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In Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> Frye notes that critics often break forth into an \u201coracular harrumph\u201d when they encounter references to alchemy, the Tarot, Rosicrucianism, and the like, and the same attitude persists more than a half\u2011century later.\u00a0 One encounters readers here and there, having discovered that Frye thought highly of Colin Still\u2019s book on The Tempest<\/em><\/a> or that he had read some esoteric work, recoiling in amazement, as if it automatically followed that Frye was a card\u2011carrying member of some mystery cult or was engaging in the ritual practices of Freemasonry<\/a>.\u00a0 In the late 1970s I was invited to a party in Toronto by a friend at York University, where the assembled party\u2011goers turned out to be McLuhanites. When they discovered that I had an interest in Frye, they began to pepper me with questions about Frye\u2019s having been a Mason. I naturally asked what evidence they had for this claim, but none was forthcoming, their assumption being that this was common knowledge. The rumor, apparently, was initiated by Marshall McLuhan, or at any rate perpetuated by him. McLuhan\u2019s biographer Philip Marchand<\/a> writes that McLuhan \u201ccertainly never abandoned his belief that his great rival in the English department of the University of Toronto, Northrop Frye, was a “Mason at heart, if not in fact\u201d (Marshall McLuhan<\/a><\/em>, 105).\u00a0 In a book review Marchand removes the qualification, saying flatly that \u201cMcLuhan thought Frye was a Mason\u201d (Toronto Star<\/em>, 30 November 2002).\u00a0 He goes on to say that it\u2019s no wonder that McLuhan suspected that Frye was a Mason because (check out this logic) he was interested in the occult, used diagrams, and, heaven help us, took Colin Still\u2019s Shakespearean criticism seriously.<\/p>\n \u201cColin Still,\u201d Marchand declares, \u201cwas a crackpot,\u201d whose book on The Tempest<\/em> \u201c[m]ost academics would have been embarrassed to be seen reading.\u201d\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 This is an example of a little learning having turned into ignorance.\u00a0 Marchand has no sense of allegory, and he has no sense of the difference between the reading of a text and the use to which that reading is put. All this gets picked up by Colby Cosh, who does Marchand one better: \u201cThe crushingly excellent Philip Marchand has a mesmerizing column about the poisonous rivalry between Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. . . . McLuhan, a conservative Catholic, despised Frye because he thought he was dabbling in dark occultic forces and perhaps messing about with Freemasonry. . . . Marchand has discovered a new and major source for Frye\u2019s thinking in Colin Still, a hitherto undistinguished flake who believed The Tempest<\/em> was a disguised representation of some sort of pagan initiation rite\u201d (ColbyCosh.com<\/a>. 30 November 2002).<\/p>\n Although Frye occasionally comments on Freemasonry (e.g., the Masonic overtones of The Magic Flute<\/em>, the Masonic links with the trade unions in the nineteenth century, the affinity between the Freemasons and the Royal Society, and the Freemason scapegoat myths), there is not a shred of evidence that Frye was a Mason. As for Still\u2019s being a \u201ccrackpot\u201d and an \u201cundistinguished flake,\u201d no less a critical intelligence than R.S. Crane speaks of the \u201cpioneering work\u201d of Still in reading Shakespeare allegorically, discovering in the play \u201cthe double theme of purgation from sin and of rebirth and upward spiritual movement after sorrow and death\u201d (The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry<\/em>, 132). \u00a0Peter Dawkins refers to Still as an \u201ceminent scholar\u201d (The Wisdom of Shakespeare in \u201cThe Tempest,\u201d<\/em> xxv), and Michael Srigley has defended Still\u2019s thesis (Images of Regeneration<\/em>).\u00a0 Ronald Tamplin finds in Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land<\/em> \u201ca pattern corresponding in outline, imagery, and incidental material to Still\u2019s account of initiation into the Greek mystery religions\u201d (American Literature<\/em> 39 [1967]: 361). In a detailed examination of Still\u2019s argument, Michael Cosser says, \u201cCertainly it is not stretching credulity to see a close parallel between the play and what can be pieced together from classical sources as to the training received in the Mystery-centers of old\u201d (Sunrise<\/em> 49 (December 1999\u2013January 2000). And in his study of the sacerdotal features of The Tempest<\/em> my colleague and friend Robert Lanier Reid, though not convinced of the explicitness of Still\u2019s claims, nevertheless takes seriously Still\u2019s view that the play is a \u201cuniversal purgatorial allegory\u201d (Comparative Drama<\/em> 41, no. 4 [Winter 2007\u20138]: 493\u2013513). These critics, like Bishop Warburton before them, are far from being crackpots and flakes. In the eighteenth century Warburton, as both Still and Frye were aware, had proposed the theory that book 6 of the Aeneid<\/em>\u2013\u2013the descent to the underworld\u2013\u2013corresponds to the ancient rites of initiation.\u00a0 In other words, observations about parallels between literary works Greek initiations rites had been around for some time: noting such parallels was a common critical practice.<\/p>\n Still\u2019s books, listed in all the bibliographies, were also celebrated by the distinguished Shakespearean G. Wilson Knight, who calls Shakespeare\u2019s Mystery Play<\/em> an \u201cimportant landmark\u201d (Shakespeare and Religion<\/em>,<\/a> 201). As an undergraduate at Victoria College, Frye had known Knight, who taught at Trinity College at the University of Toronto in the 1930s.\u00a0 T.S. Eliot referred to Still in his preface to Knight\u2019s The Wheel of Fire<\/a><\/em>, and it is possible that Frye ran across this reference even before he checked Still\u2019s book out of the Toronto public library during his sophomore year in college\u2013\u2013the same year that The Wheel of Fire<\/em> was published (1930). In The Wheel of Fire Knight<\/em> writes, \u201cSince the publication of my essay, my attention has been drawn to Mr. Colin Still\u2019s remarkable book Shakespeare\u2019s Mystery Play<\/em> . . . . \u00a0Mr. Still\u2019s interpretation of The Tempest<\/em> is very similar to mine. His conclusions were reached by a detailed comparison of the play in its totality with other creations of literature, myth, and ritual throughout the ages\u201d (16). Knight regards Still\u2019s book as confirmation (\u201cempirical proof\u201d) of his own view that The Tempest<\/em> is a mystical work (ibid.). A year later Knight wrote that his view of The Tempest<\/em><\/p>\n is most interestingly corroborated by a remarkable and profound book by Mr. Colin Still, Shakespeare\u2019s Mystery Play: A Study of the Tempest<\/em> (1921). . . . Mr. Still analyses The Tempest<\/em> as a work of mystic vision, and shows that it abounds in parallels with the ancient mystery cults and works of symbolic religious significance throughout the ages. Especially illuminating are his references to Virgil (Aeneid<\/em>, VI) and Dante. His reading of The Tempest <\/em>depends on references outside Shakespeare, whereas my interpretation depends entirely on references to the succession of plays which The Tempest<\/em> concludes.\u00a0 We thus reach our results by quite different routes: those results are strangely\u2013\u2013and, after all, I believe, not strangely\u2013\u2013similar.\u00a0 To the skeptic this may suggest that mystical interpretation of great poetry may be something other than Horatio\u2019s (Hamlet<\/em>, I. V. 133) \u2018wild and whirling words\u2019. It is not without its dangers, yet it is the only adequate and relevant interpretation of Shakespeare that exists; since, if the vision of the poet and that of the mystic are utterly and finally and in essence incommensurable, where are we to search for unity? And yet if the art of poetry has its share of divine sanction and transcendent truth, what limit can we place to the authentic inspiration of so transcendent and measureless a poet as Shakespeare?\u201d (Shakespeare and Religion<\/em>, 67\u20138)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Marchand and friends are of course free to say whatever they wish about the interpretations of Still, Knight, and Frye, though one wishes that their dismissals had not been based on such ill-informed opinions about the parallels between Shakespeare and ancient myth and ritual.<\/p>\n Previous posts on Frye and McLuhan here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>. The complete McLuhan thread here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Anatomy of Criticism Frye notes that critics often break forth into an \u201coracular harrumph\u201d when they encounter references to alchemy, the Tarot, Rosicrucianism, and the like, and the same attitude persists more than a half\u2011century later.\u00a0 One encounters readers here and there, having discovered that Frye thought highly of Colin Still\u2019s book on The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12,16,96,146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-bob-denham","category-marshall-mcluhan","category-shakespeare"],"yoast_head":"\n