BOOKS
... There was a composer Raimondi who in 1852 composed
three oratorios that were performed on successive nights, and
then performed simultaneously, all three being in counterpoint
with each other. The applause was so tremendous that Raimondi
fainted, and was dead within a year, but
his
prodigious feat ap–
pears to have died with him.
133
Frye, the humanist and critic of education, easily wins our admira–
tion and respect. He owes something to Arnold, but he improves on
Arnold by refusing to turn culture into a religious or political creed.
''The anatomy
qf
culture," as he generously defines it, "is the total body
of imaginative hypothesis in a society and its tradition." But both humor
and humanism tend to disappear when Frye strikes an 0
altitudo
before his favorite "imaginative hypothesis," of myth as a means for
recovering in literature some of the magical power of ritual.
Though we recognize that Shakespeare is not a writer of purely
ironic comedy of Moliere's kind, and though we grant (reluctantly) the
analogy between serious comedy and the
Commedia,
we may feel as we
read
A Natural Perspective
that Malvolio has got the better of Sir Toby,
that there are to be no more cakes and ale--an impression that is
surprising in view of the position from which Frye attacks his subject.
He begins with a "dichotomy" that makes all critics either
Iliad
critics
or
Odyssey
critics: those who are most interested in "tragedy, realism
and irony," in literature as a criticism of life ; and those who are
"attracted to comedy and romance," who read for sheer delight in the
self-contained conventional pattern of a work. The argument that fol–
lows, both
in
its historical and formal features, is fairly familiar. The
model for Shakespearean comedy, inherited from Plautus and Terence,
is the typical formula of Greek New Comedy in which two young lovers,
after being opposed by cantankerous elders and arbitrary laws, are at
length joined in marriage. This pattern is defined on a more abstract
psychological level as "the comic drive to identity," whether social, in
which a "new society crystallizes around the marriage of the central
characters," or individual, "an awaking to self-knowledge, which is
typically a release from a humor or a mech'anical form of behavior."
As
might be anticipated, the conventional patterns are traced back to
myth, which in tum is descended from ritual. The mythical and ritual
patterns are "popular" in the sense of "primitive," that is, they belong
to earlier social orders and to modes of behavior associated with them.
The typical mythical pattern in all comedy, increasingly evident in
Shakespeare's career, is the cycle moving from death to rebirth. In the
Romances, we 'are to see a kind of grand recapitulation of earlier Shake-
