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  • Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Volume 28 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye
  • James C. Nohrnberg (bio)
Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert, editors. Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Volume 28 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press. lxi, 794. $195.00

Shaping this volume from a modern Prospero’s magical texts was surely laborious love: quotes verified, regularized citations supplied, references ferreted out and got in, repeated themes cross-referenced internally and to other Collected Works volumes, thorough indexing, and editorial policies fixed and enforced. Asked to evaluate the editors’ success, a reviewer is grateful: Professors Grande and Sherbert are meticulous, thorough, and formidably informed. Their tome’s self-sufficiency, expansive and enterprising introduction, and recovery of wayward pieces of Frye’s bibliography all effectively position us to renew the quest for Frye’s thought and consider his place among other major thinkers and readers of his time and ours – au courant Shakespeareans, critics, and philosophers. Summing up Frye’s oeuvre itself takes courage. An 800-page compilation of ideas as direct, teachable, and appropriable should scarcely succeed in maintaining its clairvoyance, interest, and intensity throughout such length. Can a book this dense and concentrated also be lucid, penetrating, and entertaining on every page? Frye expounds the architecture of virtually all the plays and knows the mind of the canon like a book. A wide swath indeed, like Canada itself, but Frye has the seven-league boots of his own formidable intellect – and a diesel’s fourfold stamina – to go the distance, either in a single presentation or over his career’s whole course. Moreover, we get a return ticket, as Frye revisits and reformulates the topics of almost all his earlier discussions in subsequent, later ones. For the jaded, the recycling is another turn of the kaleidoscope, but for the attentive, it is a telescopic revelation, often pitched more homiletically, of new interpretive vistas.

Frye’s lecture engagements were legion; much of this book was originally delivered from a podium. Averse to baffling anyone with his erudition and epigrammatic style – yet keen to provoke and elevate us to new levels of understanding and awareness with wit and concision – Frye always makes himself accessible to his ideal audience: an intelligent nineteen-year-old, the college educator’s natural object. The teacher has read nearly everything, and retained it, yet tactfully includes in any one place only so much as students need to meet a given text on its own ground and to get on with enjoying it authentically and directly. Mirror essays on More’s Utopia and Castiglione’s Courtier provide synoptic introductions to their subjects and relevant genres. Informed by Frye’s deep interest in education, its history and humanistic reinvention in the rhetoricizing Renaissance, thumbnail sketches of the sweep of change through the Renaissance remind us of his immersion in Spengler, at [End Page 739] the same educable age. These essays project beyond their texts’ period to the future of utopian thinking about society and of the cultivation of grace via aristocratic amateurism – or immersion in liberal arts.

Frye’s early ‘Argument of Comedy’ may well be the most anthologized Shakespeare essay ever written. After the Anatomy (where they figure prominently), his four great series on the plays are the present volume’s pieces de résistance: Fools of Time, Natural Perspective, Myth of Deliverance, and his undergraduate lectures. Frye inevitably organizes any given play to reveal its thematic and structural coherence. He often-times focuses his discussion on pregnant usage of a single word: ‘recognition’ from Aristotle’s Poetics in the essay on The Winter’s Tale, ‘nothing’ in the essays on Lear, et cetera. In the named volumes, he boldly organizes Shakespearean tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy themselves: classifying, distinguishing, and showing the migration (from play to play and kind to kind) of elementary roles, functions, and motifs, focalizing set-speeches, and structural typologies for the dramatis personae and diegeses involving them: as the constant chess pieces and their basic moves. Such things as the discovery of the role and function of the idiotes or refuser of festivity in the revisited ‘argument’ of...

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