15 subject of his dissertation (he also had an interest in the Bible, being a former pre-seminary student). “The whole development of my career since then has been essentially finding things that I was good at, or that I was interested in,” Gethner says. “And this included a number of other areas in dramatic history. I’ve done a lot of work on hybrid plays, musical comedies and opera libretto since.” a French Baroque? He also wrote works questioning whether there was a Baroque period of French literature, giving a lecture on the topic on campus at Oklahoma State. The debate was a controversial one that shook up ideas among French scholars about what was happening between 1580 and 1640. Works they had dismissed as worthless now are being rehabilitated as part of the Baroque period similar to other European countries at the time, he says. Not much attention has been paid to French playwrights of that period. Gethner has set out in part to correct that by translating some of their works, an effort that began with his translation of dramatist Antoine de Montchrestien, an author known for his religiously neutral work in a time when many plays were religious diatribes against either Protestantism or Catholicism. That time period is intriguing, he says, because the English were producing William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Gethner says, while the French had no similar writers. The greatest of their playwrights — Moliere, Jean Racine, etc. — came later, especially during the second half of the 17th century. Meanwhile, English writers at the time were reading French plays, Gethner says, but none of the French writers were reading the English. Widespread French love of English writers didn’t begin, he says, until Voltaire in the second half of the 18th century. French writers were reading Spanish and Italian at the time, but almost none of them could read English, he says. “I find these sorts of things intriguing,” he says. “Who’s influencing whom, and what forms does that influence take? Because the French writers in Shakespeare’s day were nowhere near as great as Shakespeare, they’re usually dismissed, but I certainly thought some of them should be made available through translations.” Translating is tough enough when working with modern forms of a language. But when it’s in an older version of the language, the text could have archaic words unknown to but a few academics, or words whose meaning may have changed considerably over the years. There’s a lot of onus on the translator to get them correct, especially when scholars and students could be utilizing those editions for decades to come. “You also have to deal with trying to figure out what the correct text is,” Gethner says. “Some editions could be so mutilated and so bad you can’t read them. Sometimes there’s more than one edition, too, and in some cases there are only the author’s manuscripts. For one project, I had to look at Voltaire’s own handwriting and make some valiant attempts at trying to read it. I was dealing with very beautifully written manuscripts done by his secretary. Voltaire would put stuff in the margins and often scratch it out. That was the part that was hard to decipher.” Although he teaches regular undergraduate classes, he doesn’t get to direct the research of graduate students at Oklahoma State because his department doesn’t have a graduate program. Nor does he get much chance to present his own research in class. “You don’t get to teach it,” he says. “Research and teaching are almost completely unrelated in language programs.” Most students who take French do so because they want to learn the language. OSU’s classes in French literature and drama just scratch the surface. Gethner enjoys teaching, however, and is known among his students for being approachable, knowledgeable and easy to work with. Conferences and the academic community help keep him enthused about his work, he says. Phi Beta Kappa success Also, he chaired the committee that applied for permission to establish a chapter of the national academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, at OSU. Part of an effort stretching back several decades, he and other faculty members traveled to Florida in August to be voted on by the national assembly, and they were successful. “Getting that approval to start a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at OSU is really exciting,” Gethner says. Outside of work, Gethner performs classical piano recitals in the Stillwater area and accompanies singers. He is also a singer who was once in the chorus of an opera company. He taught for six years at the University of Chicago before coming to OSU. He has also edited collections of works by early female French playwrights, and he has written articles on musical comedies as well as drama and literary theory.
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