Northrop Frye - Fools of Time

FOOLS OF TIME

The Alexander Lectureship was founded in honour of Professor W. J. Alexander, who held the Chair of English at University College, University of Toronto, from 1889 to 1926. Each year the Lectureship brings to the University a distinguished scholar or critic to give a course of lectures on a subject related to English Literature.

NORTHROP FRYE

Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy

University of Toronto Press

University of Toronto Press 1967

Toronto Buffalo London

Reprinted in paperback

1973, 1977, 1981, 1985, 1991, 1996, 2011, 2013, 2016

ISBN 0-8020-1671-5 (cloth)

ISBN 0-8020-6215-6 (paper)

LC 67-5748

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Frye, Northrop, 19121991

Fools of time

(The Alexander lectures; 1966-67)

ISBN 0-8020-6215-6 (pbk.)

1. Shakespeare, William, 15641616 Tragedies.

I. Title. II. Series.

PR2983.F7 822.33 C67-2653

DESIGNED BY ELLEN HUTCHISON

What follows is the original written version of the Alexander Lectures, delivered at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto, on March 15, 16, and 17, 1966. The oral version, considerably shorter and more concise, had its advantages, but for publication I felt that the longer form, with its greater number of examples and expanding passages, was preferable. This is the fifth series of lectures I have published, and two more series are in course of publication. But for all the experience I have had with it, I still find the public lecture a fantastically difficult genre, and nowhere more so than in a field so thoroughly worked over as Shakespearean tragedy. I can only hope that the constant effort to make the familiar statement into a fresh insight has here and there been successful.

I am greatly indebted to the Canada Council for a Fellowship that helped me to work on this and other projects.

The following preface was read at the beginning of the first lecture:

The invitation to deliver the Alexander Lectures came to me in England, when I had already contracted for two other series. Yet I accepted very promptly, and for two reasons. In the first place, I was deeply touched by the great and most unusual honour of being asked to contribute to this famous series on my own campus.

In the second place, the invitation came at almost the same moment as the news of the death of Professor A. S. P. Woodhouse. If it is not too pretentious to do so, I should like to dedicate these lectures to Professor Woodhouses memory. Although I met him once or twice, I never really knew Professor Alexander, who retired from teaching in the year that I entered high school, but I did know of Professor Woodhouses admiration for him, and it is mainly through Professor Woodhouse that I can attach myself personally to the teacher commemorated in this series.

I have only to add that the occasion of giving the lectures at the invitation of University College was made both pleasant and memorable by the kindness and hospitality of Professor Clifford Leech and Principal Douglas LePan of that College, and President Claude Bissell. The fact that all three are old friends did not diminish the sense of gracious welcome.

NORTHROP FRYE

Victoria College in the
University of Toronto
1967

My father as he slept:
The tragedy of order

The tailors of the earth:
The tragedy of passion

Little world of man:
The tragedy of isolation

The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation. In the tragic vision death is, not an incident in life, not even the inevitable end of life, but the essential event that gives shape and form to life. Death is what defines the individual, and marks him off from the continuity of life that flows indefinitely between the past and the future. It gives to the individual life a parabola shape, rising from birth to maturity and sinking again, and this parabola movement of rise and fall is also the typical shape of tragedy. The mood of tragedy preserves our ambiguous and paradoxical feeling about death; it is inevitable and always happens, and yet, when it does happen, it carries with it some sense of the unnatural and premature. The naivet of Marlowes Tamburlaine, astonished by the fact that he should die when he has been wading through other mens blood for years, is an example, and even Shakespeares Caesar, so thoroughly disciplined in his views of death in general, still finds his actual death a surprise.

Being in time is not the whole of the tragic vision: it is, in itself, the ironic vision. Because it is the basis of the tragic vision, the ironic and the tragic are often confused or identified. The nineteenth-century pessimism which produced the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the novels of Thomas Hardy seems to me ironic rather than tragic. So does the philosophy and literature of existentialism, which I think of, for reasons that may become clearer later on, as post-tragic. But tragedy, no less than irony, is existential: the conceptions that existential thinkers have tried to struggle with, care, dread, nausea, absurdity, authenticity, and the like, are all relevant to the theory of tragedy. Tragedy is also existential in a broader, and perhaps contradictory, sense, in that the experience of the tragic cannot be moralized or contained within any conceptual world-view. A tragic hero is a tragic hero whether he is a good or a bad man; a tragic action is a tragic action whether it seems to us admirable or villainous, inevitable or arbitrary. And while a religious or philosophical system that answers all questions and solves all problems may find a place for tragedy, and so make it a part of a larger and less tragic whole, it can never absorb the kind of experience that tragedy represents. That remains outside of all approaches to being through thought rather than existence. The remark of the dying Hotspur, Thoughts the slave of life, comes out of the heart of the tragic vision.

Tragedy revolves around the primary contract of man and nature, the contract fulfilled by mans death, death being, as we say, the debt he owes to nature. What makes tragedy tragic, and not simply ironic, is the presence in it of a counter-movement of being that we call the heroic, a capacity for action or passion, for doing or suffering, which is above ordinary human experience. This heroic energy, glorified by itself as something invincible which bursts the boundaries of normal experience, is the basis of romance. In tragedy the heroic is within the human context, and so is still limited and finite, formed and shaped by death. In Greek tragedy especially, we can see how death is both the punishment of the aggressor and the reward of his victim. This makes tragic sense, if not moral sense. But because the heroic is above the normal limits of experience, it also suggests something infinite imprisoned in the finite. This something infinite may be morally either good or bad, for the worst of men may still be a hero if he is big enough to anger or frighten the gods. Man may be infinite if he is infinite only in his evil desires. The hero is an individual, but being so great an individual he seems constantly on the point of being swept into titanic forces he cannot control. The fact that an infinite energy is driving towards death in tragedy means that the impetus of tragedy is