"Come, here's the map": Charting Shakespeare's Genres

             In 1623, 17 years after Shakespeare died, his friends and colleagues published what is called “The First Folio,” a collection of 36 plays.  They grouped them under three genres, or categories: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. In modern times, plays were shifted from one category to another, and one added to create a fourth genre: Romance. Some of the plays have been dubbed by various editors as “Problem Plays,” in part, because of uncertainty over which genre characterizes them. This post is a mapping of Shakespeare’s genres. Here’s a panoramic view of what distinguishes them:

                                                                                    SHAKESPEARE’S GENRES

                                                                                           © Susanna Rich, 2020

GENRE	TRAGEDY	COMEDY	ROMANCE	HISTORY
Characters	Rulers	Daughters, Siblings	Travelers	British Royals
Themes	Pride/Hubris	Love and Marriage	Journeys, Bereavement	Power/Continuity
Communication	Deceit	Secrecy, Manipulation	Retreat	Confrontation
Stress Response	Freeze	Flight	Forfeit	Fight
Seven Deadlies	Anger/Pride/Envy	Lust/Sloth	Gluttony	Greed/Envy
Cardinal Virtues	Courage	Prudence/Loyalty	Loyalty	Justice
Identity	Stuck identity	Mistaken identity	Identity Loss	Changing
Choices	Monolithic	Diversity	Mono vs Multi	Monolithic
Primary Setting	Throne and Bed Rooms	Woods	Sea	Field/Castle
Emotion	Fear, Grief	Desire	Hope, Imagination	Distrust, Will
Expression	Deep/Weeping	Light/Laughter	Mixed	Dark
Nature	Supernatural	Natural	Supernatural/magic	Natural
Shadow Strategies	Takes Over	Humored	Punished/Redeemed	Conquered
Death	Suicides/Murders	Life/sex	Resurrection	Murder/Violence
Gender Treatment	Patriarchal	Switching	Questioning	Patriarchal
Attitude	Optimistic	Pessimistic	Optimistic	Optimistic
Cognition	Focused	Distracted	Delusional	Focused
Virgins	Killed/suicide	Married off	Saved	Owned/bartered
Crones	Maligned	Missing	Missing	Maligned
Ending	Blood Bath	Marriages	Revenants	Battle/Crowning

                    Many of the distinguishing features are self-explanatory. A counter-intuitive category of the genres is “Attitude.”  Tragedies end blood baths, as some Histories do.  What’s optimistic about that?  And Comedies end in Marriages—misogamists (marriage haters) aside, what’s pessimistic about that?  The attitude addressed in this row is that of the protagonists.  In Tragedies, the protagonist(s) believe(s) that he or she can defy social and personal limitations to assume power and glory.  For example, in Hamlet, Claudius believes that killing his brother will assure him power and glory; as do the Macbeth’s in killing King Duncan.  That holds true for the History plays.  Most everyone’s motivation is to “get to the top,” despite the odds. Richard III (in Shakespeare’s interpretation) kills his nephews to assume the throne.  Falstaff, in the Henry IV plays, is both a comic and tragic figure, who assumes he will always have Hal’s royal favor.

            The History plays are limited to British history.  The Roman and Greek history plays are placed in Tragedies, with the Cymbeline, based on the Celtic King listed as a Romance.

            Shakespeare hybridizes some genres to create special dramatic effects.  Romeo and Juliet is structured in the beginning as a Comedy—two lovers, defying social strictures, cleave to each other.  In a Comedy, the lovers prevail and marry.  No matter how many times I read or watch a theater or film adaptation of the play, I keep hoping that it will end differently.  This is because, structurally, the audience is meant to anticipate the classic Comedy ending.  But Shakespeare turns it into a Tragedy, with a blood bath that includes Paris, Romeo, and Juliet.  And I will never forgive him for that.

            Then there are the Problem Plays—so called for either of two reasons: one is the difficulty of placing them into a particular category.  Troilus and Cressida, again, a play that starts out as Comedy, was called a Tragedy in the First Folio.  Now it’s often called a Comedy.  The Merchant of Venice, although it does end in marriages, as Comedies do, has a most tragic figure at its core. 

            The second reason for calling a work a “Problem Play,” is that, according to The Encyclopedia Britannica definition, it deals “with controversial social issues in a realistic manner, to expose social ills, and to stimulate thought and discussion on the part of the audience.”  The Merchant of Venice, encountering anti-Semitism, is a Problem play on both counts—category placement and social commentary.  So is The Taming of the Shrew, which explores gender bias.  Measure for Measure focuses on the tension between political and spiritual values.  All’s Well that Ends Well exposes, in Marilyn Stasio’s review, “the dehumanizing effects of living in a time of war.”

            Navigating Shakespeare’s works, use the Structuralist’s binoculars, as this post does. Notice the skill with which Shakespeare hybridizes and renews the genres, themselves.

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://www.amazon.com/Drama-Comedy-Tragedy-Masks-Theatre/dp/B00MOUGK6C

Text:

https://www.britannica.com/art/problem-play

https://variety.com/2011/legit/reviews/all-s-well-that-ends-well-1117945547/

Because I Can Teach:  

“Character: (4) Development in Shakespeare’s Comedies”:

https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2020/03/character-4-development-in-shakespeares.html

After Great Pains: What's Lost in Translation

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—                    Szenvedés után, formális érzés jön—

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—                    Idegek sorban, mint Sirkövek, ülnek—

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,                Merev a Sziv és kérdi, Ö volt aki birta,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?                               Tegnap, vagy Századonként?

The Feet, mechanical go round—                                    Lábak lépnek, körbe, körbe—

Of Ground, or Air or Ought—                                         Föld, vagy Lég, vagy Semmi körül—

A Wooden way                                                                 A Fauton

Regardless grown                                                             Mely elhanyagolva

A Quartz contentment, like a stone—                              Egy Kvarx megelégedés, mint egy kö—

This is the Hour of Lead—                                               Ez az Olom Óra—

Remembered, if outlived,                                                 Visszaemlékezve, ha tulélve,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—                      Mint a Fagyoskodok, visszaemlékeznek Hóra-

First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—            Elöször—Hideg—akor Kábulás—elernyedés-

  

Translating this Emily Dickinson poem into Hungarian, I realized that the poem, itself, can be read as a poem about the process of translation.  What makes Dickinson’s poem a unified, breathing entity in English is distorted, if not lost, in my Hungarian version.  Using Dickinson’s cemeterial metaphor, and other instances of her iconic imagery, I mourn here those aspects of her work that the translation lays to rest in order to come into its own

1)     Word Choice

2)     The Split Lark of Music

3)     The Swelling Ground of Rhythm

4)     The Alabaster Chamber of Syntax

5)     The Sm(all) of Morphemes

6)     A Buzz of Rhyme

7)     The Carriage of Ambiguity

8)     The Vesuvius of Metaphor

9)     The Quartz Containment of Compression

10) The Pier of New England

Word Choice

Rest in peace the word “Tombs.”  In English, the one-word “tomb” will do for grave and stone alike.  In Hungarian, the word must be made as explicit as is the English “tombstone.” Sir (pron. sheer) means to weep—sir, by metaphor, a place to weep.  The plural of sir, sirók, sounds too close to sirók, which, meaning those who weep, would identify the stone with those who cry at it. Kö means “stone.”  Sirkö means “tombstone.”  Sirkövek is the plural. By making the stone explicit, the Hungarian separates the tombstone from what it marks—the grave and its inhabitant.

Dickinson’s metonymical compression makes the dead (in the rigor mortis of the “Nerves”), the tomb that holds them and the tombstones that mark them, one.

            Let us mourn the loss of her meaning, place a harebell at the tomb of word choice as knell to soften the grief.

The Split Lark of Music

            Here lies the mystery and horror of the sound of the long oo in “Tombs,” a sound that generates deep caverns of below the throat—sonorous, mournful, blocked by the lips that close and round to form it.  As Nims shows us in Western Wind, the long oo is the lowest frequency vowel—tending toward that flat line on an EKG. 

Sir wheezes out its excited ee, a sound that opens the mouth, reveals the vibrating tongue, forms the lips into a false smile.  For Nims, the ee is the highest frequency vowel, looking much more like fur.

Here lies the shrill percussion of “Pain,” replaced by the soft line and repetitions of the syllables and vowels in the Hungarian szenvedés. Dickinson’s dirge comes in monosyllables.  Agglutinative Hungarian replaces them with the arias of megelégedés, visszaemlékezve, elerneydés.  “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go” lets go on a monosyllabic low frequency vowel oh.  Elöször—Hideg—akor Kábulás—majd as elernyedés puts up a struggle, especially in the last four-syllable word ending in the bright high-frequency sound of a long ae.

 Let us place Lilies of the Valley at this tomb, for their silenced bells.

The Swelling Ground of Rhythm

            The stark stasis of Dickinson’s monosyllables—“Nerves sit”—turns into the Hungarian St. Vitus dance of idegek ülnek—three syllables, not two. The hard thud of “Tombs” becomes the busyness of sirkövek. “Ceremonious” becomes a five-syllabled pomp in a line of monosyllables—1, 1, 1, 5, 1, 1. Like tombstones, the words sit separate from each other. The Hungarian Az idegek ülnek udvariasan, mint sirkövek is a polysyllabic carnival—the words are 1, 3, 2, 5, 1, 3, respectively. The Hungarian version does not offer the image of the separate tombstones that Dickinson’s does.  If the Hungarian word udvariasan were replaced with sorban (“in a row”), we would approximate the dirge-like monotony of words with similar syllables, but we would lose the last gasp of life that the word “Ceremonious” renders in the English before it drops back to monosyllables.

            Of Dickinson’s 72-word poem 74% are monosyllabic, 16% have two syllables; only 1% in five syllables.  The 56-word Hungarian translation is 41% monosyllabic, almost a half of the English; 35% two, more than twice the English. With 4% five-syllable words (four times the English, 13% of the words are more than three syllables long.

            So, this has further effects.  “Regardless grown” is said and done. Mely elhanyagolva keeps us handing on in its agglutinations (addings on) of syllables.  The staccato of “recollect”—becomes the flourish of visszgondolnak. Dickinson’s “Feet mechanical go round—” march, march each lone step of her pain. Hungarian words contradance, and stick to each other.  “The Feet, mechanical go round,” except for the felicity of my being able to craft two four-syllable words in the middle, couldn’t be A Lábak, gépiesen, körbe, körbe.

The Alabaster Chamber of Syntax

            Farewell “He—“—sinuously capitalized by Dickinson—“He—” instead of a softened, hushing “She.”  Hungarian pronouns are not differentiated by gender, so the ungendered ö can’t have that resonance.

           

            Prepositions, separate bits of predominantly monosyllabic glue in English, are assimilated in Hungarian agglutinated inflections. “Centuries before” became the Hungarian Századonként—“centuries across.”  “Of Ground, or Air or Ought—” was especially challenging to bring along.  Were the feet made “of” ground, air, or ought? Were the feet moving on and through?  Dickinson didn’t have to choose. Voilà! Poetic compression. In the translation, I had to choose.  Choose the mundane feet go around—körül—around the ground, the air, or ought.  Lose the sense Dickinson wrings from the word “Feet”—as in “poetic feet” that could be made of the ground earth of the pencil, or the air which is the air of a song, or the nothing which is the ephemera of meaning.  In the Hungarian, the feet become just what occurs between the ground and the person walking on it.  And we lost the ambiguities of the English “of.”

           

            Let us lay the peace of an olive branch at this tomb—syntax and order could not come along.

The Sm(all) of Morphemes

            Deconstruction taught us that texts self-implode with contradictions.  One of the ways to explore this is to find words embedded in words. It’s not even that “He” is he but that “He” is the “He” in “Heart,” and that this poem is also about itself—the violence of poetry, of “he” art.  And the “eat” in “great” is what pain does—gnaw at the soul.  The words “formal,” “feeling,” “stiff,” “Feet,” “Freezing,” and “First” link through the alliteration of f, even as life fizzles to its letting go.  The energy of Dickinson’s going “round” is embedded in “Ground”—Einstein would come to know this relation between energy (movement) and mass. The “Freezing” person” knows the “no” and “now” that comes with being buried in “s-no-w.”  “Ore” in “bore,” is a lode to be mined from bearing pain. 

            Place a heliotrope here in memory of Judge Lord.

A Buzz of Rhyme

            All the rhymed woe, the deep wobbling low-frequency wavelengths of “Tombs,” “bore,” “round,” “grown, “stone,” “Snow,” “go,” and the plummet in “before” in Dickinson’s poem—are gone in translation.  Each of Dickinson’s stanzas ends with the sure crisp closure of a Shakespearean couplet.  This pained security and finality is dashed.

            Place a spiked speedwell.

The Carriage of Ambiguity

            “The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore.”  Of the English version we can ask: a)

Was it He who endured it?  b) Was it He—that boar, that boor?  c) Was it He, that boring

one? Birta, the denotative translation of “bore” does not offer us such ambiguities.  “Hour of Lead” in English resonates with such meanings and echoes as a) Hour made of lead; b) Hour of being lead; c) Hour of the Dead; d) Our lead.  Olom is only metal.

      Laburnum blossoms—for the forsaken.

  

A Vesuvius of Metaphor

“A Wooden way”—on a wooden leg, into the words, with wooden teeth, behind the wood pile, a wooden look—wouldn’t it be loverly if “wood” meant for the shepherds of Hungary what it does for the forested and New Englandly?  “Wooden way” translated into A Fauton, translated back into English means “a road made of wood.”  Something missing in that translation, something about plodding, a missing leg, a hollow one for liquor never brewed, toy soldiers, the Civil War, stiffening.  There are significant dissonances in cultural meanings attached to the images for an English speaker as opposed to that of a Hungarian.

     

      Place and iris here, for messages lost.

The Pier of New England

            Puritan thrift and decorum, individualism, crisp closure of winter, the long Atlantic coastline, Calvin’s God precipitate into compression of thought, hymn rhythms and rhyme, words ceremonious, separate, uninflected to each other, stop when they stop.  All that is Hungarian—the Magyars, renegades, nomads blocked forever from the ocean tribal, nationalistic, soldier saints, shepherds and winemakers, boundaries blurred in pronouns as they are in a country where borders are constantly shifting—precipitates a language which hoards syllables; is profligate with inflections, unrelenting agglutinations, shirkings of the formal, words musical and passionate and warring for the sake of connection, tombs identified more with the living than the dead and long nights singing together around the fire.  My translation is more about the passionate responses of the Magyars to pain and death than the Puritan restraint of those who think New Englandy in households where each person lives as a monarch in her own realm—reclusive, touching only with words.

            “A formal feeling comes,” translating Dickinson’s poem—language to language—a kin to dying into immortality—promise of perfect transport unkept, the leaving behind the promise of E.D.en.  The translator’s nerves sit ceremonious, mechanical, go round.  Translator, on a wooden way, regardless grown—freezing person, recollecting Dickinson’s snow.  First—the chill impossible—then stupor—then, the translation lets go.

Works Cited:

Cover Art: https://www.marketingweek.com/marketing-translation/

Low Frequency:

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/3d-particles-mesh-array-wave-sound-flowing-vector-24566998

High Frequency:

https://thisishuso.com/sound-frequency-heal-us/