Question of the Week
Monday, November 10th, 2008The First Folio (1623) delineates Shakespeare’s plays into three genres: Comedy, Tragedy, and History. More recent scholars added the category of Romance to describe some of his later plays, and there is also a fifth, more nebulous, category that goes by several different names, which describes plays like Troilus and Cressida that seem to defy genre.
How meaningful are these genres? Certainly, a play like King Lear has a very different tenor than, say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s not just a question of mood, but even the rules are different. These are plays in different genres. But does this distinction hold up across the canon? Or does each play speak for itself? This is the Question of the Week.
How much stock should we put in Shakespearean genres?
And if you say that these genres are correct, I have a few follow-up questions. Perhaps you’d like to tackle one of these as well:
- Why is Macbeth a Tragedy while Richard III is a History?
- Why is As You Like It a Comedy, while The Winter’s Tale is a Romance?
- Why is Much Ado About Nothing a Comedy, while Romeo and Juliet is a Tragedy? (Is it just the ending? Is that enough to consider it a different genre?)