Introductory considerations: zooming in on the data

Wrath and anger are certainly not the feelings I associate with Marta Gibińska. But they are important elements in the English emotion lexicon, which has become my pet subject in the last few years. It might be argued, of course, that I could equally well write about joy and happiness, but negative emotions (and the words denoting them) happen to be more interesting. It seems that in all known languages the vocabulary for negative emotions is richer than that for positive ones (Averill 1980, Nöth 1992).

Given Marta's standing as a noted Shakespearean, I had hoped to deal with wrath and anger in both Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but unfortunately the subject has proved too vast. I decided to concentrate on Shakespeare's contemporaries, because in this particular case knowledge of Shakespeare's contemporaries seems a prerequisite for understanding Shakespeare rather than vice versa. What I can say about Shakespeare at the moment, sad to say, finds room in a small table which will appear at the end.

Wrath and anger deserve our special interest because the semantic difference between the two words is unlike the difference which we can observe in other European languages. Wrath has been defined as “intense anger” (Johnson-Laird and Oatley 1989: 121). Other European languages distinguish similarly between degrees of anger: gniew and złość, Zorn and Ärger. But while the difference between gniew and złość seems to be much the same as that between Zorn and Ärger, that between wrath and anger is clearly not the same. Most of English anger cannot be translated as Ärger.