, and the son asks his father pointedly if he really does love mother.” The source is Gilbert Norwood, Plautus and Terence (New York: Longmans, Green, 1932). What Norwood actually says is that “More than once Plautus carries bad taste to the pitch of infamy” (66). The last sentence of this notebook paragraph is also echoed in the same paragraph of the article.
46 Gilbert Murray does indeed make such an assertion in “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,” in Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962; orig. pub. 1912), 341; annotated copy in the NFL. However, no mention of the Murray passage occurs in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–61). NF is probably thinking of a moment during Toynbee’s discussion of one of his controlling themes, that of “withdrawal and return.” In 3:259, he says, “One mythical variant of the motif is the story of the foundling.” He ends the paragraph by saying (3:260–1), “This is the story of the foundling; and in the Hellenic imagination this story loomed so large that it came to be a literary commonplace: a regular ingredient in the plots of the Attic ‘New Comedy’ and of the Hellenistic Novel.” He does not explicitly connect the foundling with the divine man, although divine deaths and resurrections have been mentioned on previous pages as versions of the withdrawal and return pattern. This passage in Toynbee is also referred to in NB 42b.
47 Terence defends himself against the charge in the Prologue to the Andria.
48 Contaminatio, or contamination, meant making a play out of parts of other plays.
49 A character in Aristophanes’ The Wasps whose name is also allegorical, meaning “hater of Cleon.”
50 In The Clouds, 1. 828, Zeus is said to be replaced by dinos, commonly translated as “whirl” or “vortex.”
51 The parabasis was a direct address to the audience in the middle of Aristophanic Old Comedy.
52 GC, 48 (GC2, 66), defines dromena as “things to be done or specified actions.” NF may have picked the term up from the Cambridge ritualists, for whom myth arose out of ritual, rather than vice versa. See also par. 146, below, and NB 9.74, 79, 81, 107.
53 See Gilbert Murray, “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,” in Jane Ellen Harrison’s Themis, 343.
54 Written above: “H Sr’s.”
55 NF is apparently referring to act 3, scene 1, in which Claudius and Polonius hide in an unspecified manner to spy on Hamlet while he talks to Ophelia. It is actually Polonius who hides “behind the arras” in act 3, scene 4, and is killed by Hamlet.
56 See J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951; orig. pub. 1935), 68: “They have been studying together at the university of Wittenberg, Luther’s university, the very cradle of the Reformation. They are in fact Protestants, and the point has no small bearing upon our interpretation of the play. Nor is the mention of Wittenberg the only indication that Shakespeare intended his audience to think of Denmark as a Protestant country.”
57 “The court of King Pétaud” is a French colloquial phrase meaning a disorderly assembly or place of utter confusion. King Pétaud is the king of the beggars, from Latin peto, “I beg.” Cf. also pars. 89, 91, below.
58 Cf. par. 227 and n. 186, below.
59 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 306. The Loeb edition translates it as “Behold a spectacle.”
60 In his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), Johnson says: “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind.” See Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1938), 243; annotated copy in the NFL.
61 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 5.5.243. Cf. also par. 38 and n. 37, above, and par. 229, below.
62 Cf. par. 81 and n. 57, above.
63 See Charles Lamb, The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 298–9: “But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear; they might more easily propose to per-sonate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michelangelo’s terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in the corporal dimension, but in intellectual.… Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage.”
64 NF probably has in mind Elmer Edgar Stoll, Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960; based on the 2nd ed., 1942, with additional corrections), which he mentions in par. 174. Chap. 3, “The Characterization,” takes issue with critics who try to read Shakespeare’s characters as if they were in a realistic novel, forgetting that they are subject to the stage conventions of their time. NF speaks slightingly of Stoll in NB 42b, also from the 1940s: “The Stoll approach to Shakespeare is typical: the mediocrity wishes to assure his fellows & reassure himself of the essential mediocrity of the great writers of the past.”
65 Written above: “music, as silent to us as to the composer.”
66 Cf. pars. 81, 89, and n. 57, above.
67 Written above: “3, if you count the putting down the breeches speech.”
68 Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humor, ed. Gabriele Bernhard Jackson (New Haven and London: Yale, 1969), 1.2.124.
69 Schalk = knave, rogue, joker. For example, see NB 7.2 (from the late 1940s), in which Goethe and Joyce are characterized as “both representing the schalk disruption pattern which was the one thing Dante couldn’t include, the form of the fourth …” Of its various occurrences in the notebooks, this is the only time that schalk is associated with Toynbee.
70 Cf. NB 43.89 and n. 200.
71 See Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox, pt. 3, chap. 5, “Shakespeare as Executioner,” 139–45. The point is being repeated from NF’s 1936 essay “The Diatribes of Wyndham Lewis: A Study in Prose Satire,” SE, 370: “Shakespeare was essentially an executioner of the tragic hero. His job as a dramatist was brutal and bloody.”
72 See John Webster, The White Devil, in John Webster: Three Plays (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1972), 166: “I limb’ed this night-piece, and it was my best” (5.6.295). In some editions, the spelling is “limn’d,” as NF has it.
73 David exorcises the evil spirit Malzah in Saul, by nineteenth-century Canadian poet Charles Heavysege (1816–69).
74 In his published writings G. Wilson Knight’s attitude to the Ghost is in fact more ambiguous. In The Wheel of Fire, he says only that “The Ghost may or may not have been a ‘goblin damned’; it certainly was no ‘spirit of health’ (i.iv.40).” In The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, including the Roman Plays (London: Methuen, 1951; orig. pub. 1931), 104, he says, “Hence he is vividly shown as a thing of darkness. In this play the dark forces are given ethical sanction; but this alters not their darkness … Throughout our problem is unsolved for us. If we seek for a final answer, we must say: the Ghost is neither ‘right,’ nor ‘wrong,’ but it is a thing of dark, not light; of Death, not Life.” It is possible that Wilson Knight expressed a slightly different view in conversation with NF.
75 Cf. Introduction, lii. Also par. 170, below.
76 See Emile Male, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (New York: Harper & Row, 1972; orig. pub. 1913), annotated copy in the NFL, a famous study of the encyclopedic iconography of the Gothic cathedral. According to Ayre, reading Male for the first time in the fall of 1934 “was an initiation into the fundamental, but largely forgotten, medieval structure of the four levels of meaning which would permeate Frye’s critical writings for decades” (109–10).
77 Built in the reign of Henry VII, the twenty-eight windows of St. Mary’s Church in Fairford are the only complete set of pre-Reformation stained glass windows left in Britain. They have been called “the poor man’s Bible” because they tell the whole story of Christianity. Ayre records NF’s visit to the church in the 1930s: “For Frye, it was a revelation. He had read Emile Male’s book on the iconography of the Gothic cathedral but was uncertain how it actually worked. The church took several hours to see and while the typology was not nearly as elaborate or as obvious as that of French cathedrals that Male studied, Frye was fascinated with how the Biblical outline could be set into architectural design” (141–2).
78 Descent to the underworld. The term, which literally means “sailing into port,” derives from the Kataplous of Lucian of Samosota (2nd century A.D.).
79 A version of this paragraph appears in “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1952), 52.
80 The Rev. Nathanael Burwash was President and Chancellor of Victoria College, 1887–1912. As he died in 1918, it is hard to imagine what remark of his NF could be alluding to; it is possible that NF has in mind some dormitory in-joke from Burwash Hall, his old residence, named after the former President and Chancellor.
81 NF had not published any paper on King Lear or on tragedy during the period of the composition of NB 8.
82 King Lear, 3.4.114. Cf. also pars. 239, 275, below, and Notes 58–5.29.
83 See C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 2: “There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man.’ He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord.’ The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love.’”
84 Donne’s First and Second Anniversaries (1612), in commemoration of Elizabeth Drury, who died when she was only fourteen, were criticized by Ben Jonson and others for idealizing their subject into a quasi-divine being.
85 For Dante’s Feltro, cf. NB 43, par. 95 and n. 208. In the Travels (1356) attributed to John Mandeville, the Amazons are said to keep the ten lost tribes of Israel shut up in a cavern in the Caucasus mountains.
86 Pars. 110–20 were originally a single short essay, whose paragraphs were not separated by spaces as with the other entries.
87 Written above: “i.e. restorative.”
88 J.M. Robertson (1856–1933), secularist, rationalist, and a prolific author, whose works include The Genuine Shakespeare: A Conspectus (1930).
89 According to medieval folklore, the lion, when pursued, wiped out his tracks with the end of his tail.
90 From Milton’s On Shakespeare: “Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving, / Dost make us Marble with too much conceiving” (ll.13–14).
91 See John Middleton Murray, Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936). It comes close to being the controlling idea of Murray’s book that Shakespeare “had to make a choice between two alternatives: either to be the greatest poet and the greatest dramatist of the world, or to be the greatest poet and the greatest artist of the world; but that to be all three together is somehow denied by the nature of things” (108, in chap. 5, “The Blunt Monster,” from 2 Henry TV, Induction, ll.18–19, which speak, significantly, of “the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wav’ring multitude”). To Murray, Shakespeare’s distinction both as dramatist and as poet is due to his choosing the first of these alternatives, thus pleasing the multitude rather than addressing himself, like Jonson and Chapman, to a “clerisy” or elite above it.
92 Cf. par. 28 and n. 26, above.
93 Harley Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927–48), provide practical advice for actors and directors.
94 See Una Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement (London: Methuen, 1939), 10–11: “Collaboration, in art, may be defined as the combined work of two or more artists. But a distinction must be added immediately between mere cooperation and that true collaboration which gives to the product the artistic unity, harmony and congruence that we feel to be the distinctive quality of a work of art.… It will be noticed that the resulting play … is something different from the work of either of the dramatists separately and even from the sum of their separate qualities and capacities. It is, that is to say, analogous to a chemical compound in relation to its component elements and not to a mixture.”
95 See Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox, pt. 4, chap. 1, “Shakespeare as a Feminine Genius,” 149–52. In his essay “The Diatribes of Wyndham Lewis,” SE, 369, NF explains Lewis’s point thus: “In Shakespeare’s case this is reinforced by a ‘feminine’ mind which made him treat some of his heroes like a lover.” Cf. also par. 181, below.
96 Written above: “mystery instead of morality.”
97 See Introduction, li-lii. Cf. also pars. 10, 98, above.
98 NF uses the Greek spelling of this word several times in this notebook.
99 The reference is to Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). Cf. also par. 266, below.
100 The upper balcony in a theatre.
101 NB 41 (NR, 87–9) is a brief study of Handley Cross, a foxhunting novel by Robert Smith Surtees. A reference to Surtees occurs in SeS, 146–7 (SeSCT, 96–7).
102 1 Corinthians 15:33 is a quotation from Menander’s Thais, “evil communications corrupt good manners,” as the AV translates it.
103 See Young, 1:2–6. Hrotsvitha, born ca. 935, was a nun whose “adaptations” of Terence modified their original in an attempt to praise the chastity of virgins.
104 The Edict of Nantes, signed by Henry IV, granted Protestants the right to their religion. The Test Act of 1673 required all civil and military officials to be members of the Church of England, and to swear oaths of supremacy and loyalty; it was aimed at Roman Catholics but affected Dissenters as well.
105 Prometheus: The Poem of Fire is the last symphony of Alexandre Scriabine or Scriabin (1872–1915). Cf. also par. 134 and n. 121, below.
106 Richard II, 5.3.22 and 5.5.13–14. Cf. also par. 161, below, NB 9.291, and Notes 54–13.101.
107 De Verbo mirifico, or The Miraculous Word is a Kabbalistic work by Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522). Reuchlin claims that divine power is inherent in the Hebrew language and the Kabbalah.
108 Written above: “O.T.”
109 “To cut out this scene!—but I’ll print it—egad, I’ll print it every word,” in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: George Bell & Sons, 1883), 474 (act 2, sc. 2, final line).
110 The Pharaohs of the Saite Dynasty (663–525 B.C.) were driven by an antiquarian impulse, copying Old Kingdom art and adding their own burials to tombs from early dynasties.
111 “Allen’s Alley” was a radio program by the comedian Fred Allen in the 1940s, a series of sketches with recurring type-characters.
112 A tierce de Picardie is the device of ending a minor-key musical composition with a major chord. Literally, it means “Picardie third,” because of the change from a minor to a major third in the final chord.
113 Theodore Bilbo was a conservative Southern Democrat, twice governor of Mississippi, and a member of the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947. His political success was due to his rabble-rousing speeches supporting white supremacy. The New Republic was the foremost liberal political journal of its time.
114 Characters in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World respectively.
115 Basically, mythical descent, ascent, and satiric apotheosis respectively. Kataplous, which literally means “sailing into port,” derives from the Kataplous of Lucian of Samosata (2nd century A.D.), a satire in dialogue form that takes place before and during the ferryboat journey to the underworld. The Apocolocyntosis, or The Pumpkinification of Claudius, is a Menippean satire about the deification of the emperor Claudius after his death, attributed to Seneca the Younger.
116 “Shakespeare shows himself in it a common-place librettist working on a stolen plot, but a great musician. No matter how poor, coarse, cheap and obvious the thought may be, the mood is charming, and the music of the words expresses the mood.” See George Bernard Shaw, “Shakespeare’s Merry Gentlemen,” a review of a performance of Much Ado about Nothing at the St. James Theatre, 16 February 1898, in Dramatic Opinions and Essays, 2 vols. (New York: Brentano’s, 1913), 2:422–9. The quotation appears on p. 424.
117 The quotation marks apparently indicate NF’s own drafting.
118 “Favourite abode of the nymphs.” Originally from Aeneid, bk. 1, 1.168.
119 Antenor, the brother of Priam, was supposed to have founded Padua with a remnant band of Trojans. See Aeneid, bk. 1, ll. 242–6.
120 During this period, NF temporarily thought of FS as Liberal.
121 Cf. par. 124 and n. 105, above. The phrase “black mass” is explained by a passage in NF’s student essay of 1936, “Religion and the Art Forms of Music and Drama”: “As a general rule those who admire the Mass solely as a work of art are decadents; and it was a contemporary sign of decadence when program music was followed by the symphonies of Scriabin, with their colour-organs and perfume-engines. If Scriabin had had his way, he would have plunged ahead into what could only have been called a black mass” (SE, 336).
122 Adjectival form of “parabasis,” the direct address to the audience in the middle of Greek Old Comedy.
123 In the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson said, referring to himself, that “Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, to mixe his head with other mens heeles.” “Making Nature Afraid” is the title of chap. 2 of NP.
124 For the Florentine Ghibelline party, see n. 11, above. “Morituri te salutamus” was the Latin version of the phrase used by the Roman gladiators before a contest: “We who are about to die salute you.”
125 See Selected Works of John Dryden, ed. William Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1953), 362–3: “To begin, then, with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,
Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi
[As much (taller) as cypresses usually are, among pliant viburnums.]
The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eton say, that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare….”
126 See previous note. NF may have had his attention directed to both Dryden and Hales of Eton by John Middleton Murray’s Shakespeare, which he seems to refer to in par. 115, above. The warm and appreciative reference to John Hales on pp. 353–4 of that book comes right after references to what Jonson and Dryden said of Shakespeare.
127 The editors’ address, “To the great Variety of Readers,” begins, “From the most able, to him that can but spell: There you are number’d.”
128 “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.”
129 See AC, 9 (AC2, 10–11).
130 See Henri Frankfort, Henriette Antonia Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946); annotated copy in the NFL.
131 The annual festival of Osiris celebrated and re-enacted his death and rebirth. According to R.T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1959), “The final and most sacred act, at least in the later time, was the erection of the ‘Djed Column’—a fetish which was supposed to symbolize the backbone of the god. Its upright position was the final sign that Osiris had risen” (132).
132 See Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of “The Tempest” (London: Cecil Palmer, 1921), 200: “The fact remains that Setebos, as the ‘god’ of Sycorax, is evidently the hostile Evil Principle, and it is (shall we say?) an odd coincidence that the Egyptian word seteb- means ‘what is hostile.’ Setebos corresponds, therefore, to the evil Set of Egyptian myth, whose consort was Nephthys, dark sister of Isis.”
133 NF links the wands of magical fertility enumerated by Edmund Wilson with the fantasy of his friend and colleague, the Canadian poet E.J. Pratt (1882–1964), who, in The Depression Ends (1932), imagines using the rod of Prospero to summon up an “apocalyptic dinner” for “The shabby ones of earth’s despite, / The victims of her rude neglect” (ll.19–20).
134 See “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction,” Manitoba Arts Review (Spring 1942): 35–47; EICT, 23–38; “In Lyly’s play Campaspe, for instance, Plato and Aristotle are bores, and Diogenes, who is not a philosopher at all but an Elizabethan clown of the Malcontent type, steals the show” (39; EICT, 28). The sentence is reproduced in AC, 230 (AC2, 215).
135 An unusual use of T for Tragicomedy; T usually stands for Twilight. The normal symbol for Tragicomedy occurs in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph.
136 In canto 27 of the Purgatorio, Dante the character has to pass through a wall of fire that separates Purgatory from the Garden of Eden.
137 See n. 52, above.
138 Written below: “hence [?] the reflection of a reflection.”
139 The following may be the passage NF had in mind, even though Montaigne does not use the idea, except by implication, to refer to his own work: “Plato seems to me to have quite knowingly chosen to treat philosophy in the form of dialogues: he was better able to expound the diversity and variety of his concepts by putting them appropriately into the mouths of divers speakers. Variety of treatment is as good as consistency. Better in fact: it means more copious and more useful.” See Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed., M.A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 568.
140 In his New Organon, Bacon lists four kinds of “idol,” typical weaknesses that afflict understanding. The idols of the theatre are characteristic of systematic philosophies that falsify reality through overgeneralization or reduction to an ideal scheme or picture.
141 The first great German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was originally the tale of an insane asylum run by a man who himself turned out to be insane. However, a frame story, contrived by Fritz Lang, was added which made the original plot the paranoid delusion of a psychotic patient.
142 Johannes Bolte, with Georg Polivka, Commentaries to the Nursery and Household Tales, which updates Grimm from modern archives. See TBN, 260; 417–18n. 436.
143 In “The Dream of Maxen Wledig,” in the Welsh Mabinogion, the title character, who is emperor of Rome, dreams of a beautiful maiden, whom he eventually discovers in Britain. When he leaves to woo her, his enemies seize the throne, but he regains it with the help of his wife and her friends.
144 See par. 125 and n. 106, above.
145 “The Plowman’s Tale,” a radical attack on the clergy, was accepted as Chaucer’s until the late nineteenth century, producing a sixteenth-century view of Chaucer as a harbinger of the Reformation.
146 Atellan plays were improvisational farces with masked stock characters, performed in Atella in ancient Italy.
147 The term used by Jane Ellen Harrison in Themis (1912) for the cyclic dying-god figure. Cf. also par. 280, below.
148 See Introduction, lii, and pars. 20, 98, above.
149 This note has not been found in NF’s unpublished materials.
150 John Bale (1495–1563) wrote what is sometimes deemed the first English history play, Kynge Johan (1538–39), in which he rewrites history to make John a heroic rebel against a tyrannical Pope, with an intended parallel with Henry VIII and his defiance of Rome.
151 Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
152 See Elmer Edgar Stoll, Shakespeare Studies. On p. 404, Stoll says, “And to read an old play is as difficult as to read old score,” then attempts on pp. 404–10 to demonstrate that Maurice Morgann has misread the score of the Henry plays as regards Falstaff.
153 I.e., in NF’s chart in par. 168, above.
154 Kenelm Digby (1603–65), naval commander, courtier, and author of works on philosophy, science, and alchemy, wrote a commentary on Spenser.
155 See par. 118 and n. 95, above.
156 The corresponding passage in Symbols of Transformation, Jung’s drastic revision of Psychology of the Unconscious, is par. 316 and n. 13, but the material NF refers to has been omitted from it.
157 C.G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 315.
158 See Louis Untermeyer, The Lives of the Poets: The Story of One Thousand Years of English and American Poetry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 295.
159 Alludes to the attack on drama made by Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). Collier includes Love for Love in a general assault that also includes Aristophanes and Shakespeare.
160 Marcus Cato was censor of the Roman Republic from 189 to 184 B.C.
161 See Max Eastman, The Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 352: “In The Sense of Humor, I explained how, since the comic is the unpleasant taken playfully, the person who causes comic laughter is, if he takes himself seriously, in a humiliating position, no matter how friendly and how free from scorn those may be who enjoy the laughter.” The concept does occur in The Sense of Humor (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), e.g., p. 16, but the phrase itself seems to come from the later book.
162 See Norman Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1969; orig. Everyman edition, 1927), 1:128. Forster quotes from a letter sent by Dickens to Walter Savage Landor: “‘Society is unhinged here,’ thus ran the letter, ‘by her majesty’s marriage, and I am sorry to add that I have fallen hopeless in love with the Queen, and wander up and down with vague and dismal thoughts of running away to some uninhabited island with a maid of honour, to be entrapped by conspiracy for that purpose. Can you suggest any particular young person, serving in such a capacity, who would suit me?’”
163 See James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Viking Critical Library (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 214–15. The reference is to Stephen Dedalus’s famous distinction between lyric, in which the artist’s material is presented in relation to himself; epic, in which it is related equally to himself and other people; and dramatic, in which it is related entirely to others and the personality of the artist disappears.
164 NF probably derived the word paravritti from the following passage in D.T. Suzuki’s Introduction to his translation of the Lankavatara Sutra: “Paravritti literally means ‘turning up’ or ‘turning back’ or ‘change’; technically, it is a spiritual change or transformation which takes place in the mind, especially suddenly, and I have called it ‘revulsion’ in my Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, which, it will be seen, somewhat corresponds to what is known as ‘conversion’ among the psychological students of religion.”
165 Information about the Babylonian Sacaea, to which NF refers several times in NB 8 (pars. 219, 272, 274, below), originally derives from Frazer’s Golden Bough. See Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1914), vol. 4, The Dying God, 113–14: “According to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea. It began on the sixteenth day of the month Lous, and lasted for five days, during which masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines. But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled.” Frazer goes on to speculate that the Sacaea was identical to the Babylonian New Year Festival, the Zagmuk, despite a difference in dates. In vol. 9, The Scapegoat, he takes up the subject once again, this time attempting to identify it not only with the Babylonian New Year festival but also with the Roman Saturnalia and the Jewish Purim (pp. 355–70). A marginal note on p. 368 makes the goal of the argument clear: “The mock king of the Sacaea seems to have personated a god.” In other words, all these festivals hark back to the ritual of the cyclical killing of a god-figure. Finally, at the end of The Scapegoat is a “Note” titled “The Crucifixion of Christ.” Frazer explains that he has relegated this passage from the 2nd edition to an appendix because it proved so controversial. Its thesis is as follows: “But closely as the passion of Christ resembles the treatment of the mock king of the Saturnalia, it resembles still more closely the treatment of the mock king of the Sacaea.” This latter passage is quoted by Wyndham Lewis in The Lion and the Fox (p. 8), also mentioned several times in NB 8. When NF speaks, in par. 10, above, of “the comedy-camival elements of the Passion,” he is adding the medieval customs recorded by W.K. Chambers’ The Mediaeval Stage to the cluster of resemblances. These passages of The Golden Bough are probably the major reason NF was interested in Frazer; he quotes them in three of his student essays of the 1930s (see SE, 121, 133, 334–5). Their import for him is summed up in a sentence from his “Religion and the Art Forms of Music and Drama, SE, 334: “That is, all mankind approximates the Christian religion: non-Christian myths all strive to approach the Passion, which is the nexus of all religious symbolism.”
166 Maitreya is a messianic Buddha whose coming as a World Teacher in a period of decline will renew the doctrine of the founder of Buddhism. Maitreya is one of the few bodhisattvas accepted by both Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism.
167 See “Gylfaginning” (“The Tricking of Gylfi”), in Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Dent, 1987), 45. Thor is set various challenges by the giant Utgarda-Loki, one of which is to lift a cat off the ground. Straining with all his might, he manages to get it to lift one paw off the ground. Later, Utgarda-Loki explains that the cat was really the Midgard Serpent which encircles the universe.
168 Polytropos occurs in the first line of the Odyssey as a key to its conception of Odysseus, and recurs later. He is the “man of many turnings,” or, as translated by Robert Fagles, “the man of twists and turns.”
169 NF is again referring to the chart in par. 168, above.
170 Written above: “conscious in Casina.”
171 Characters in Aristophanes’ Plutus and The Birds respectively.
172 See AC, 172 (AC2, 160).
173 See The Complete Roman Drama: All the Extant Comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the Tragedies of Seneca, in a Variety of Translations, 2 vols., ed. George E. Duckworth (New York: Random House, 1942), annotated copy in the NFL, 1:543: “Woman, I was born on the day after Jupiter was born to Ops.” “And if he had been born a day ahead of Jupiter, this man would now be ruler of heaven.”
174 From Mercator, 2.2.291, actually meaning “decrepit old man.”
175 See n. 165, above.
176 Written above: “note the characteristic ambiguity: we can’t definitely say.”
177 Written above: “balls, of course.”
178 The reference has not been located. Shakespeare’s use of the Bible is discussed in Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latin & Lesse Greek, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), chap. 44, “Upper Grammar School: Shakespere’s Lesse Greeke,” 2:617–61.
179 See par. 34 and n. 32, above.
180 See Frances A. Yates, A Study of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936).
181 See K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 107: sometimes translated “Reflectory,” it is a coinage from the word meaning “think,” in relation to words ending in “erion,” denoting places of work.
182 See Francis Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy, 17. Cf. also pars. 275, 293, below.
183 Written above: “86.”
184 The Origin of Attic Comedy, 162.
185 See Nicomachean Ethics, 1108a.21–4.
186 Literally, Schwarzkünstler means “black artist,” i.e., black magician. Presumably, then, the “Schwarzkunstler plays” are plays such as Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, concerned with the figure of the black magician or evil Magus. See also par. 81, above.
187 Diallage is Greek for “reconciliation”; in rhetoric, it is a technique of making arguments from various points of view converge to one point.
188 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 5.5.243. Cf. pars. 38 and 89, above, and n. 37.
189 Presumably because of its confirming of male authority.
190 Ijim is a character in William Blake’s Tiriel. Cf. also par. 39.
191 Katisha is a character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
192 King Lear, 3.4.114. Cf. also pars. 104, above, and 275, below.
193 A change of ink beginning with par. 241 may indicate a jump in time.
194 Another version of this circle occurs in NB 19.191. See TBN, 43–4. Like the Great Doodle of the Third Book notebooks, the circle moves counterclockwise, following the path of the sun: from the zenith to the West, passing underground from West to South to rise in the East again.
195 See Proverbs 20:27: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly.”
196 Or Misapprehension, as she is called in the Introduction to the play, where the Prologue is reproduced, in The Complete Greek Drama: All the Extant Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the Comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, in a Variety of Translations, 2 vols., ed. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene o’Neill, Jr. (New York: Random House, 1938); annotated copy in the NFL.
197 Title of a fragment by Menander; it means “girl who gets her ears boxed.”
198 Paradise Lost, bk. 11, 1. 519.
199 See The Complete Greek Drama, 2:1146. The remark is actually made in the editor’s introduction to the play by L.A. Post; of the baby, he says, “His story supplies the framework of the action and every scene is relevant to his advancement.”
200 The word used by NF here does not appear in the standard Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon of Classical Greek. Wallace McLeod observes that it looks like a plausible adjective derived from , and speculates that NF might mean or , “observant of law.”
201 See AC, 166 (AC2, 154): “Proofs (i.e., the means of bringing about the happier society) are subdivided into oaths, compacts, witnesses, ordeals (or tortures), and laws—in other words the five forms of material proof in law cases listed in the Rhetoric.”
202 Actually, it is not the general editor, O’Neill, but the editor and translator of the Menander plays, L.A. Post, who says of Charisius in his Introduction (2:1145): “In a modern drama he would be a rather priggish clergyman. In the play we see how love operates to broaden his sympathies, to teach him humility and to make a new man of him.”
203 Fragments of the play survive, and are accessible in Menander: Plays and Fragments, trans. and ed. Norma Miller (London: Penguin, 1987), 185–90.
204 Deisidaimon and Psophodees are more fragmentary plays by Menander.
205 The Anthesteria was a three-day festival in honour of Dionysus. Cf. also pars. 265, 274, 278, below.
206 Cf. par. 253 and n. 196, above.
207 In the ancient Greek theatre, the eccyclema was a platform, on wheels, that could be rolled out to display interior scenes. The mechane was a crane used to show characters rising, descending, or flying. The Latin phrase deus ex machina refers to the god descending from the mechane. Cf. also pars. 260, 294, below.
208 Again, it is not O’Neill but the editor and translator of the Menander plays, L.A. Post, who says in his Introduction to the Samia or Girl from Samos that the baby is “a symbol of the lasting union and serious intention of the lovers.… To the Greeks a baby without a wedding was a better guarantee of love and union than a wedding without a baby” (2:1123).
209 Empimpramene, meaning “girl who is set on fire,” is another fragment by Menander.
210 NF wrote “each for each genre,” an apparent slip.
211 That is, Arthur Waley, The No Plays of Japan (New York: Knopf, 1922); an annotated copy of the 1976 edition (Rutland, Vt.: C.E. Tuttle) is in the NFL. The Zen term ytūen is defined on p. 22 as “‘what lies beneath the surface’; the subtle as opposed to the obvious.” For “eccyclematic,” see par. 257 and n. 207, above.
212 The names of the two principal actors in a Japanese Noh drama. The shite or “doer” is the main actor, who will dance the central dance; the waki is the “assistant.” See Waley, 18. Also Allardyce Nicoll, World Drama from Aeschylus to Anouilh (London: Harrap, 1949), 653.
213 Another drama, in addition to Sakuntala, by the Sanskrit dramatist Kalidasa.
214 The Sanskrit play Nagananda (The Joy of the World of Serpents) is attributed to King Harsha.
215 See Allardyce Nicoll, World Drama, 650. This volume is the source of the information in this paragraph about Vikramorvashi (p. 633), Nagananda (p. 636), and Ukai (p. 655).
216 The Great Doodle of the Third Book project (for a diagram, see TBN, xxix) was a circle divided into quadrants by crossed axes; each quadrant represented a cluster of imagery and thematic patterns associated with a certain phase in a total death-and-resurrection pattern. The Lesser Doodle is apparently a congruent diagram attempting to show the literary genres associated with such clusters of imagery and themes. NF also discusses it in NB 7.190–2, forthcoming in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23), and includes in par. 193 the following table of its contents:
mythical |
Psychological |
conscious |
|---|---|---|
1. birth of hero |
awakening of libido |
aspiration |
2. triumph of hero |
Wish-fulfilment |
achievement |
3. fall of hero |
anxiety-nightmare |
defeat |
4. dissolution |
threshold |
relaxing of censor |
217 See n. 205, above.
218 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1:7. See par. 123 and n. 99, above.
219 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (October 1949): 1–16. Incorporated into the Polemical Introduction of AC. Rpt. in EICT, 60–76.
220 A reference to “Levels of Meaning in Literature,” Kenyon Review, 12 (Spring 1950): 246–62. Incorporated into AC, Second Essay. Rpt. in EICT, 90–103.
221 A reference to “The Archetypes of Literature,” Kenyon Review, 13 (Winter 1951): 92–110, Rpt. in FI, 7–20, and EICT, 120–35.
222 Semasiology is the science of meanings, equivalent to semantics.
223 The Ichneutae is a satyr play by Sophocles, of which the first half survives, based on the tale of Hermes’ theft of Apollo’s cattle.
224 See n. 165, above.
225 See n. 205, above.
226 See n. 165, above.
227 See n. 182, above.
228 King Lear, 3.4.114. Cf. also pars. 104 and 239, above.
229 Reference to a line in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 16: “The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth, the causes of its life & the sources of all activity …” (Erdman, 40).
230 The title of Calderón’s El Veneno y la Triaca (1634), one of his autos sacramentales, means, more or less, “the poison and the remedy.” “Triaca” was a seventeenth-century opium compound used as a remedy against poisonous animals.
231 See Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; orig. pub. 1950), 10; annotated copy in the NFL.
232 See n. 205, above.
233 See Theodore Gaster, Thespis, 24.
234 See n. 147, above.
235 “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Kenyon Review, 13 (Autumn 1951): 543–62. Incorporated into AC, Fourth Essay. Rpt. in EICT, 104–19. The first sentence of this pararagraph is in fact very close to a passage on pp. 561–2 of the article (EICT, 118).
236 See NR, 156; also AC, 204 (AC2, 190). Peace is a play of Aristophanes in which the protagonist journeys on the back of a gigantic dung beetle.
237 “Opora” means “harvest.” “Theoria” is related to theorem, which means “to look at”; one of its possible meanings is “spectacle.” NF put a question mark above the parenthesis.
238 See Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 56: “The disastrous returns of the Greek heroes and the fall of the house of Agamemnon point rather to an unsuccessful expedition than to a great conquest. And how does it happen, one may ask, that so many Greek lays were based on the subject of ‘Wraths,’ or quarrels between leading chiefs, between Agamemnon and Achilles, Odysseus and Agamemnon, Odysseus and Aias, Achilles and Odysseus? Does it not look—I take the suggestion from Prof. Bury—as if there was need of an excuse for some great failure? .… I lay no stress on this point, except to suggest that it is curious, if the war really ended in success, that the great national poem in its early forms should not tell of the success, but only of disastrous ‘Returns,’ together with a quarrel, or several quarrels, between the chiefs—incidents well calculated to excuse failure.”
239 In the seventh century B.C. the poet Arion of Corinth adapted the tragoedia, or “goat song,” of the worshippers of Dionysus into the dithyramb. See Herodotus, 1.23.
240 See AC, 284 (AC2, 266). However, the sentence has been lifted, with slight alteration, from “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Kenyon Review, 13, . no. 4 (Autumn 1951): 548 (EICT, 108).
241 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 10 (Erdman, 38). Cf. NB 9.207.
242 Cleonymus was an Athenian general who had cast away his shield in a battle; Clisthenes was a notorious homosexual. As NF says, Aristophanes made fun of them for years, in play after play.
243 NF is following the order of the Seven Deadly Sins in Dante’s Purgatorio, in which Lechery is least and last, and therefore highest up the mountain.
244 See n. 182, above.
245 The King’s Entertainment, sometimes called The Penates, presented in 1604, was Ben Jonson’s second royal entertainment, and thus precedes what is usually considered his first masque, The Masque of Blacknesse in 1605.
246 “The Other at Temple Bar” is a part of The King’s Entertainment.
247 Or “Veneration,” as the text says.
248 See E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), 2:91, 148. Chambers speaks of the increasing popularity of devil scenes as liturgical drama was secularized; the “greater figure” driving the devils away is presumably Christ in the Harrowing of Hell dramatizations.
249 The Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althorpe, otherwise known as the Althorpe entertainment or The Satyr (1603), was one of two pageants or spectacles by Ben Jonson that preceded his first masque proper, the other being The Penates, referred to above.
250 The reference is to Jonson’s The Entertainment at Highgate (1616, first performance 1604).
251 Reference to Jonson’s Entertainment of the King at Theobalds (1616, first performance 1607).
232 See n. 207, above.
253 Presumably this represents drafting for something never published.
234 Literally, “empathy-play” or “intuition-play.” NF apparently intends this coinage as equivalent to “sensational.”
255 NF speaks in AC, 166 (AC2, 154), of “A little pamphlet called the Tractatus Coislinianus, closely related to Aristotle’s Poetics, which sets down all the essential facts about comedy in about a page and a half.…” Actually, three pages in NF’s source both for this notebook entry and the discussion in AC: Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy with an Adaptation of the Poetics and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 224–6. Cooper’s headnote says, “But I have discarded the schematic arrangement of the original, supplying such words as ‘is divided into’ in place of the oblique lines and horizontal braces which there indicate divisions and subdivisions under the various heads….” NF restores the diagrammatic form of the original Tractatus. Richard Janko, in Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of “Poetics II” (London: Duckworth, 2002; orig. pub. 1984), 22, provides a Greek version of the chart that NF labels “1. Poetry,” along with photographs of some original manuscript pages for comparison.
256 In Cooper’s translation, “Laughter arises (I) from the diction [= expression] (II) from the things [= content]” (224). This introduces two charts on p. 223. The first is “(I) From the diction, through the use of—” and then goes on to list the seven items that NF lists under “verbal (lexis).” The second is “(II) Laughter is caused by the things—” and then goes on to list the nine items that NF lists under “objective.” NF’s wording is very close to Cooper’s, with no substantive changes.
257 See Cooper, 226, except that NF renders in chart form what Cooper translates as paragraphs.
258 See Cooper, 226.
259 See Cooper, 226.
260 See AC, 172 (AC2, 160): “This list is closely related to a passage in the Ethics which contrasts the first two [eiron and alazon], and then goes on to contrast the buffoon with a character whom Aristotle calls agroikos or churlish, literally rustic. We may reasonably accept the churl as a fourth character type, and so we have two opposed pairs.” The passage from the Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2, chap. 7 (1108a), is given by Cooper on p. 117. Its point is that the mean of pleasantness is witty; whereas an excess of pleasantness is buffoonery, and a deficiency of pleasantness is boorishness—i.e., churlishness.
261 A thirteenth-century Chinese play by Li Xingdao; Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle was inspired by a German adaptation of it in the 1920s.
262 Paradosis: handing down revelation or the word of God through tradition and established practice. Epopteia: the epiphany experienced by the initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries.
263 A reference to Dylan Thomas’s poem Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. The “bait” is a girl thrown into the sea.
1 All told, the charts in the first three paragraphs account for 25 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays; omitted are the 10 history plays, Titus Andronicus, and, surprisingly, Romeo and Juliet.
2 This chart rehearses the organization of FT, in which Shakespeare’s tragedies are divided into tragedies of order (the plays on the first horizontal line), tragedies of passion (the plays on the second horizontal line), and tragedies of isolation (the plays on the third horizontal line). FT adds Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy of passion.
3 This chart, wedged into a free space next to the chart in par. 1, above, was probably added later, as an attempt to fit Shakespeare’s comedies into par. 2’s threefold division of social, erotic or dual, and individual resolutions.
In FT, 16, NF identifies the types of tragedy with three of Blake’s four Zoas: tragedies of order with Urizen, tragedies of passion with Luvah, and tragedies of isolation with Tharmas. Apparently, NF is musing about whether sea, forest, and humour comedies are comedies of social order, romantic love, and individual identity* respectively.
4 The Yeats essay is “The Rising of the Moon: A Study of A Vision,” SM, 245–74. The Milton lectures were the Centennial Lectures delivered at Huron College in March 1963, which eventually became RE (M&B, 35–131). The Shakespeare lectures were the Bampton Lectures, delivered at Columbia University in November, 1963; NF is meditating about their content in the paragraphs that follow. The talk at the MLA was “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” (StS, 90–105; WE, 192–206), originally presented as an address at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, Chicago, 29 December 1963.
5 See par. 20, below.
6 In the Preface to NP, NF claimed, “I did not realize, until it was too late to retreat, that the lectures would arrive on the threshold of the year 1964.” The motivation spoken of in the following sentence is ascribed to Shakespeare himself, in the same words, in NP, 38.
7 “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale, FI, 107–18.
8 Probably F.E.L. Priestley (1905–88), member of the English department at University College of the University of Toronto, 1944–70.
9 Probably NB 19, some of whose opening paragraphs are notes towards the 1965 essay “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” See TBN, 3–103.
10 Written above: “CE.”
11 The roots of this central idea go back to the late 1940s. See NB 8.35.
12 See NP, 1.
13 Probably a reference to pars. 1–5 of NB 13a, below, which basically make the same point NF elaborates in the present paragraph.
14 Cf. NP, 14–15.
15 See NB 8.126 and n. 109; also NP, 21.
16 See “The Instruments of Mental Production,” StS, 7–8; WE, 265–6: “Plato divides knowledge into two levels: an upper level of theoretical knowledge (theoretical in the sense of theoria, vision), which unites itself to permanent ideas or forms, and a lower level of practical knowledge, whose function is to embody these forms or ideas on the level of physical life. What I have referred to in my title as the instruments of mental production consist of the arts, and we may see the major arts in Plato’s terms as forming a group of six. Three of these are the arts of mousike, music, mathematics, and poetry, and they make up the main body of what Plato means by philosophy, the identifying of the soul of man with the forms or ideas of the world. The other three are the imitative or embodying arts, the arts of techne, painting, sculpture, and architecture, which, along with all their satellites and derivatives, unite the body of man with the physical world!” The distinction between arts of mousike and techne seems to be NF’s own, and does not occur in Plato. See NF’s diagram from the beginning of NB 9, which has been reproduced on p. lix of the present volume. See also the references to this binary division in TBN, 18, 20, 31, 131.
17 Cf. NP, 15–16.
18 Cf. NP, 20.
19 NF did write “Nature and Nothing,” published in Essays on Shakespeare, ed. G.W. Chapman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 35–58.
20 Lister Sinclair (b. 1921), playwright and producer for the CBC. The entry for 9 February of NF’s 1949 Diary provides an explanation here: “Struggled through a Nashe lecture & used some stuff I stole from Lister Sinclair. Stage direction in Titus Andronicus: Lavinia’s hands cut off & tongue cut out, ravished—however they did that. Titus chops his hand off on the stage to prevent Aaron from killing his two sons, but is too late & Aaron sends back the two heads along with the hand. Titus announces that he thinks this is a dirty trick, & plans revenge. Puzzle: how to get all the cold cuts off the stage? He takes the two heads in one hand: that being full of heads, he can’t carry the other hand—his hand, which Aaron has returned. So he gives it to Lavinia, who hasn’t any hands at all, has to take it with her mouth, and goes out like a retriever with the hand dangling from her puss. It amused my kids, & the brightest of them mentioned the Grand Guignol” (D, 120–1). The same anecdote, even much of the same wording, shows up in NFS, 5, thirty-seven years after the diary entry.
21 The line from Cymbeline that this phrase comes from is quoted in NP, 66: “I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good” (5.4.203–4).
22 The twin of the hero-consort in Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948). See pars. 299, 302, 306, below. Also see TBN, 114, 137, 170, 255, 286.
23 Cf. par. 6, above.
24 This did indeed become the title of chap. 4 of NP.
25 Cf. NP, 98.
26 Cf. NP, 99.
27 The Harvard paper is “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors,” delivered at Radcliffe College on 30 November 1950, unpublished until it appeared in LS, 144–59. See Ayre, 229. The Royal Society paper is “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd ser., 46, sec. 2 (June 1952): 47–58.
28 Cf. NP, 89.
29 Cf. NP, 24, 27–8.
30 Cf. NP, 28.
31 Cf. NP, 111–14.
32 Cf. NP, 37.
33 Cf. NP, 49–51.
34 Cf. NP, 20–1.
35 At this point NF wrote “cancelled: end of II.”
36 Cf. NP, 27–31, for some of the ideas in this paragraph.
37 Cf. NP, 56.
38 See par. 25 and n. 27, above. NF is absent-mindedly repeating himself. The Whitman quotation occurs on p. 146 of NP.
39 Cf. NP, 57.
40 “Q” is NF’s instruction to himself to quote the passage from Peele, which he does in NP, 13.
41 These did in fact become the chapter titles of the four essays in NP, except that “Make” was changed to “Making.” Moreover, each of the four chapters does in fact conclude with an extended treatment of the romance with which NF identifies it here, following the order of the plays’ composition.
42 Leonato’s wife is what is known as a “ghost character.” The name “Innogen” appeared in the act 1, scene 1 heading of Much Ado, the critical surmise being that the mistake was copied from Shakespeare’s manuscript.
43 Cf. NP, 65.
44 See D.H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1964; orig. pub. 1923), 8: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
45 “48” is presumably the page number of the manuscript where NF wants to interpolate the bracketed phrase.
46 From “Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humors.” See par. 40 and n. 38, above.
47 This phrase has been cancelled by NF.
48 See par. 41, above.
49 Cf. NP, 13.
50 Cf. NP, 11.
51 Cf. NP, 128–9.
52 See NB 8.126 and n. 109, above; cf. NP, 21.
53 A touchstone or means of testing.
54 Written above: “very important point here: type-characters in comedy.”
55 See par. 52 and n. 51, above.
56 Cf. NP, 86. Also, par. 93, below.
57 Cf. NP, 84–5; for Dylan Thomas’s “long-legged bait,” NP, 64.
58 Cf. NP, 124–5, where the remark about God is attributed to Gascoigne’s Supposes.
59 The reference is to Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, about the effect of music. See also par. 79, below.
60 Cf. NP, 96.
61 See TSE, 41.
62 Cf. NP, 58.
63 Written above: “(displaced father-double).”
64 See NB 8, n. 52.
65 Cf. NP, 150.
66 See NB 8, n. 52.
67 Cf. NP, 48. A reference to Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast. See also par. 70, above.
68 See NB 8, n. 52.
69 Cf.NP, 61.
70 Cf. NP, 73.
71 In Thespis, 26, Theodor Gaster finds four major elements to the rituals of seasonal renewal in the Near East: mortification, purgation, invigoration, and jubilation. NF is combining the last two in order to have a three-day pattern like that of the Good Friday-Easter Sunday period in Christianity.
72 See Thespis, 23. Rites of kenosis, or emptying, “portray and symbolize the eclipse of life and vitality at the end of each lease”; rites of plerosis, or filling, “portray and symbolize the revitalization which ensues at the beginning of the new lease.”
73 See AC, 166 (AC2, 154), where NF cites the Tractatus Coislinianus, a pamphlet related to Aristotle’s Poetics, as dividing the dianoia of comedy into “opinion” and “proof”: “Proofs (i.e., the means of bringing about the happier society) are subdivided into oaths, compacts, witnesses, ordeals (or tortures), and laws—in other words the five forms of material proof in law cases listed in the Rhetoric.” WP, 275, speaks of “Lope de Vega’s extraordinary play The Sheep Well, in which villagers rise in revolt against noblemen who make free with their women.”
74 See Thespis, 36, where Gaster quotes “the antiquary Bourne” as saying this; his n. 124 cites Brand’s Popular Antiquities, 304. The phrase is applied to Falstaffin NP, 86.
75 Cf. NP, 82.
76 Cf. NP, 86. Also, par. 93, below.
77 Written above: “as in MV.”
78 Cf. NP, 86 for both the Falstaff and Bertram references. Also, cf. par. 62, above, for Bertram; par. 93, above, for Falstaff as Herne the hunter.
79 As par. 4, above, indicates, NF was also working during this time on the lectures for Huron College, delivered in March 1963, that became RE. See also par. 101, below.
80 Cf. NP, 148.
81 Cf. NP, 82.
82 I.e., chaps. 1–3 of RE. See also par. 96, above.
83 Cf. NP, 45
84 Cf. NP, 46.
85 Written above: “in, but not very securely.”
86 See NB 8, n. 52.
87 Cf. NP, 148.
88 The fool or clown is discussed in NP beginning on p. 93.
89 The “terrifying” speech of Lavache is quoted in NP on p. 105.
90 NF eventually terms this character the idiotes and discusses him in NP beginning on p. 93.
91 Written above: “6 times.”
92 Cf. NP, 119.
93 Written above: “or slander.”
94 Written above: “or calumniated bride.”
95 Cf. NP, 130–3.
96 See Notes 58–5.84 and n. 60.
97 Cf. NP, 13.
98 Material from this paragraph was used in FT, 47 and 97–8.
99 In 1 Henry VI, 4.6.54–5, Talbot says to his son, “Then follow thou thy desp’rate sire of Crete, / Thou Icarus. In 4.7.14–15, he adds, “And in that sea of blood my boy did drench / His overmounting spirit; and there died / My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride.” This is in fact mirrored in 3 Henry VI, 5.6.21, when Henry VI declares, “I, Daedalus; my poor boy, Icarus.” In 1 Henry VI, 5.3.188–9, Suffolk tells himself, “Thou mayest not wander in that labyrinth, / There Minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk.”
100 See pars. 93 and 103, above.
101 The phrase “not used” has been cancelled. In fact, the paragraph contains the germ of FT, chap. 3.
102 Written above: “Cynic—Diogenes in Lyly.”
103 Cf. NP, 98.
104 Written above: “has never existed & never will exist.”
105 Cf. NP, 132–3.
106 See NB 8, par. 190 and n. 163.
107 Cf. FT, 20–3, 31–4, 64, 86–8, and NFS, 57–8.
108 Written below: “cf. Cy & the Troys as across.” This refers to the last sentence of par. 143, across the page from par. 140.
109 Written above: “shows.”
110 Cf. NP, 34–5.
111 Cf. NP, 103–4.
112 Edmund Burke asserted this idea in more than one place, for it is central to his political philosophy, but most famously in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1968; orig. pub. 1790). See, for example, pp. 119–21: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.… Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.… This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors.… All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.” Cf. also par. 152, below.
113 Cf. NP, 102 ff.
114 Above “we like him dramatically” NF has written “he manages to con. vey.” Above “audience” he has written “that.”
115 Above “Not Eden” NF has written “or the green world.”
116 Cf. NP, 29.
117 This sentence was cancelled.
118 This entry was cancelled.
119 “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–73: “The second world is absent from the so-called problem comedies, which is one of the things that makes them problem comedies” (63). In AC, 183 (AC2, 170), this became, “We notice too that this second world is absent from the more ironic comedies All’s Well and Measure for Measure.”
120 Cf. NP, 82–3. The Italian phrase is from an arietta, Voi che sapete, sung by Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, act 2, scene 2.
121 See NB 8, par. 191 and n. 164, above.
122 Cf. NP, 150.
123 Cf. NP, 148.
124 Cf. NP, 31.
125 A phrase used by NF in the notebooks to denote recreation on a higher level of understanding. See TBN, Introduction, xlii.
126 “Pericles” is derived from peri, “around,” “all around,” “widely,” and kleos, “fame,” “glory”; thus the name does mean “far-famed,” as NF suggests, and Pericles’ (ca. 495–429 B.C.) leadership of Athens marked its intellectual and material zenith.
127 NF’s numbering changes here, and identifying labels appear above individual paragraphs. The pages with notes on Shakespeare have so far been numbered with an “Sh” prefix. But SI147 is cancelled, and the page is renumbered Al 1, i.e., Alexander Lectures, page 1. In FT, 16, NF says that “a critic who had learned his critical categories from Blake, like the present writer,” would think of the tragedies of order (chap. 1), of passion (chap. 2), and of isolation (chap. 3) as tragedies of Urizen, Luvah, and Tharmas respectively. Intermittently through the rest of the notebook, the labels Ur., L., and Th. are therefore used to designate material for their appropriate chapters.
128 Cf. FT, 62.
129 See Henry V, 3.1.3–8, where Henry says, “But when the blast of war blows in our ears, / … Disguise fair nature with hard-favor’d rage.” In act 5, scene 2, Burgundy says, now that Peace has been chased from France, the “best garden in the world,” “all our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges, / Defective in their natures, grow to wildness” (3.2. 54–5).
130 Cf. FT, 3, 10, 13.
131 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 387–8, where “Augenblick” is translated “moment of vision,” though Heidegger uses it mindful of its literal meaning, “the blink of an eye.” It is a moment of ecstatic insight, one that must be seized and acted upon, because it makes possible a redemption of Being from the “fallen” state into which it has been “thrown.” See also pars. 194 and 264, below.
132 See Paradise Regained, bk. 4, ll. 475–6: “Each act is rightliest done, / Not when it must, but when it may be best.”
133 See SR, 60 (ENC, 132).
134 A reference to the horizontal, East-West axis on the Great Doodle of NF’s Third Book project, called the axis of speculation. The poles of the vertical or North-South axis, called the axis of concern, were identified in NB 19 with subject and object, suggesting a connection with the final sentence of the present paragraph. See TBN, Introduction, xxxii-xxxvi.
135 See n. 131, above.
136 Cf. FT, 17.
137 Cf. FT, 12–13.
138 Cf. FT, 83.
139 See G. Wilson Knight, “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet,” in The Wheel of Fire, 17–46.
140 Cf. FT, 17.
141 A reference to Andrew Marvell’s An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.
142 Cf. FT, 44–5.
143 Hamlet, 1.2.188: “I shall not look upon his like again.”
144 The translators of Being and Time gloss the term on p. 42, n. 2: “The verb ‘verfalien’ is one which Heidegger will use many times. Though we shall usually translate it simply as ‘fall,’ it has the connotation of deteriorating, collapsing, or falling down.” Heidegger’s own explanation occurs on pp. 219–20, where he speaks of “a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the ‘failing’ of Dasein [Being]. This term does not express any negative evaluation, but is used to signify that Dasein is proximally and for the most part alongside the ‘world’ of its concern.”
145 See NB 8.288 and n. 240.
146 Cf. FT, 45.
147 Cf. FT, 45–6.
148 Cf. FT, 81.
149 See par. 184 and n. 132, above.
150 See Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955; orig. pub. 1950).
151 The two plays are Bussy D’Ambois (printed 1607) and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (printed 1613).
152 Cf. FT, 27.
153 Cf. FT, 102. Also par. 211, above.
154 Cf. FT, 80.
155 Cf. FT, 79.
156 Cf. FT, 82.
157 Cf. FT, 80.
158 Written above: “empire.”
159 Cf. FT, 44–5.
160 Cf. FT, 78. Written below: “conclusion blood & thunder.”
161 Written above: “natural dramatic form.”
162 See Being and Time, 322: “Uncanniness is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up. Out of the depths of this kind of Being, Dasein itself, as conscience, calls.”
163 Cf. FT, 18.
164 Heidegger and Sartre refer to the nature of temporality as “ecstatic” in its root meaning of “going out of itself”; that is, the present moment is not an extentionless point, but projects itself into both the past and the future.
165 See Iliad, bk. 12, ll. 310–28, a famous speech, in the course of which Sarpedon says to Glaucus:
Ah, my friend, if you and I could escape this fray
And live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,”
I would never fight on the front lines again
or command you to the field where men win fame.
But now, as it is, the fates of death await us,
thousands poised to strike, and not a man alive
can flee them or escape—so in we go for attack!
Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves!
(trans. Robert Fagles, 374–81)
166 See The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 67–8 (sec. 9): “Sophocles understood the most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, as the noble human being who, in spite of his wisdom, is destined to error and misery but who eventually, through his tremendous suffering, spreads a magical power of blessing that remains effective even beyond his decease. The noble human being does not sin, the profound poet wants to tell us: though every law, every natural order, even the moral world may perish through his actions, his actions also produce a higher magical circle of effects which found a new world on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown.”
167 Huey Long (1893–1935), American Senator, nicknamed “the Kingfisher,” assassinated after running Louisiana as a virtual dictatorship. Long’s career was fictionalized in All the King’s Men (1946), the famous novel by Robert Penn Warren.
168 Written above: “apart from TAnd.”
169 The villain in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
170 In NB 7 (a brown notebook), par. 97 more or less corresponds to the present paragraph. It postulates “three worlds: the physical world, the psychic world, & the pneumatic or verbal world.” Speaking of the pneumatic world, which he calls the “logical” (in the sense of logos), he says: “From there one can try to descend into the psychic world & make sense of it. This is Beulah, the world of angels, devils, ghosts, spirits in purgatory, unborn spirits, elementals including fairies & automatic potencies like those employed in magic. … The difficulty about the psychic world is that it can be seen, in relation to the logical world, as imaginative, or to G [Generation] as ‘actually existing.’” See also NB 3 (also a brown notebook), par. 136 (RT, 54).
171 NF’s footnote has “Ur.” [Urizen] written above it.
172 See The Birth of Tragedy, 105 (sec. 17): “The structure of the scenes and the visual images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts: the same is also observable in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for instance, similarly, talks more superficially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be deduced, not from his words, but from a profound contemplation and survey of the whole.”
173 See par. 242 and n. 167, above.
174 See n. 131, above.
175 Apparently NF’s reminder to himself that “Th” (Tharmas) has been changed to “L” (Luvah).
176 This paragraph and par. 267 mark NF’s discovery of what will become the organizing scheme of the three chapters of FT.
177 Antony and Cleopatra, 1.2.163. The phrase became the title for chap. 2 of FT.
178 Refers to the contrast between Seneca’s Hercules Furens and its model, Euripides’ Heracles.
179 As NF says in his review of Kathleen Coburn’s selection from Coleridge’s notebooks: “Because these aphorisms contained his essential ideas, the process of translating them into a continuous prose narrative was, in theory, a mechanical piece of copying, to be done in any leisure time. In practice, of course, it turned out to be a deadly dull and painful drudgery, in which he found that he had, so to speak, no gear low enough to keep him moving. Hence, he would assert that books were finished because, in one sense, that was true; though in any sense that would interest a publisher, they had not been begun.” See “Long, Sequacious Notes,” in NFCL, 171; ENC, 44.
180 Written above: “timeless.”
181 Written above: “crookback.”
182 See AC, 38 (AC2, 36), though NF does not mention Heidegger there.
183 Sonnet 124 is the source of the phrase “fools of time,” the title phrase of NF’s book on Shakespearean tragedy. The dying Hotspur says, “But thoughts, the slaves of life, and life, time’s fool, / And time that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop” (5.4.81–3).
184 See Being and Time, 321–3.
185 Written above: “hugger-mugger of Polonius.”
186 Cf. FT, 43.
187 NF’s footnote has “Th” [Tharmas] written above it. For the statement in braces, see FT, 117. Below the footnote is written, “the divine in human life is what dies,” for which see par. 313, below.
188 In the top margin NF has added: “rebel precipitates this: hence he turns the wheel into mutability.”
189 That is, the two parts of Chapman’s The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608).
190 See par. 240 and n. 165, above.
191 In FT, 16, Oedipus and Antigone are reversed.
192 A section called “Quotes in Histories” appears at this point, consisting of notes about the location of passages in the history plays.
193 Hamlet, 1.5.107–8: “My tables—meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”
194 Literally “inclination, obligation.” In other words, a tragedy arising out of the conflict of inclination and duty, as in Antigone. See also NB 133.29.
1 NF’s facts are not quite accurate. The Apollyonists and Locustae are by Phineas Fletcher alone, and were both published in 1627, two years after Milton’s In Quintum Novembris of 1625.
2 Cf. NP, 23–4.
3 Cf. NP, 15.
4 See “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy/’ in Selected Works of John Dry den, ed. William Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1953), 365: “As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon him while he was himself (for his last plays were but his dotages), I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had.”
5 Conventionally, the protasis, epistasis, and catastasis, were the first, second, and third parts of a tragedy, the catastrophe being the fourth. See NP, 15. NF has probably taken these terms from Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 334.
6 The Pilgrimage to Parnassus and The Return from Parnassus, pts. 1 and 2, three anonymous, satirical plays written for the students of St. John’s College, Cambridge, were published between 1597 and 1601.
7 Cf. NP, 6.
8 Cf. NP, 30–1.
9 For the forza–froda theme, see SeS, 65 ff (SeSCT, 44 ff.).
10 The critics referred to are Prosser Hall Frye, author of Theory of Greek Tragedy (1913) and Romance and Tragedy (1922); A.C. Bradley, author of Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); and William Macneile Dixon (1866–1945), author of Tragedy (1924)—none of them “nineteenth-century books,” although from NF’s point of view the style of thinking in them is nineteenth century.
11 These are “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (StS, 109–34) and “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century” (StS, 241–56; ENC, 271–86).
12 The last part of Purgatorio, canto 11, is a diatribe against human effort by Oderisi of Gubbio, who says, among other things (ll. 94–6), “Once Cimabue thought to hold the field / as painter; Giotto now is all the rage, / dimming the lustre of the other’s fame” (trans. Mark Musa).
13 Ubi sunt, meaning “Where are?” is short for the Latin aphorism Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent? Where are those who came before us? Several medieval poems begin with the phrase.
14 See NB 9.240 and n. 165.
15 See FT, 66: “The two great tragic conceptions of being and time pervade the play: each is the subject of an eloquent speech by Ulysses. These two conceptions as presented are, respectively, the worlds of Tantalus and of Sisyphus.” On p. 70, NF says that “the ironic vision, elaborated by Ulysses’ two great speeches, is more dominant than in any other tragedy.”
16 The Avatamsaka or Flower Ornament Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism, referred to many times throughout the notebooks, is one of NF’s two chief sources for his central concept of interpenetration, the other being Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. An annotated copy of The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, vol. 1, trans. Thomas Cleary (1984) is in the NFL, but for most of his life NF relied on a discussion of the Sutra in D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, 3rd ser. (London: Rider, 1958); annotated copy in the NFL.
17 See John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in John Webster: Three Plays, ed. D.C. Gunby (New York: Penguin, 1972), 5.5.93–5. Malatesta asks, “How came Antonio by his death?” Bosola responds, “In a mist: I know not how; / Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play.”
18 See GC, 123 (GC2, 143).
19 For desis, often translated “complication,” see Poetics, 1455b, 26–8 (sec. 18); for lysis, often translated “resolution,” see 1455b, 28–31 (sec. 18). See also TBN, 184.
20 Written above: “symb. [symbolized] by paradox of Evadne’s suttee.” Evadne was the wife of Capaneus, one of the Seven against Thebes. When he died, she threw herself upon the funeral pyre.
21 One of Apollo’s epithets was Smintheus, “Lord of Mice”; mice were associated with disease and its cure, and white mice were kept in Apollo’s temples to protect against disease and to prevent plagues of mice.
22 See NB 9.17 and n. 19.
23 The reference is somewhat uncertain. H. Munro Chadwick’s major work on heroes and the heroic is The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972; orig. pub. 1912); annotated copy in the NFL. But that work says little of any “integrating hysteria,” unless NF meant Chadwick’s statement that “The qualities exhibited by these societies, virtues and defects alike, are clearly those of adolescence” (442). Chadwick does have an earlier book however, The Cult of Othin (1899), that relates Odin and his Valkyries to the shamanistic tradition.
24 Churchill died in 1965, Kennedy in 1963.
25 See NB 9.333 and n. 194.
26 Cf. FT, 98.
27 The epigraph to Eliot’s Marina, from Hercules Furens, reads: Quis hie locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? or “What world is this? What kingdom? What shores of what worlds?” The title of chap. 5 of SeS is “Quis hie locus?
Themes of Ascent.”
28 In the Iliad, bk. 1, ll.188–205, Athena restrains Achilles from drawing his sword upon Agamemnon; as no one sees or hears her except Achilles, it is possible to regard her as a projection of Achilles’ mental processes. Later, in bk. 19, ll. 85–90, Agamemnon tries to exculpate himself by claiming that “Zeus and Fate and the Fury stalking through the night, / they are the ones who drove that savage madness in my heart, / that day in assembly when I seized Achilles’ prize— / on my own authority, true, but what could I do? / A god impels all things to their fulfillment” (trans. Robert Fagles).
1 The scheme expounded in chap. 5 of GC. The seventh phase, apocalypse, subdivides into panoramic and participating apocalypse; hence “seven/eight,” In this paragraph, NF is saying that as the first phase, creation, was the theme of CR, the second phase, Exodus, will be the theme of MD.
2 The Larkin-Stuart Lectures, which NF gave on 30–31 January and 1 February 1980, under the auspices of Trinity College, University of Toronto, and St. Thomas Church; they were published as Creation and Recreation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); rpt. in NFR, 35–82.
3 NF gave the Tamblyn Lectures at the University of Western Ontario on 25–27 March 1981; they were published as The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983).
4 “The Bridge of Language,” a keynote lecture NF gave at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 3 January 1981, in Toronto; published in Science, 212 (10 April 1981): 127–32; rpt. in OE, 153–67, NFMC, 315–29.
5 Cf. MD, 12.
6 In Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 4, Belacqua is one of the Indolent. In TBN, 24, NF says, “I’m in what Beckett calls the Belacqua fantasy, in no damn hurry to climb.”
7 Cf. MD, 52. Cf. also pars. 60, 81, below.
8 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: MIT Press and John Wiley & Sons, 1961). On entropy, see pp. 11, 56–7, 62, 64.
9 Use of the terms “Eros” and “Nomos” suggests that NF was still thinking in terms of the categories of the Third Book, whose explanatory diagram, the Great Doodle, has Nomos, “law,” as its Western cardinal point on a crossed circle. It is possible that NF took the term “Nomos” from Francis Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western Speculation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957; orig. pub. 1912); annotated copy in the NFL. Chap. 1, “Destiny and Law,” contains a lengthy discussion of Nomos.
10 In other words, what would shortly become GC.
11 In addition to writing individual essays on these plays, “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (FI, 107–18) and “Shakespeare’s The Tempest” (EAC, 81–93), NF had dealt with both of them in NP. As the Tempest essay was unpublished, he may have had in mind his introduction to the play in Shakespeare, The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 1369–72, rpt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of “The Tempest,” ed. Hallett Smith (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), 60–7.
12 The “Stratford visit” is perhaps a reference to the seminar on Twelfth Night, in which NF participated, at Stratford, Ont., on 12–13 August 1980. As for where NF put “all that stuff,” see The Practical Imagination: Stories, Poems, Plays (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 876–7: “Our second type of dramatic experience is an extension of the same principle to the characters in a play, who are so often locked inside subdramas of their own, so that the play we are watching often becomes a bundle of subsidiary dramas. Take the conclusion of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a dialogue between two people, Miss Julie herself and Jean, the valet who has seduced her. Miss Julie goes out and kills herself at the end of the play because she feels that fate or God or circumstances or the class structure of nineteenth-century Sweden, or whatever, has woven an ironic drama around her in which she has the role of a sacrificial victim, and she kills herself in obedience to the role she assumes she’s cast in. The valet then hears his master’s bell ring, and says that behind his master’s hand there’s something else moving the hand. That something else is presumably his subdramatist, setting a role for him to go on living, at least through the mess of Julie’s death. However we interpret the words of his final speech, they make it clear that there’s no simple situation involved where Strindberg merely writes a play and an audience merely listens to it. There’s a group of intermediate dramas, some of them within the characters and some of them within our own previous experiences, and it’s the interactions of all these that make up the whole drama. Admittedly, the dramatist who is shaping Miss Julie’s life into a suicide is a pretty corny dramatist and is really not God or fate or Sweden but Miss Julie herself. In other words both she and Jean are projecting their inner dramas on something outside them. That doesn’t, however, reflect on Strindberg, who had the ability to create Miss Julie and Jean both as characters and as the subdramatists of their own lives.” See also pars. 42 and 90, below.
13 “‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frere!’” (“You! hypocrite reader!—my double,—my brother!”): the last line of pt. 1 of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which Eliot quotes from the last line of “Au Lecteur,” the introductory poem of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mai.
14 Cf. MD, 13.
15 Cf. MD, 89. NF had used the passage in “Shakespeare’s The Tempest” (1979), EAC, 93, but that essay had not yet been published. He later used it in Something Rich and Strange: Shakespeare’s Approach to Romance (A Lecture Given by Northrop Frye for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, 11 July 1982, Festival Theatre) [Stratford: Stratford Festival], 1982; and in NFS, 185.
16 Metabasis is a rhetorical term for a transition that refers both backward to what has been said and forward to what is forthcoming,
17 See GC, xxi (GC2, 15), where NF says, “I understand very well what Samuel Johnson meant by saying that Burton’s was the only book that got him out of bed earlier than he wanted to.” NF repeated the remark in “Literature as Therapy,” EAC, 24; rpt. SeSCT, 463–76. For Johnson’s remark, see James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 2:121.
18 Here NF cancelled “kind” but was possibly prevented from inserting its logical replacement, “turn,” because of the repetition of wording that would result.
19 Cf. MD, 44–5.
20 NF’s deliberate joke-spelling of “law and order.”
21 Cf. MD, 47.
22 Rhys Carpenter did not write a separate book on the Odyssey. NF is probably referring to Carpenter’s Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), an annotated copy of which (1958 printing) is in the NFL.
23 The reference is to the argument of Denis de Rougemont about the increasing socialization of passion and the decadence to which passion without constraints leads. See his Love in the Western World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940).
24 See Thomas DeQuincey, “The English Mail Coach,” in Thomas DeQuincey: Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings (Toronto: New American Library, 1966), in the section called “The Glory of Motion”: “The galvanic cycle is broken up forever; man’s imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the interagencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed” (237).
25 The last sentence is a holograph addition.
26 See AC, 174 (AC2, 161).
27 From the Vulgate translation of Psalm 113:9: non nobis Domine non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam. In the King James version, Psalm 115:1, this becomes, “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake.”
28 See par. 13 and n. 12, above.
29 Seen enough. The vision met itself in every kind of air.
Had enough. Noises of cities in the evening, in the sunlight, and forever.
Known enough. The haltings of life. Oh! Noises and Visions!
Departure into new affection and sound.
Arthur Rimbaud, “Départ,” in Les Illuminations, in Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); 247.
30 See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); annotated copy in the NFL.
31 Cf. par. 4, above, par, 81, below, and MD, 52.
32 Cf. MD, 16.
33 Cf. MD, 16–17. For the speech of Zeus, see Odyssey, bk. 1, II.32–43.
34 In the Odyssey, bk. 4, ll. 561–9, Proteus tells Menelaus that, because he is married to Helen, he will go to the Elysian fields instead of Hades.
35 For the ideas in this paragraph, cf. MD, 17–18.
36 Cf. MD, 43–4, where the passage, from the Aeneid, bk. 6, ll.126–9, is quoted in Latin. It reads, in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: “The way downward is easy from Avernus. / Black Dis’s door stands open night and day. / But to retrace your steps to heaven’s air, / There is the trouble, there is the toil.”
37 For the “five non-rhetorical proofs,” see NB 8.255 and n. 201.
38 “If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, / And hug it in mine arms” (Measure for Measure, 3.1.83–5).
39 See WP, 291–2: “In Igitur the central character descends a staircase, commanded by his ancestors to take a candle with him which he blows out at midnight, recalling the ‘chapel perilous’ image of medieval romance, then throws (or perhaps merely shakes) dice, and lies down on the ashes of his ancestors, described as the ‘ashes of stars,’ for the stars seem to keep recurring in Mallarmé with a Dantean persistence. In The Ancient Mariner a throw of dice accompanies the victory of Life-in-Death over Death; in Mallarme the dice represent a world where, ‘in Yeats’s phrase, choice and chance are one.” The Yeats phrase comes from Solomon and the Witch, 1.15.
40 Cf. pars. 4, 60, above, and MD, 52.
41 Cf. MD, 38–40.
42 See Odyssey, bk. 14 and Aeneid, bk. 2.
43 See par. 13 and n. 12, above.
44 The last clause of this sentence is a holograph addition.
45 For the contents of this paragraph, cf. MD, 62–3.
46 The last sentence is a holograph addition.
47 Cf. MD, 66.
48 Cf. MD, 65.
49 Cf. MD, 67–8, where “tarry” and “hold off” are discussed. The passage parallels FT, 66–8, where Tantalus, “tarry,” and “hold off” also appear.
50 In his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), Johnson says: “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind.” See Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958), 245; annotated copy in the NFL.
51 Cf. MD, 65–6.
52 Richard II, 5.3.22 and 5.5.13–14. Cf. also NB 8.125, 161, and NB 9.291.
53 For NF’s discussions of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see MD, 81–2, and 74–81, respectively.
54 See A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.351–2: “No, I assure you, the wall is down that parted their fathers.”
55 Cf. MD, 62–3.
56 NF did end his second and third chapters along the lines proposed here. For the “antithesis of past and art against future and nature,” see MD, 56–8; for the “sowing seeds of the island business” (The Tempest, 2.1.90–5), see MD, 89; and for “Helena’s oracular word-and-summer speech” (All’s Well That Ends Well, 4.4.31–6), see MD, 54.
57 For “the emergence of created reality out of objective reality” in Paradise Lost, cf. MD, 83; for “Ariosto’s moon-world,” cf. MD, 73–4; for lunar imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, cf. MD, 79–81.
58 See WP, 181–4.
59 For Flaubert’s St. Anthony, see par. 90, above, and par. 123, below. The Poe story referred to is “Three Sundays in a Week”: see MD, 47.
60 Cf. MD, 67.
61 Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (ca. 1473–1524), a paragon of chivalry, became known as the knight sans peur et sans reproche.
62 Cf. MD, 64, for the ideas in this paragraph and in par. 116.
63 I.e., of the sequel to GC, which eventually became WP, as NF conceived of it at the time.
64 Cf. MD, 63.
65 The last sentence of this entry is a holograph addition.
66 See MD, 72–3.
67 NF’s footnote was added in pencil.
68 Cf. pars. 90 and 109, above.
1 Cf. NFS, 82. Der bestrafte Brudermord is a German play, surviving in a manuscript dated 1710, that apparently goes back to a text used by English actors in Germany from around 1586. It may have been based on the Ur-Hamlet that Shakespeare presumably used as his main source, and is often used to discuss how Shakespeare transformed his inherited materials. The pirated First Quarto of 1603 contains a few details, absent from the Second Quarto and the Folio, which may likewise reflect the earlier source-play.
2 For The Spanish Tragedy, cf. NFS, 82. For the ideas on “revenge tragedies” here and in par. 4, below, cf. NFS, 89–90.
3 Cf. NFS, 84.
4 The Victorian critic A.C. Bradley (1851–1935) was the author of Shakespearean Tragedy (1904).
5 Cf. NFS, 83
6 Cf. NFS, 94.
7 Cf. NFS, 90–1.
8 Cf. NFS, 90.
9 Cf. NB 8.81 and n. 56.
10 Cf. NFS, 89.
11 See Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Norton, 1976; orig. pub. 1949).
12 Cf. NFS, 88.
13 Cf. NFS, 90; also NB 8.245.
14 Cf. NFS, 99.
15 For the ideas in this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 87.
16 Cf. NFS, 82; also, NB 8.25.
17 Cf. NFS, 84.
18 In What Happens in Hamlet (see NB 8, n. 56), J. Dover Wilson spends considerable time trying to come up with a logical explanation for why Claudius does not react to the first representation of his crime, in the dumb show/but waits until the Mousetrap play itself. On p. 151, he rejects NF’s interpretation here, which is also that of Granville-Barker, “that Claudius is sufficiently strong-nerved to stand the first trial but breaks down under the second.” On p. 184, he contends that Claudius must have missed the dumb show because he was busy talking to Gertrude and Polonius.
19 Cf. NFS, 93.
20 The phrase is Wilhelm Reich’s. See his Character-Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1963), 44, 145–49, 314–27.
21 Cf. NFS, 98–9.
22 Cf. NFS, 108–9.
23 Nahum Tate (1652–1715), Anglo-Irish poet and dramatist who wrote several popular adaptations of Shakespeare, the most famous being his King Lear, in which he omitted the part of the fool and had Cordelia survive to marry Edgar.
24 King Lear, 3.4.114. Cf. NB 8.104, 239, 275.
25 Cf. NFS, 104, 119.
26 Cf. NFS, 119.
27 NF’s treatment of these words was eventually included in his chapter on King Lear, in NFS, 104 ff.
28 NF quotes the Wilde passage, from “The Critic as Artist,” on p. 11 of CR, which reads, in part: “After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears” (NFR, 41).
29 Cf. NFS, 99.
30 Cf. NFS, 119.
31 See Troilus and Criseyde, bk. 5, 1.1849: “Lo here, of payens corsed olde rites.”
32 See NFS, 105–6.
33 Cf. NFS, 103.
34 Cf. NFS, 104.
35 Cf. NFS, 110.
36 For the ideas in this and the beginning of the next paragraph, cf. NFS, 107.
37 Cf. NFS, 110–ll.
38 Cf. NFS, 115.
39 Cf. NFS, 109.
40 Cf. NFS, 109, 113, 114.
41 Cf. NFS, 112.
42 In par. 55, though not directly, as the full passage shows: “The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes.”
43 Cf. NFS, 112, 118. The anonymous ballad, usually called “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song,” was collected in the eighteenth century. NF quotes the relevant lines in “The Journey as Metaphor,” MM, 220: “With an host of furious fancies / Whereof I am commander, / With a burning spear, and a horse of air, / To the wilderness I wander.” Cf. also WP, 96.
44 Cf. NFS, 60.
45 Cf. NFS, 92–3.
46 For this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 88.
47 When Henry VIII wanted a divorce from Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, he used as excuse his uneasiness over marrying his deceased brother’s wife, even though he had a papal dispensation allowing him to do so. The marriage of brother-in-law and sister-in-law was regarded as incestuous.
48 Cf. NFS, 91.
49 Cf. NFS, 84–5. For the “Lady Macbeth’s children” puzzles, see NB 29.2 and n. 3.
50 Cf. NFS, 15.
51 For the contents of this and the following three paragraphs, cf. NFS, 16.
52 For “the gold-statues business,” cf. NFS, 31–2.
53 Cf. NFS, 17.
54 Cf. NFS, 5.
55 Cf. NFS, 31.
56 For the ideas in pars. 72–8, cf. NFS, 17–19.
57 For Brooke’s poem, see par. 91 and n. 67, below.
58 For the ideas in this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 28–9.
59 For the ideas in this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 31–2.
60 See W.H. Auden, “Commentary on the Poetry and Tragedy of ‘Romeo and Juliet,”’ in Romeo and Juliet, The Laurel Shakespeare, ed. Francis Fergusson (New York: Dell, 1958), 21–39. The question is a common one, however, and not original with Auden. Cf. NFS, 24.
61 Cf. NFS, 21–2.
62 For this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 25.
63 For this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 22–4.
64 Cf. NFS, 26–7.
65 Cf. NFS, 14.
66 Dante simply records, in Purgatorio, canto 6, ll.106–11, that the Montecchi (Montague) and Capuleti (Capulet) families were on opposites sides in the political conflicts of thirteenth-century Verona, where Dante lived from 1299 to 1304.
67 Cf. NFS, 29–30. Arthur Brooke’s narrative poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562), was Shakespeare’s chief source for his play.
68 Cf. NFS, 33.
69 Cf. NFS, 41.
70 Cf. NFS, 24.
71 The last line of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Woodspurge.
1 Cf. Notes 58–5.26 and n. 20.
2 See NFS, 99. Also Notes 58–5.26.
3 See Knights’s How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism (Cambridge, Eng.: G. Fraser, The Minority Press, 1933). Cf. also NFS, 84, and Notes 58–5.63.
4 NF is castigating himself for making a mistake after “guilty of,” where he began to write the wrong word, which he then marked through.
5 Cf. NFS, 85.
6 Cf. Notes 58–5.62.
7 For this and the following paragraph, cf. NFS, 5.
8 See Anatomy of Criticism, 51.
9 Cf. NFS, 132–3, 154–5.
10 Cf. NFS, 138–9.
11 The phase refers to the famous book by Ernest H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
12 Cf. NFS, 64, 109.
13 Cf. NFS, 164, 167.
14 There is no lecture on Twelfth Night in NFS.
15 Cf. NFS, 38.
16 Cf. NFS, 46–7.
17 Cf. NFS, 66.
18 Cf. NFS, 164.
19 Here NF changes to a pen with a finer nib.
1 See The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (New York: John Murray, 1833), 213.
2 All the masques mentioned in this paragraph are by Ben Jonson.
3 Cf. SM, 164. The golden chain comes from the Iliad, bk. 8, ll.19–26, in which Zeus tells the other gods that he not only can win a tug-of-war with them, but can pull both them and the earth and sea as well up into the heavens on a golden chain. The passage was later taken as an allegory of the Chain of Being; this allegorical tradition is what Jonson is working from here. The gloss does indeed appear in Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952, 1990), 145 (chap. 14, sec. 15): “Accordingly, since Mind emanates from the Supreme God and Soul from Mind, and Mind, indeed, forms and suffuses all below with life, and since this is the one splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance reflected in many mirrors arranged in a row … there is one tie, binding at every link and never broken. This is the golden chain of Homer which, he tells us, God ordered to hang down from the sky to the earth.” NF was criticized by one reviewer of GC for writing, “In Homer, however, there is sometimes the suggestion that Zeus is not merely the king of gods but contains all the other gods, as in the passage in the Iliad (viii) where he tells the squabbling subordinate deities that he holds heaven and earth, including them, on a gigantic chain that he can at any time pull up into himself” (GC, 10; GC2, 28), which elides the distinction between the actual Homeric text and its later allegorization.
4 The passage (ll.100–14) is worth quoting:
When you ha’ made
Your glasses, gardens in the depth of winter,
Where you will walk invisible to mankind,
Talked with all birds and beasts in their own language;
When you have penetrated hills like air,
Dived to the bottom of the sea like lead,
And ris’ again like cork, walked in the fire
As’twere a salamander, passed through all
The winding orbs, like an intelligence,
Up to the Empyreum; when you have made
The world your gallery, can dispatch a business
In some three minutes with the Antipodes,
And in five more negotiated the globe over,
You must be poor still.
Cf. SM, 164–5.
5 Cf. The Fortunate Isles, ll.146–7. Till Eulenspiegel was a German folk hero. Merefool, the Rosicrucian, would rather have Jophiel summon up Hermes Trismegistus, Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, or Aesop. Instead, Jophiel turns him over to Scogan and the poet John Skelton, the latter of which proposes, in Skeltonic verse, to raise “Howleglass” (Eulenspiegel) instead of Hermes, and the Elinor Rumming of his own poem instead of “Ellen of Troy” (1. 250).
6 See The Fortunate Isles, ll. 297–302:
That point of revolution being come
When all the Fortunate Islands should be joined,
Macaria, one, and thought a principal,
That hitherto hath flouted as uncertain
Where she should fix her blessings, is tonight
Instructed to adhere to your Brittannia …”
Cf. also SM, 161.
7 See headnote for information on this paper.
8 Cf. SM, 169: “In drama later than Shakespeare, the most ambitious dramatic romance dealing with themes of redemption and the recovery of original identity, along with a good many alchemical themes, is perhaps the second part of Faust, and we can see how that poem flowers out of the two gigantic masques, which dramatically are rather antimasques, of the scene at the Emperor Maximilian’s court and the Classical Walpurgis-Night.”
9 I.e., out of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in April 1975, which became SeS. Cf. SeS, 116–17; SeSCT, 77.
10 Cf. pars. 25, 32, below. Also SeS, 169; SeSCT, 110.
11 In the margin at this point is NF’s holograph addition: “antimasques, professional; masques, amateurs.” The masque with thirteen antimasques is James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace, as NF remembers in par. 57, below.
12 Cf. SM, 159–60.
13 Cf. SM, 158–9. For the Fabergé, world’s fair element of the masque, cf. also pars. 23, 46, 48, below. For Jonson’s distinction between the masque’s body and soul, cf. par. 24 and n. 26, below.
14 Cf. SM, 176; also pars. 50, 62, below.
15 See n. 50, below.
16 Cf. SM, 156: “Middleton even spells it ‘antemasque.’” NF took this information from his main source, the collection titled A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, no editor listed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 255: “Middleton, who consistently wrote ‘Antemasque’ for ‘Antimasque,’ seems to have thought of it as a dance preceding the main masque.”
17 Cf. SeS, 165, 169; SeSCT, 107, 110.
18 Cf. SM, 176, which echoes NP, 27. Cf. also par. 30, below.
19 This paragraph has been cancelled. Written in the margin: “brutal flattery of king: cf. Jonson on Donne.”
20 The axis mundi, the vertical axis organizing the mythological universe, seen also in pars. 26 and 42, below, will become the organizing diagram of NF’s late work, replacing the circular and cyclical Great Doodle of the Third Book notebooks (see TBN, xxviii–xxxi). The fact that its final paragraphs revert to the Great Doodle diagram indicates that Notes 58–7 comes from a transitional period in NF’s thinking. Cf. also pars. 26 and 42, below, as well as SM, 162.
21 Greene’s Pandosto, the source of The Winter’s Tale, is subtitled The Triumph of Time; the last sentence of The Winter’s Tale is “Hastily lead away.” Cf. also par. 54, below.
22 Cf. par. 43, below.
23 This entry is a holograph addition.
24 Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), communications theorist and member of the English department of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, was probably the most influential Canadian intellectual of his time.
25 For the contents of this paragraph, cf. SM, 158–9.
26 In “Romance as Masque,” 159, NF quotes the passage from Jonson’s preface to Hymenaei that he has in mind here: “So short-lived are the bodies of all things, in comparison of their souls. And, though bodies oft-times have the ill luck to be sensually preferred, they find afterwards the good fortune (when souls live) to be utterly forgotten. This it is hath made the most royal Princes, and greatest persons [who are commonly the personators of these actions]… not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show [which rightly becomes them]… but curious after the most high and hearty inventions, to furnish the inward parts, [and those grounded upon antiquity and solid learnings; which, though their voice be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries.” See Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Yale Ben Jonson, gen. eds. Alvin B. Kernan and Richard B. Young (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 75–6. Spelling and punctuation in that edition differ slightly and non-substantively from NF’s.
27 See Ben Jonson, “Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden,” in Ben Jonson, The Oxford Authors, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 596 (ll. 32–5): “That Donne’s Anniversary was profane and full of blasphemies. That he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something; to which he answered that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was.” Cf. also par. 44, below, and SM, 157.
28 Here NF inserts the marginal notation: “weariness of James: note button.” The explanation for this shows up in SM, 158: “It is clear that sometimes he would have given his crown to possess the equivalent of that bastion of democratic liberties, the television button, which can turn the whole foolish noise into silence and darkness, leaving not a rack behind.”
29 Cf. SM, 160.
30 See n. 20, above. A holograph addition above this passage reads: “Progress from antimasque (‘antemasque’) to masque: chaos to cosmos.” Cf. SM, 161.
31 This last sentence is a later holograph addition.
32 Cf. also par. 53, below.
33 See The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.64–5: “What tempest, I trow, threw this whale (with so many tuns of oil in his belly) ashore at Windsor?” Cf. also NB 9.76, and NP, 150.
34 NF’s holograph addition at this point: “cf. the ‘triumph.’”
35 See par. 34 and n. 38, below.
36 For the difference between “hence” narration and “and then” narration, see SeS, 47–8 (SeSCT, 34).
37 “How True a Twain” (1962), FI, 88–106. Notes towards this article appear in NB 13b.
38 Jonson’s late play The Staple of News (1626) includes a satire on early English journalism.
39 For the contents of this paragraph, cf. SM, 177.
40 This paragraph has been cancelled.
41 This paragraph has been cancelled.
42 In Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy (1819), what corresponds to an antimasque is the procession of allegorical figures (Murder, Fraud, etc.) representing members of the English ministry responsible for the Peterloo massacre; the “Pandora’s box theme” means that the triumph of Anarchy is opposed by Hope. Cf. also par. 15, above.
43 This paragraph has been cancelled.
44 This paragraph, which repeats material from par. 24, above, has been cancelled.
45 See Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft, College Classics in English, gen. ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1965), The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, 1625, Essay 37, “Of Masques and Triumphs,” 145: “These things are but toys to come amongst such serious observations.” Cf. also par. 23, above.
46 This paragraph has been cancelled.
47 This paragraph has been cancelled.
48 Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) described in a letter the burning of the Globe theatre in 1613: “I will entertain you at present with what hath happened this week at the Bankside. The King’s players had a new play called All Is True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garter, the Guards with their embroidered coats and the like, sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous.” Cf. NB 10.5.
49 This paragraph has been cancelled.
50 See Pericles, 1.1.84–5: “But being play’d upon before your time, / Hell only danceth at so harsh a chime.” Cf. also par. 8, above.
51 Cf. par. 13 and n. 21, above.
52 See Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, 122–3: “And because her majesty (best knowing that a principal part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers and have the place of a foil or false masque, I was careful to decline not only from others’, but mine own steps in that kind, since the last year I had an antimasque of boys; and therefore now devised that twelve women in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposites of good Fame, should fill that part…”
53 Samuel Daniel’s Vision of Twelve Goddesses, the first masque organized by Queen Anne, was presented on 8 January 1604 at Hampton Court, as part of the Christmastide ceremonies.
54 See Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, which has a pattern of black and white imagery.
55 See Samuel Daniel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, in A Book of Masques, 32, ll. 263–5.
56 Cf. SM, 163, for the contents of this paragraph.
57 Oberon, in Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1979), 346.
58 The title of the last chapter, chap. 12, of Through the Looking Glass is “Which Dreamed It?” When Alice wakes up, the world of her adventures is revealed to be only a dream, in which the Red Queen, for instance, is really her kitten. She is, however, not sure whether the dreamer was herself or the Red King.
59 Cf. SM, 165, for the contents of this paragraph.
60 Cf. SM, 157. NF has taken this from Norman Sanders’s introduction to Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, in A Book of Masques, 76: “This paradox as well as the others contained in the riddle is ultimately based upon certain Christian exercises which Jonson adapted for his own purpose in the masque. As Edgar Wind has shown in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958, chap. 14), they derive from the serio ludere of Cusanus who, in order to direct the mind to the hidden God, invented a series of experiments in metaphor or semi-magical exercises, which consisted of finding in an unusual object within human experience those apparent contradictions which are combined in the Godhead. For example, the motionless eye of God is said to follow us everywhere, and so the eyes of a portrait are used by Cusanus in his De Visione Dei.… Strictly speaking, therefore, the Sphinx’s riddle should have the answer ‘God,’ but for Jonson the transference of such divine traits to the King, God’s agent on earth, and by extension to Albion, the country he governs, was but an easy step.” There is an annotated copy of Cusanus’s Vision of God, trans. Emma Gurney Salter (New York: Ungar, 1960), in the NFL. NF also refers to Jonson’s masque and Cusanus’s paradoxes in “Charms and Riddles,” SM, 146, providing a footnote for the Cusanus references referring the reader to Edgar Wind’s book.
61 Cf. SM, 162.
62 Cf. SM, 163–4, for the contents of this paragraph.
63 I.e., in Jonson’s Lovers Made Men, the previous masque in A Book of Masques.
64 The coryphaeus was the leader of the chorus in ancient Greek drama. NF is wondering whether the word can be appropriately applied to the leader of the dance in a masque.
65 The maze of Daedalus is described in the Aeneid, bk 6, ll. 25–8. According to Virgil, Daedalus, in flight from Minos, landed at Cumae and designed a temple of Apollo at the entrance to the underworld; in its entrance is portrayed the Minotaur and the labyrinth. In bk. 8, Aeneas, desperately looking for allies, visits Evander at Pallanteum, the site of the future city of Rome. When he arrives, a ritual is being performed in celebration of Hercules’ defeat of the monster Cacus; the cup is the cup of wine used in the ritual. See Aeneid, bk. 8, ll.184–279.
66 Cf. SM, 166. But also see FS, 228–9 (FS2, 228–9): “Spenser’s contemporary Henry Reynolds suggests that the Hebrew ‘Eden’ and the Classical hortus Adoni are etymologically connected. Thus the Adonis river, the red earth of which was supposed to be dyed with the blood of the god, is the same as the fourfold river of Eden, the water of life.” See Henry Reynolds, Mythomystes (ca. 1632), in Literary Criticism of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Edward W. Tayler, vol. 4 of The Borzoi Anthology of Seventeenth-Century English Literature, gen. ed. Joseph A. Mazzeo (New York: Knopf, 1967), 256 (sec. 3): “Lastly (for I have too much already exceeded my commission) what can Adonis horti among the Poets meane other then Moses his Eden, or terrestriall Paradise?”
67 Inferno, canto 1, 1. 3, che la diritta via era smarrita: “for the straight way was lost.”
68 See Erdman, 3: “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?”
69 “Comus enters with a charming-rod in one hand, his glass in the other; with him a rout of Monsters, headed like sundry sorts of wild beasts, but otherwise like men and women, their apparel glistering”: stage direction following 1. 93 of Comus. “Re-enter Ariel, loaden with glistering apparel, &c”: stage direction following 4.1.215 of The Tempest. For this paragraph and the previous one, cf. SM, 166–7.
70 See par. 70 and n. 72, below.
71 In 1950, in Seattle, NF had an epiphany, which he refers to at various points in the notebooks without ever fully explaining, concerning a crossing point at the bottom of the katabasis or descent journey of the archetypal quest journey beyond which solemnity, oracle, and tragedy turn into laughter, wit, and comedy. See TBN, li.
72 Despite his use elsewhere in these notes of the vertical axis mundi image that will organize much of NF’s late work, in particular WP, this paragraph reverts to the earlier down-up shape for the quest journey, the circular and cyclical Great Doodle diagram from the Third Book project. See TBN, xxix for a drawing of the Doodle; xxxvii for an explanation of how NF tried unsuccessfully to identify the cardinal points of the Doodle with four “kernels of prose,” the list of which varies but which may include commandment, aphorism, riddle, and pericope.
73 A reference to Stéphane Mallarme’s prose poem Igitur, to which NF referred almost obsessively throughout TBN and LN.
1 The “gulling sonnets” were a series of poems by Sir John Davies satirizing the excesses and artificialities perpetrated by the sonneteers.
2 Cf. FI, 89–90: “We are also referred to a. story told in Willobie his Avisa [1594] about a certain H.W., who, ‘being suddenly infected with the contagion of a fantastical fit, at the first sight of A(visa), pineth a while in secret grief, at length not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W.S.’” Some critics have seen Henry Willobie as the “Mr. W.H.” of the sonnets.
3 Line 2 reads, “And yet it may be said I loved her dearly.”
4 Cf. FI, 94.
5 Cf. FI, 89.
6 Cf. FI, 88.
7 Cf. FI, 95–6.
8 See Samuel Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, 20 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1925), 14:145: “Fresh from the study of the other great work in which the love that passeth the love of women is portrayed as nowhere else save in the Sonnets, I cannot but be struck with the fact that it is in the two greatest of all poets that we find this subject treated with the greatest intensity of feeling. The marvel, however, is this; that whereas the love of Achilles for Patroclus depicted by the Greek poet is purely English, absolutely without taint or alloy of any kind, the love of the English poet for Mr. W.H. was, though only for a short time, more Greek than English. I cannot explain this.
9 Michael Drayton, in Idea, Sonnet 20, 1.1.
10 See FI, 97.
11 Thomas Thorpe prefixed to his edition of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609) the enigmatic dedication, “To the onlie begetter of these insving sonnets Mr. W.H….” Cf. FI, 89.
12 Cf. FI, 97 ff.
13 Cf. FI, 98: “In 50 the poet has wandered far away from the youth, but in this and the following sonnet he is riding back to his friend on horseback.”
14 See C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, vol. 3 of The Oxford History of English Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 504: “xxx (‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’), LXVI (Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’), LXXIII (That time of year thou mayst in me behold’) are meditations respectively on bereavement, taedium vitae, and age, hooked on to the theme of love only by their concluding couplets. The effect of this ‘hook’ is twofold. On the one hand it makes richer and more poignant the emotion expressed in the preceding twelve lines/but not until that emotion has been allowed to develop itself fully; it converts retrospectively into a mode of love what nevertheless could be felt (and has been felt until we reach the couplet) on its own account. And, on the other hand, there is a formal or structural pleasure in watching each sonnet wind back through unexpected ways to its appointed goal, as if it said at the end vos plaudite.”
15 Cf. FI, 103.
16 Cf. FI, 99.
17 See Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (see NB 43, n. 325), 74–5 (pt. 2, sec. 5).
18 Cf. FI, 89.
19 “Primate” is defined in FI, 99, as “pattern of beauty.”
20 FI, 99, says “leading up,” and cites Sonnets 17, 53, and 106, “or what we have called the ‘effusive’ sonnets.”
21 “Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament, / And only herald to the gaudy spring…”
22 Cf. FI, 102.
23 The aphorism comes from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a, 31 (bk. 9, chap. 4).
24 “Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish …”
1 So reads the title page. The edition NF is using is Robert’s Chester’s “Loves Martyr, or, Rosalins Complaint, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: New Shakespeare Society, 1878). On the fictional Torquato Caeliano, see Grosart’s “Introduction,” lxviii-lxix.
2 The motto from Martial is from Epigrams, bk. 1, no. 66, 1. 9: “A well known book cannot change its author.”
3 “Introduction,” lxii.
4 Loves Martyr, sts. 4–5. Cf. NF’s remarks on this part of the poem in MM, 49.
5 Loves Martyr, sts. 6–7. See Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant (1820).
6 Loves Martyr, sts. 18 and 5 (misnumbered for 19).
7 In Shakespeare’s King John, Faulconbridge, known as the Bastard, is named after his foster-father, Philip, but his real father is Richard the Lion-Hearted. Hence, presumably, the parallel with the stories of Uther-Igraine and Amphitryon, the husband of Alcmene, whom Zeus lay with while disguised as Amphitryon; the product of the union was Hercules.
8 John Leland (ca. 1506–52), antiquary and chaplain to Henry VII, who empowered him to search the ancient records of England.
9 Stephen Batman’s enlarged and emended edition of De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), a famous Medieval encyclopedia of natural history by Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew of England), a thirteenth-century English Franciscan. Batman’s edition was published in London by Thomas East in 1582.
10 That is, mottoes, as inscribed within a ring.
11 “The Phoenix Analysde,” Loves Martyr, st. 186.
1 Cf. MM, 292.
2 Cf. MM, 297: “I suspect that the name Hythlodaye [Hythloday], which seems to suggest something like ‘babbler’ or ‘speaker or trifles,’ is connected with the character type who is considered a fool but is not one, and whose vision or picture (imago) of Utopian life enables him to see the folly around him in Europe.”
3 Cf. MM, 304–5.
4 See R.A. Lafferty, Past Master (New York: Ace, 1968), annotated copy in the NFL, and MM, 302.
5 The God That Failed (1949), ed. R.H. Crossman, collected essays by Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright recounting their disillusionment with Stalinism.
6 Cf. MM, 301.
7 Cf. MM, 300–1.
8 Cf. MM, 299–300.
9 Cf. MM, 289–90.
10 “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” Daedalus, 94 (Spring 1965): 323–47; rpt. StS, 109–34. Cf. StS, 110, for the point about the four natural virtues.
11 The Epistolae obscurorum virorum, or Letters of Obscure Men (1515–17) was a collection of humanist satires directed against scholastics and monks, a herald of the Reformation.
12 Cf. MM, 297–9.
13 Cf. MM, 295.
14 Cf. MM, 296: “A century later than More, Joseph Hall, an Anglican bishop who collided with Milton, wrote such a satire, Mundus Alter et Idem (Another World, yet the same World).” See also par. 24, below.
15 See Plato, The Republic, 592b. Socrates says that the wise man will live according to the model of the ideal republic in his mind, no matter what society he is living in externally.
16 Cf. MM, 292.
17 Cf. MM, 294. See Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, trans. P. Knapp, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; orig. pub. 1966). Mythe et Epopee is a three-volume study published in 1968, 1971, and 1973. See also TBN, 7.
18 Macrobius (395–423) preserved Cicero’s sixth book in his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, or Dream of Scipio, which was popular and influential throughout the Middle Ages. Cf. MM, 303.
19 Cf. MM, 303.
20 See C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1965; orig. pub. 1961), 150.
21 See John Crowley, Little, Big (New York: Bantam, 1981).
22 Cf. MM, 304.
23 Cf. MM, 297–8.
24 Cf. MM, 302–3.
25 Cf. MM, 295.
26 Cf. MM, 293–4.
27 Cf. MM, 296.
28 Cf. MM, 296.
29 Cf. MM, 292.