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Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

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This is the book that opened Shakespeare up to me. In a college Shakespeare class, which I came into with a strong anti-Shakespeare bias, I found myself confused with the language, bored and indifferent with the stories and frustrated. So, I went out and picked up this book (I had read Frye's the Archetypes of Literature) and it immediately changed my outlook on the old bard. I soon noticed that much of what my professor was lecturing in class was taken from Frye's work. I had discovered the secret. This is a very readable, interesting and witty look into many of the Shakespearean plays. Frye is quite unusual for a literary critic, he's fun to read.

Frye's essays on Shakespeare are distinguished by their accessibility. In "The Anatomy of Criticism" and "Fearful Symmetry" as well as other, more scholarly work, Frye demonstrates his profound insights into literature generally in the former and Blake's work in the latter. In both works, the reader is expected to have significant background in literary studies.
"Northrop Frye on Shakespeare" is targeted for the general reader. Frye's commentary helps any reader understand the Bard, but it does so in a more accessible style than any other work I have read by Frye. Ideally suited for the high school student or the college undergraduate, Frye's essays provide excellent entry points into many of Shakespeare's plays for the student who wishes to delve further into these essential works. Not exhaustive like Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human," or scholarly and advanced like Cavell's "Disowning Knowledge," Frye's work invites the reader to ponder some key points and formulate her own ideas.
This collection of essays complements the other works mentioned in this review. As an introductory set of essays on Shakespeare, it is without peer.

Here's a piece of literary criticism that made me re-examine my own assumptions and views about Shakespeare's plays. I don't always accept Northrop Frye's word on a subject as the gospel truth, but I'm not far from it, either. He's so imminently sensible. He's never trying to dazzle the reader with his intellect, and as a result he sounds even smarter than the literary theorists who seem to enjoy complexity for its own sake.

In the introduction, he mentions the very important fact that Shakespeare's plays are so open to our interpretation because the playwright himself wasn't trying to push his own views on the audience. Shakespeare wasn't using his plays as a platform to complain about taxes or speak out against imperialism--he was just writing something intelligent, moving and entertaining. Nowadays, we expect serious writers to be pushing a particular agenda; they "mean something by" their fiction. But even if Shakespeare had wanted to make sly political or social points, the censors of his day were very sharp and could pick up on hidden agendas just as easily as blatant rebellion. I really do like it when writers are producing something thoughtful without trying to drop anvils on the audience, and that seems to be what we have here with Shakespeare.

Northrop Frye starts by talking about Romeo and Juliet. This play has never appealed to me. I don't like suicide and I don't like stories where romantic impulses completely override good sense, and R&J has notable examples of both. But Frye makes the whole play seem less sentimental when he draws attention to the love conventions and traditions that are at work. He discusses courtly love and the Cult of Love, and it all makes the main characters seem more understandable. Romeo and Juliet are archetypes that come from an older time in literature, so they seem not-of-this-world even in an Elizabethan play.

His insights into A Midsummer Night's Dream seemed a little less like a fresh revelation to me, but he did bring up the presence of "double heroines" in so many plays, something that I'd like to mull over. It is interesting how most of Shakespeare's plays have at least two good female roles. Beatrice and Hero, Helena and Hermia, Viola and Olivia, Ophelia and Gertrude.

There's lots of historical discussion on Richard II, which has always been a hard play to warm up to because it lacks a strong villain like Richard III or a witty antihero like Prince Hal to make it sparkle. But Frye has some insights about the two parts of the king--the individual side and the symbolic side, and how Richard being deposed affects both. Discussions of the English usurpation usually don't fascinate modern readers like they must have engrossed Shakespeare's contemporaries.

The discussion of the two Henry IV plays talks about Hal's two foils, Hotspur the man of rash action, and Falstaff the...well, it's hard to say anything solid about Falstaff. He's very complex and he challenges our ideas about honor and cowardice. Falstaff can be a criminal and a buffoon, but he also says some things worth noting. Frye mentions time and the wheel of fortune (the fate-related concept, not the game show), and talks about Hal's strange yet impeccable sense of timing in his dissolute act.

The chapter on Hamlet mentions the talkiness of the play. It's Shakespeare's longest work, and its central character never takes a break from pondering and talking about what he's pondering. Hamlet's views are apparently often confused with Shakespeare's own ideas, especially his "Suit the action to the word" speech, but Frye reminds us that Hamlet, regardless whatever degree of madness he may develop, is always suffering from emotional excesses. His melancholy affects his actions, including his stringent demands of the players. Another cool thing--Frye says that revenge tragedies must have three main characters. 1. The character who basically "needs killing" 2. The vengeful killer 3. The avenger who kills the killer. In Hamlet, we get more than one of these groupings. Hamlet kills Polonius and is killed by Laertes, Claudius kills the king and is killed by Hamlet, and Hamlet's father killed Fortinbras' father and Fortinbras takes over Denmark.

Northrop Frye also covers King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. I wish like anything that he had discussed some more comedies, like my favorites Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, but their absence doesn't lessen the impact of this study on Shakespeare. I've filled my copy with notes and highlighted passages, and I'm going to revisit this volume often.

As the introduction makes clear, this book is not so much a composition of Frye's thought (cf. Anatomy of Criticism, Great Code) as a transcription of lectures for an undergraduate Shakespeare course at the U of Toronto, clipped and smoothed to be readable in essay-format. There is good stuff here, and it makes one jealous of those lucky enough to have had Frye for a teacher- BUT, this work does not have the thoroughness and rigor of Frye's actual books. Most notably for me, there are no citations and no bibliography (except in-text references to the plays being discussed). There are several points at which I would like to see references for some of the assertions Frye makes, for instance the idea of the three-season year in the discussion of A Mid-summer Night's Dream.

Keeping that in mind, as others have said there is some very readable and accessible discussion of Shakespeare here. This would be a good place to start if you are doing a high school or intro-level undergraduate course in Shakespeare. For my money, the late Professor Frye was one of the best academic writers of all time, with the rare combination of immense learning and lucid prose style. This book is worth reading, but definitely check out his more in depth works as well.

I looked all through the chapters on the comedies, particularly _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and could find no reference to his famous "Green World." There were casual allusions to a "wood-world," but I knew that wasn't it. I felt misled. SO, if you're looking for the source of his Green World idea, this is not the book.

Frye expertly reviews and comments on over half-a-dozen of the Bard's best works. The only problem with the book is that he doesn't look at more of Shakespeare's works!

This book is excellent. Only two words are needed to explain its incredible value: "Green World"! Nothing more needs to be said.