Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse

Abstract

Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse J. MICHAEL WALTON Until comparatively recently it was unusual to treat the comedy and tragedy of classical Athens as part of a single dramatic tradition. As for the satyr play as a significant part of a tragic submission, most early books on tragedy tended to find it an uncomfortable coda but, as only Euripides’ Cyclops survived complete from the whole canon, it could be simply sidelined like a rather dodgy uncle with a penchant for dandling nephews and nieces on his knee. The first major translator of Euripides, Robert Potter, omitted Cyclops entirely (1781 and 1783). Michael Wodhull, whose complete Euripides (1782) was sandwiched between the two Potter volumes, did include Cyclops, with no more than a footnote in apology for the language of Polyphemus as “extremely natural in the mouth of a drunken man,” but when it comes to the Cyclops’ plans for Silenus adds, “It appeared expedient to me to omit a line and a half at the close of this speech.” Charlotte Lennox, whose three-volume translation of Père Pierre Brumoy’s Théatre (sic) des Grecs (1759) initially dismissed Cyclops as “repugnant to our modes of thinking,” extended this discomfiture to the whole of Aristophanes. Her “Dissertation on Greek Comedy” begins with the confession that “I was in doubt a long time, whether I should meddle at all with Greek comedy,” mostly because “the licentiousness of Aristophanes, their author, is exorbitant.” Lennox chose to farm out translation of acceptable sections to other (and male) hands, though these are carefully bowdlerized to avoid frightStephanie Nelson, Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse: Comedy, Tragedy and the Polis in 5th Century Athens, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016, 394 pages. arion 24.2 fall 2016 ening the squeamish. Charles Wheelwright, who claimed to be the first to translate the whole of Aristophanes, still declared that: “The Lysistrata bears so evil a character that we must make but fugitive mention of it, like persons passing over hot coals.” Nonetheless, he managed in this “complete” translation to pepper the text with asterisks and own up to eighty expurgated lines before omitting everything from lines 810 to 1215. All of which goes towards accounting for the subsequent tendency, with some notable exceptions, to treat tragedy and comedy as separate entities well into the twentieth century, with Lysistrata still banned on the English stage until 1957. But, as Stephanie Nelson cogently argues in her introduction to this important study, “when the first comic performances were staged at the City Dionysia, comedy and tragedy shared the same stage in fifth-century BCE Athens and were performed at the same festivals” (1). Integration of Athenian dramatic forms could profitably be further investigated in terms of gender, theatricality, performance aspects, social conditions, family commitment, theology, morality, the generation gap, all in Aristophanes as well as in those of the three tragedians. Though Nelson has chosen to concentrate, as her subtitle signals, on the polis in the years between the first extant Aeschylus and the plays of 405–404, she does in the course of her study, approach most of these other topics at least peripherally. All of which make her volume most welcome, though with some reservations. Nelson’s organization of her main material is clear and precise. She offers a general Introduction on the background to her book, the linked but central differences between tragedy and comedy. Here she reveals she has a thesis or, as she later puts it: “As I argue throughout, tragedy often concerns itself with necessity and comedy with freedom. The roots of this distinction may also lie in the genres’ different origins” (31). In her opening two chapters she considers some performance aspects of both in Athens, then the satyr play, with Euripides’ Cyclops and fragments from elsewhere. In five further chapters she proceeds to specific aspects of her aristophanes and his tragic muse 150 main argument about tragedy and comedy through comparisons of individual plays from each genre: Acharnians, and the Oresteia and Bacchae; Wasps, and Ajax and Medea; Oedipus Tyrannos and Knights; Persians, Peace, and Birds; and a final chapter dealing with Aristophanes’ own attitude to tragedy in Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs...