GENRES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAY

             GENRES OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

                                        

(1564-1616)

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon. The son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, he was probably educated at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together, they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583, and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585.

                                                               About Shakespeare in a glimpse

                                       

Unlike other writers, Shakespeare wrote many different types of plays in varying styles. He was a master of multiple forms, capable of writing everything from side-splitting comedy, to bloody tragedy, heady romance, magic and mischief, historical epics, and more.

COMEDIES

Shakespeare’s comedies are often extremely funny stories, involving romances, mistaken identity, magic, love potions, grand adventures, shipwrecks, long lost twins, clowns and comic hijinks. As a device, Shakespeare often has the characters in his comedies travel to new lands and explore distant and mysterious places, away from the structure of city or courtly life. This allows for much play, confusion and personal discovery for the characters. However, some of the stories classed as comedies are quite serious. What they all have in common, is that they all end well (that is, no characters die), and most end happily with some kind of resolution. Most comedies end with a wedding or two (or three). Any characters who tried to derail the happy story, always get their comeuppance.

Plays include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest.

                                          A Midsummer Night's Dream-Portland Stage             

The Tempest at Hartford Stage-The New York

tragedies

Shakespeare’s tragedies are often based around a main character, or several characters, who are either faced with external pressures by family or society that they struggle to solve, or, these characters bring about their own downfall due to personal flaws. In other words, they have a weakness or fatal flaw, such as pride, jealousy or ambition, that brings about their downfall or death. Tragedies are often epic stories, and can involve romance, war, family disputes, figures from history, kings and queens, power struggles, disillusionment with society, and much more. Tragedies do not end well and often feature death, and lots of it. Interestingly, as a whole, Shakespeare’s tragedies are often his most famous plays, and regarded as his greatest works.

Plays include: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus (in every one of these plays, the title characters die)

Othello - Bharat Rang Mahotsav 2024

Romeo and Juliet (2017)

HISTORIES

Shakespeare wrote many plays about real people – mostly kings and queens from English history. However, he didn’t always stick to the historical facts, and liked to adjust events and characterisations to make a good story. While this was for dramatic purposes, some people didn’t like that he did this. For instance, to this day, people still challenge Shakespeare’s villainous portrayal of King Richard III, believing that the play was so powerful it changed this King’s reputation and legacy to something far more negative than the reality. Shakespeare also wrote about historical figures from Rome and Egypt such as Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, however those plays are classed as tragedies.

Plays include: Henry V, Richard III, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Richard II, and Henry VI Parts 1 – 3.

Henry V at Utah Shakespeare Festival

Richard III at Bristol Old Vic

'PROBLEM' PLAYS

Some scholars also apply a fourth genre to Shakespeare’s plays, the ‘Problem Play.’ This classification has long been controversial, and scholars do not even agree which plays fit within this genre. Generally, the term ‘Problem Play’ refers to the difficulty classifying some of Shakespeare’s plays into a particular category. It can also refer to plays which deal with contentious or social problems, that characters in the play have differing views on. The critic Frederick Samuel Boas was the first to apply this idea to classifying Shakespeare’s plays.

Plays include: The Winter’s Tale, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice

          Merchant of Venice on Broadway

               

                                                 MERCHANT OF VENICE -FULL MOVIE
  

CONCLUSION

The distinctions between genres described above are not meant to describe the boundaries of Shakespeare’s art, nor the art of any other playwright of the Renaissance. They are merely reference points from which one can begin to frame the works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. As mentioned earlier in passing, Shakespeare mixed styles and genres, which means that many of his plays cannot be exclusively categorized into any single mode of writing. Phrases like “problem plays” are given to works like Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice because these plays do not fit into the conventional genres of comedy. “Serio-comic” is an adjective used to describe characters like Feste from Twelfth Night and the Fool from King Lear because they imbue their seemingly foolish and flippant language with wisdom and insight and thus do not fit into stock character types of the period. Such ambiguities are what give Shakespeare’s plays their longevity and appeal, and they are what make his characters seem more organic and true to life. Individuals in the real world to not easily fit into character types, nor can real world situations be subordinate to dramatic genres. To make his plays reflect the ambiguities of the real world, Shakespeare’s writing often transcends such categorical limitations; hence, their timeless appeal.