Status Updates From Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

“…at the other extreme, there is Lucio, who retains something about him that is obstinately likable, though he’s clearly a basket case morally” (148).

😂 going back to read the Measure for Measure entry now that I’ve finished the play.

The Winter’s Take was over my head and Frye’s essay on it was as well. 😂 Definitely one to revisit in the future.

Interesting that Frye, in his essay on The Winter’s Tale, is calling a number of Shakespeare’s late plays his romances. They don’t fit neatly into history, comedy, or tragedy.

I really dislike Falstaff. 😬🙈

Brilliant first third of the Henriad chapter. My mind was firing on many cylinders!

Two pages into the 30-page section about the Henriad and my mind is like 😵‍💫 about how everyone is related. 😂

“The fairy world clearly would not do as a democracy: there has to be a king in charge like Oberon, who will see that Puck’s rather primitive sense of humor doesn’t get too far out of line” (45).

😂

“In Shakespeare’s comedies we often get two heroines…It’s a natural inference that there were two boys in Shakespeare’s company who were particularly good at female roles…” (35).

Funny with how this fits in with my Shaketember adjacent read, Cue for Treason.

“Shakespeare’s audience lived in what was in many respects a more intellectually tidied-up world than ours. Practically nobody believed, or had even heard of the notion, that the earth was a planet revolving around the sun: the earth was the center of the whole cosmos, and nature was intimately related to man” (8).

Fascinating!

Forgiveness & reconciliation come at the end of a comedy because they belong at the end of a comedy, not because Shakespeare "believed" in them. And so the play ends: it doesn't discuss any issues, solve any problems, expound any theories, or illustrate any doctrines. What it does is show us why comedies exist and why Shakespeare wrote so many of them.

"It's a dangerous business to enter the world of titans and heroes and gods, but safer if we have as a guide a poet who speaks their language." -page 120

Intro - Shakespeare’s target audience (the ones who payed the bills) were educated and the groundlings didn’t mind things that went over their head. Music and staging were part of the play and sometimes more effective than what we can do with film. Frye talks a little bit about cosmology and the four humors. Shakespeare knew how to stay out of feuds with the competition and he avoided the wrath of the censors.

Intro. Shakespeare was a dramatist who happened to write in blank verse. His theatrical instinct was infallible and, if we don’t get something, that fault is in us. I wish Frye would have written a chapter on Titus Andronicus. LOL The Elizabethans were far more school in words, grammar, rhetoric, and logic and that is why a lot of stuff go over our heads. We should never outgrow his love of puns and word play.