The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies by Northrop Frye (review)

1579 also saw the last performance of the Corpus Christi play at Coventry, and the result is the one article in the collection that does not fit the main theme. A less astute scholar than R.W. Ingram might have tried to be clever on the subject- the death of an old drama, the birth ofa newbut Ingram wisely concentrates on reporting some of the results of his research into local records. He shows that the old drama was, in fact, a long time dying.After 1579 there were several attempts to revive whathad been a strong tradition of local performances. Behind many of these was a rich upholsterer named Thomas Massie, a stubborn fellow who was not above slanging the authorities or even lying to them. History was against him, but in a more propitious time his energy, dedication, and unscrupulousness might have made him a great pioneer. As it is, he appears an engaging minor hero defending a lost cause, and students of drama will be grateful to Ingram for recovering some of his story. (ALEXANDER LEGGATI) Northrop Frye. The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies University of Toronto Press. viii, go $5.95 paper The Myth of Deliverance exhibits many of the usual difficulties with 'myth: but the idea of deliverance is important enough and its centrality presented cogently enough that these may be overlooked for a moment. The three essays in the book are based on the Tamblyn Lectures given at the University of Western Ontario in 1981. By 'deliverance' Frye means an expansion of consciousness, energy, and freedom that often entails a reversing of the normal current of life and expresses the human desire for a more intense mode of living. It may be found in either tragedy or comedy, but the focus here is on the reversals and recognitions of comedy. The first chapter, 'The Reversal of Action: employs Aristotle's terms to explore the comic structure of the last half of The Odyssey and to demonstrate the comic shape of Measure for Measure. At m.i.I50, where blank verse gives way to prose, the action of the play is reversed, Frye says, from tragedy to comedy. Consequently, the sentence of death that hangs over three of the characters, Claudio, Angelo, and Lucio, is also reversed. The second chapter, 'The Reversal of Energy: identifies three major forms of love: Christian charity, Courtly Love, and the Eros of Plato's Phaedrus, the last of which is also said to be ' the heightened form of the energy of life itself: The normal current of Eros is said to be in the direction of Thanatos, or death, and the chapter attempts to show the reversal of this current in The Aeneid and in All's Well That Ends Well. At this point, however, the apparently neat symmetry of Frye's argument becomes 420 LETTERS IN CANADA 198} troublesome. It may be true that All's Well is not a problem play after the manner of Shaw or Ibsen, but there certainly are problems if, in order to see it as a 'fairly typical' comedy, we are expected to find in Bertram at the end of the play, as Frye seems to, a sense of 'renewed and creative life: The character and his actions are not coherent enough, or in a sense even energetic enough, for this. The importance of deliverance would be more securely established were more sustained critical attention given to Measure for Measure - the greater play. Frye has never understood the nature or need of evaluative criticism (his recent animadversions on evaluationin The Great Code, p xvi, are further evidence of this, if more were needed), and he seems to feel that deliverance is presented with equal success in nearly all of the many Shakespeare plays he touches on. It is revealing to note, however, that although 'reversal of energy' is fumbled in the second chapter, the point had already been made more impressively, if only incidentally, in the first chapter, a fact suggesting both that the material there is more capable of truly supporting the point and that action and energy need to be considered more closely together. When in...