Pavel makes a good point about Shakespeare: the difference between RJ and Othello is the presence of deception. In Romeo and Juliet everyone behaves exactly as themselves, reacts immediately to various stimuli. We stop to lament, but never to consider. Othello on the other hand is a drama of deception: something is not what it appears to be.
Can we claim that the shakespeare that's survived best into modernity is the deliberative shakespeare? The stuff where people are trying to decide what to do? Or is that just what I like the best: Hamlet, much of Macbeth, read as far more relevant than Lear. Lear's problem is that the king's decision feels inexplicable. I suppose maybe the modern idea of tragedy has to do more with decision-making.
Adapted plot from Cinzio: Oliver is a PhD student in biology, doing important new research with his mentor, Stephen. But Oliver falls in love with Stephen's daughter, Olivia, possibly because their names are so similar. They keep their affair a secret until Oliver and Stephen publish their research and Oliver secures an adjunct-but-promising position teaching in another state. When Olivia happens to also end up in that state, Stephen is not suspicious, but when he realizes from a facebook photograph taken by an academic friend that they're together, he flies into a rage even he doesn't understand very well. By this time Oliver has secured an offer for a tenure-track position at his university, but Stephen offers him a tenure-track position with him at the original university, and then pretends to be surprised and delighted that Oliver and Olivia are seeing each other. Everything goes well until Oliver's tenure review, when Stephen angrily objects to everything about his career, and even claims that the original research they'd done together was fabricated by Oliver, a claim he's altered records to support. Oliver is denied tenure, and the foundation of his career thrown into doubt. He may commit suicide, as may Olivia.
An untranslatable plot: a judge convinces a beautiful woman to become his mistress by promising to pardon her brother. She agrees, but instead he sentences the brother to death. Distraught, she complains to the king, who orders the judge to marry her and then also sentences the judge to death. But the woman, now either behaving in accord with wifely principles or having fallen in love with the judge, persuades the king to pardon him. The couple live happily forever after. And oh also the brother was a rapist.
What's untranslatable about the story--and what's partially untranslatable about many of these novellae--is the presence of agonists, usually male, with complete, life-and-death power over the other agents in the story. In the original grad student story, the older man has his daughter's husband and her children killed and then like casually shows her the corpses. But also Creon, Agamemnon, the kings in Shakespeare: much of literature, until quite recently, can be read as a grappling with the misbehavior of absolutely empowered male authorities. Iuriste (the judge story) is interesting in that it has two layers of AEMA--the judge, and then the king, each of whom behave bizarrely.
One of the common themes in the AEMA story is the development of excellent outcomes following displays of quiet (silent) virtuosity by the female protagonists--men in positions of power behave awfully, some of the time, but everything ends up okay if the women they're behaving awfully to just sit and bear it.
One thing that I want Pavel to do more often (at all) is try to connect these different items in the history of the novel to items in the social or economic history of the novel-writers or novel-readers. Art, especially popular art, spends a lot of time and energy reassuring its readers that the lives they're living are right or noble or otherwise defensible.
