The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

On March 25, 26, and 27, 1981, at the University of Western Ontario, Professor Northrop Frye delivered the Tamblyn Lectures, in this instance three “Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies,” reproduced here under the general title The Myth of Deliverance. Under the headings “The Reversal of Action,” “The Reversal of Energy,” and “The Reversal of Reality,” he analyses three of the Bard’s least understood, least accessible plays, the “problem comedies” Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. As Professor Frye points out in his preface to these absorbing papers, “We begin with a notion of what the play might reasonably be expected to mean, and end with realizing that what the play actually does mean is so far beyond this as to be in a different world of understanding altogether.” This scholarly work, by one of Canada’s most respected Shakespearean commentators, will bear multiple re-readings, every one of which is sure to reveal new insights and avenues of further study.