A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance

Northrop Frye

Columbia University Press, 1965 - Comedy - 159 pages

In A Natural Perspective, distinguished critic Northrop Frye maintains that Shakespeare's comedy is widely misunderstood and underestimated, and that the four romances - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - are the inevitable culmination of the poet's career. Rather than comment only on individual plays, Frye treats the comedies as a group unified by recurrent structures, devices, and images: the storm at sea, the identical twins, the heroine disguised as a boy, the retreat into the forest, the heroine with a mysterious father.

Contents

• I Mouldy Tales: 1
• II Making Nature Afraid: 34
• III The Triumph of Time: 72
• IV The Return from the Sea: 118

About the author

Herman Northrop Frye was born in 1912 in Quebec, Canada. His mother educated him at home until the fourth grade. After graduating from the University of Toronto, he studied theology at Emmanuel College for several years and actually worked as a pastor before deciding he preferred the academic life. He eventually obtained his master's degree from Oxford, and taught English at the University of Toronto for more than four decades. Frye's first two books, Fearful Symmetry (1947) and Anatomy of Criticism (1957) set forth the influential literary principles upon which he continued to elaborate in his numerous later works. These include Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, The Well-Tempered Critic, and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Frye died in 1991.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance; Issue 15 of Bampton lectures in America, ISSN 0067-3129; Issue 15 of Bampton lectures; Volume 71 of Harbinger book
• Author: Northrop Frye
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Columbia University Press, 1965
• ISBN: 0231082711, 9780231082716
• Length: 159 pages