Among Northrop Frye’s papers at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto are seventy-six holograph notebooks and uncounted pages of typed notes on various subjects. Six notebooks and five sets of typed notes on subjects related to Renaissance literature are collected into the present volume, and have been divided into three categories: those on Spenser, and more widely on the epic tradition; those on Shakespearean drama, and more widely on the dramatic tradition from Old Comedy to the masque; and those on lyric poetry and nonfiction prose. This reflects the organization of a three-volume study that Frye proposed in 1949 to the Guggenheim Foundation. Frye received a Guggenheim fellowship, but never wrote the book. Nevertheless, his application, part of which is also included here, is an important document because it reveals the outlines of his thinking about literature, and about his plans for his own future creative life, in the crucial period, beginning around 1946, between the completion of Fearful Symmetry and his absorption in the writing of Anatomy of Criticism from the early 1950s.
During that time, Frye thought in terms of a so-called “ogdoad,” a magnum opus of eight volumes that were to be not merely literary criticism but a “synthesis of modern thought.” The possibility of such a vastly ambitious project was probably the source of his excitement at reading Spengler in the early 1930s. Plans for the ogdoad were set aside during the writing of Fearful Symmetry, but taken up again in the late 1940s, and are in fact reflected by the Guggenheim application. The first three volumes of the ogdoad were to be concerned, respectively, with epic and its relationship to myth and scripture; with drama; and with a theory of literary meaning, by way of a study of prose forms. In other words, the Guggenheim application was really a proposal to compose the first three volumes of the ogdoad. These would amount to a complete study of literature up to about 1600; a concluding fourth volume (the ogdoad was really a double tetralogy) would study the breakdown, since the Romantic era, of the cultural and literary synthesis that culminated in the Renaissance and Reformation. The notebooks towards that fourth volume are contained in the first part of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, which thus forms a complement to the present volume. The short books on Shakespeare, based on lecture series, that Frye produced from the 1960s onward no longer reflect the ogdoad project directly, but are still in its spirit and were often considered trial runs for its second volume. Thus, while readers may read the following notebooks and notes for their incidental insights, or to follow Frye’s struggle to clarify the focus of some of his published works, their greatest reward may be to gain a sense of what is most central to Frye: not, as is usually thought, a vision of literature as a static and unchanging total structure, but a vision of historical evolution and metamorphosis.
Speaking of history, the notebooks and typed notes have a complex one of their own, a history that has been told so often that I cannot repeat it here. As usual, I refer anyone interested to two works by Robert D. Denham: his Preface to Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (CW, 5–6) and his “The Frye Papers.”1 Also as usual, I assure readers that no arcane numerology is involved in the numbering of the notebooks and typed notes, which is based on a combination of date of accession and location in the Northrop Frye Fonds, not on chronology or subject matter or anything that might actually mean something to the ordinary reader.
The volume’s editorial principles are those of previous volumes of notebooks and typed notes, in which Robert Denham and I have tried to reproduce what Frye actually wrote or typed, without the kind of makeover involved in publishers’ conventions. Frye’s shifting between British and American spellings has been preserved; so have his inconsistencies of capitalizing, underlining, and accentuation (or lack of it). However, his underlining has been changed to italics, and his square brackets to braces, in order to distinguish the latter from editor’s interpolations; his commas and periods have been regularly pinned inside of his quotation marks. A few typos and other obvious slips have been silently emended. A question mark in square brackets in a holograph transcription is a confession of editorial failure to decipher the particular squiggle, scrawl, blot, or blur that occurs at that point in the manuscript. I have added the paragraph numbers, provided first names when useful, and added brief source information such as King Lear, 3.2.45–8 or Genesis 11. While many of Frye’s abbreviations have been expanded, some occur so often that it seemed more reasonable and less distracting to include them in a list at the front of the book; a second list gives Frye’s abbreviations, used throughout his career, for the titles of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.
The endnotes identify Frye’s more out-of-the-way allusions and provide bibliographic information about them, including whether or not an annotated copy of the text cited exists in Frye’s personal collection, now the Northrop Frye Library in the Victoria University Library. For the sake of sanity, both editors’ and readers’, endnotes have not been provided for allusions falling within the boundaries of a general literary education; however unlikely such an education increasingly happens to be, it was what Frye presupposed of his readers in his published work. To identify Volpone as a play by Ben Jonson or II Penseroso as a poem by Milton would have bred endnotes like Hamlet’s maggots in a dead dog. The commoner names and terms out of Blake, so much a part of Frye’s native dialect, can usually be glossed by a quick reference to Fearful Symmetry. The endnotes also provide cross-references, both to other notebooks and sets of notes and to Frye’s published works. Finally, they provide interpretive glosses when it has seemed helpful not merely to identify a reference but to explain its context within the larger pattern of Frye’s thinking. So that the reader may distinguish between them at a glance, cross references are denoted by “Cf.” and interpretive glosses and identifications by “See.”
Like everyone involved in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye project, I am grateful to the Michael G. DeGroote family, whose support has made it possible; and to General Editor Alvin Lee, whose invaluable contributions are both administrative and motivational. Jean O’Grady, my editor now for three complicated volumes, has been as always a joy to work with. Most of all, I must try to express my debt to Margaret Burgess, knowing that, for the third time, I can find no words adequate to express my gratitude for what she has contributed as editorial assistant for the Collected Works and as copy editor for the press, most often invisibly, to this and so many other volumes of Frye’s unpublished work. However careful I try to be, it is only her mastery of fine detail that has saved me, again and again, from errors, bungled cross-references, and lost opportunities. The volumes of unpublished work have been far more demanding and time-consuming than any normal editing job, and Margaret has committed herself to them unstintingly. Thanks to Ward McBurney and Jean O’Grady for the thankless task of preparing the index.
This volume touches frequently upon comedy and its sense of a renewed community. I have been moved by how consistently my community at Baldwin-Wallace College has expressed interest in, respected, and supported my labours on the Collected Works project for well over a decade now, most recently honouring me with the Gigax Award for scholarship and research, for which I am deeply grateful. It was at Baldwin-Wallace that I first discovered Frye’s work almost thirty-five years ago in Theodore Harakas’s course on the Romantics. In the college’s Ritter Library, where I first read, or tried to read, Anatomy of Criticism during that same period, I am now assisted by the reference librarians, who patiently retrieve out-of-the-way books from storage vaults, and by the Circulation staff, particularly Yvonne Deyling, the head of Circulation, who cheerfully process my interminable sequence of interlibrary loan requests. Wallace McLeod offered invaluable assistance in deciphering and explaining Greek words. William Blissett, Rachel Clark, Robert D. Denham, and Theodore Harakas also contributed research to this volume. To all the above, and to any I may have forgotten, my heartfelt thanks. Special thanks to my wife, Stacey Clemence, for research (she located a number of the most obscure references), for illumination (she read and commented upon the Introduction), for inspiration (she knows why devotion to intellect and imagination matters), and, God knows, for patience and good humour (marry me, marry my project).
A reference such as “NB 8.104” in the Introduction and endnotes means “Notebook 8, paragraph 104.” Likewise, “Notes 54–13.12” refers to “Notes 54–13, paragraph 12.” The same conventions apply in references to unpublished notebooks or notes. Cross-references within a notebook or set of notes take the form “See n. 56, above,” or “See n. 87, below.” Cross-references to another notebook or set of notes within the same volume are in the form “See NB 14, n. 2” or “See Notes 58–5, n. 4.” Notebooks or typed notes in previously published volumes are cited according to abbreviated title and page number; for example: “See TBN, 234.”
All citations from Spenser come from Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977); I regret that the second edition of this text was not yet available when I was editing Notebook 43. Frye himself owned many editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and quoted from whichever one he had a hand—when he was not quoting from his impressive but not infallible memory. Therefore, all references to Shakespeare have been standardized according to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). The following editions have also been used in citations throughout this volume: John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957); The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David Erdman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). Page numbers from the latter volume are signalled by “Erdman” in the endnotes. Line numbers from Greek and Latin authors are those of the Loeb Classical Library editions.