BOOKS
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tions in his cntlclSIn of Shakespeare and of
all
drama, if not of all
literature. We can agree with
him
when he says that:
In Shakespeare the meaning of the play
is
the play, there being
nothing
to
be abstracted from the total experience of the play.
Progress in grasping the meaning
is
a progress, not in seeing
more in the play, but in seeing more of it.
But the use of the word "meaning" implies that some residue of signifi–
cance, at least some total feel of experience--a "taste in the head," as
Empson says-arises from our "seeing more."
It
is, moreover, one of the
critic's chief functions to attempt to define and place the particular
quality of this "total experience." In the next sentence following our
quotation, Frye's mythical theory leads
him
to
the curious definition of
the meaning as a progress "from the individual plays to the class of
things called plays, to the 'meaning' of drama as a whole." And what
is that? It is what drama does "through the identity of myth and
metaphor," and that in
turn
is "what its ritual predecessors tried to do
by the identity of sympathetic magic: unite the human and the natural
worlds." Abstraction, it seems, is inevitable at some point in critical
discourse, as it
is
in all discourse.
If
we overlook the circular character of an argument that begins by
establishing the ritual cycle in drama through analogies between plays
and actual ritual and that ends by concluding that the meaning of the
plays is to
be
found in this generalized ritual cycle, we nevertheless can
see the death's-head of all myth criticism peering through these state–
ments. The critic and his readers must finally conclude that all plays
are one universal Play, that there are no individual meanings, but only
the Meaning. We need not deny that the ritual analogies are "there," or
that they tell us something (probably) about the genesis of comedy. But
having found the pattern, what more is there to say? The original
discovery of analogies with ritual, made by Jane Harrison, Murray and
others, some fifty years ago, was an exciting event, and every reader of
Greek drama must remember his own initial
thrill
in learning of their
discovery. For the past twenty-five years we have seen some interesting
applications of the formula to the plays of later writers, especially Shake–
speare. But once the critic has pointed out the analogy, he may feel a
little like Frost's Witch of Coos-"When I have done it, what have
I done?"
This is hardly to suggest that Frye's treatment of individual plays
in the later and more "mythical" half of his book is without value. We
learn interesting things, not about myth in general, but about particular
parallels or overtones, such as the hints in
The Tempest
of analogies to
