Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Renaissance Literature

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Northrop Frye was a compulsive notebook-filler. Five volumes of them
have already appeared in the Collected Works series, and there are
apparently more to follow in addition to the present book. This one is
mainly devoted to notes on books he was planning after Fearful Symmetry
(1969), including one on Spenser, another on Shakespeare, plus notes on
related subjects such as More’s Utopia and Jonson’s masques. The
emphasis is on the theory of romance. Though many of these ideas were
not carried further, most of the notes were eventually incorporated into
his voluminous later writings. This book is therefore of prime interest
to scholars interested in the development of Frye’s ideas.
Non-specialists may well get bogged down.

The most interesting material seems to be his (alas uncompleted)
book-by-book notes on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Here we see him
struggling to understand and interpret a complicated text rather than
confidently asserting his principles.

This book shows Frye at his most Frygian, and most vulnerable. Here are
three comments to illustrate what I mean: “You Can’t Take It With
You is a poor play, but interesting as a groping for dramatic
patterns”; “Shakespeare ... seems to have no archetypal interest
whatsoever”; “leviathan [archetype] Falstaff in [The Merry Wives of
Windsor].”

Frye addicts will, I suppose, accept these readily. To those whose
admiration for him stops well short of idolatry, they may seem
respectively “typical,” embarrassingly desperate, and absurd to the
point of self-parody. I was surprised, indeed, to find so many of his
remarks on Shakespeare either irrelevant or banal.

As usual, the book is well-edited and well-produced. I have to admit,
however, that after 22 volumes published so far, I am beginning to feel
intellectually satiety—and indigestion.