Tammy’s Reviews > Northrop Frye on Shakespeare > Status Update

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 playwright who wrote for Elizabethans. He is a poet who speaks to us today and at other times. His plays have a surface meaning revealed in the basic story but an underlying understanding communicated in metaphor and images. He never sought to drive a didactic lesson into our brains. We don’t know much about him but he had a good schoolboy education but his real education was in the theater.

The preface says that this books is one-third from his oral lectures, one-third from the lectures of colleagues that he may have inadvertently absorbed, and one-third from his tutorials. Imagine being his student. Since he adapted them to book form, I guess we are his students.