Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation ed. by Jeffrey Henderson

Abstract

Reviews 281 The following four pages consist of words and phrases with commentary plus a page of explanation. A major problem with the listed words and phrases, however, is the lack of any line reference to the play. Addition­ ally, most of them are identical to the standard footnote explanation in, for example, Neilson and Hill’s 1942 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Although Joseph’s interpretation of mamm’ring on as “stammering about” may help the actor, his listing of haply as “perhaps” seems unnecessary and his definition of prime as “sexually vigorous” is open to dispute. At best, this is a hit and skip method and not always satisfying. Each volume of A Shakespeare Workbook has an introduction—an introduction to “Tragedies” (Volume I) and “Comedies & Histories” (Volume 2). It is unfortunate, however, that Joseph found it necessary to adapt his introduction to “Tragedies” to the second volume simply by omitting paragraphs relating to particular tragedies and by cutting sec­ tions of background information. By so doing he reduces the length of the introduction by ten pages but adds nothing to his discussion, which has few references to the comedies and histories. Such blatant disregard for scholarly obligations or the intelligence of his readers suggests one attitude of Professor Joseph toward his publication. At the same time, there can be no doubt as to the intensity of his interest in Shakespeare’s language or the perceptive character of most of his observations which will, indeed, be helpful to the student and the actor. WALTER J. MESERVE Indiana University Jeffrey Henderson, ed. Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation. Yale Clas­ sical Studies, 26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. ii + 237. $35.00. Of all the Greek dramatists, Aristophanes presents to the modem reader—whether learned or unlearned in Greek—the most difficulty. The conventions of Old Comedy and Aristophanes’ very language, the coined words, and, especially, the obscenity obscure the impact of the plays to such a degree that modern audiences must take it on faith that he was regarded in his own day as the brightest creator of comedy. The situation has not been much helped by classicists who have generally neglected him. There are no up-to-date texts and commentaries for most of the plays, as anyone knows who has tried to teach him in either the original or in translation. As Jeffrey Henderson remarks in the Introduction to this collection of essays, “Aristophanes is a comic playwright composing in a defunct and often alien mode about topical subjects only imperfectly intelligible to a distant posterity.” Henderson observes that Aristophanes “has more and more been denied the status of a serious and/or intelligible spokes­ man for his time.” But, since the publication in 1972 of K. J. Dover’s Aristophanic Comedy, a renewed interest in the Greek playwright by classicists has been evident. One of the important reasons for this new interest stems directly from the permissive society in which we live; obscenity can now appear in print. The dirty jokes and the double 282 Comparative Drama entendres which abound in the comedies can at last be read and dis­ cussed, something which seemed impossible even twenty-five years ago in a graduate course whose members were all male. Henderson himself has significantly contributed to this change with his publication of The Maculate Muse (1975). Now that all those juicy terms are available, critics and scholars can go on to consider other matters in the plays and re-evaluate what Aristophanes achieved. To further that quite laudable goal Henderson has edited and published the five important essays which comprise this volume in Yale Classical Studies. The five essays include two on specific plays, one on Aristophanes’ lyric poetry, one on Aristophanes’ criticism of Socrates, and one on the theme of war and peace. Each in its particular way illuminates concerns long obscured or misunderstood and contributes to the claim that Aristophanes is a serious, sincere, as well as humorous playwright, one clearly worth attending to if one wants to learn more about Athenian history, literature, and society. Michael Silk begins his three part essay on “Aristophanes as a Lyric poet” by demolishing the common belief that...