20/1001 - Frye on King Lear,

 Short story: The Mask of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe

Essay: Northrop Frye on King Lear

I love reading Frye, and having him as guide and teacher through Shakespeare has been a great experience. The standout quote in this essay has to be:

"...language is just about the only thing that fights for humanity in this blinded world."

The essay was improved by the discussion I had about it with my reading group, the St. Anne's Fellows. I came away from reading and discussing with a new thought about tragedy, that when we see a tragedy, Frye says, "The moral for us, as students of the players, is clear enough: we have to take a much broader view of the action than either a fatalities or moral one  and try, not to "explain" it, but to see something of its dimension and scope." In a tragedy, there are no easy answers. Or if there are, they are not pleasant. Tragedy asks us to be uncomfortable and sit where there are no easy answers. Lear loses his identity as king and regains his humanity at the end. But he does not get his happy, earthly ending. "Wherever we turn, we're up against the ambiguity in all tragedy: that death is both the punishment of the evil and the reward of the virtuous, besides being the same end for everybody." And, "We don't know the answers; we don't know that there are no answers. Tragedy forces in us a response of acceptance: we have to say, 'Yes, this kind of thing is human life too.'"

Poem:

Bright is the ring of words

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Bright is the ring of words

When the right man rings them,

Fair the fall of songs

When the singer sings them.

Still they are carolled and said –

On wings they are carried –

After the singer is dead

And the maker is buried.

Low as the singer lies

In the field of heather,

Songs of his fashion bring

The swains together.

And when the west is red

With the sunset embers,

The lover lingers and sings

And the maid remembers.