The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy ed. by Michael Fontaine, and Adele C. Scafuro (review)

Abstract

Fontaine, Michael, and Adele C. Scafuro, eds. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $175. xiv + 894 pp.This collection, comprising an introduction, forty-one chapters, and appendices, is a remarkably comprehensive guide to Greek and Roman comedy in antiquity. In addition to essays on each of major comic playwrights (Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence), it includes chapters on origins of comedy in both Greece and Rome; performance; comedy's responses to tragedy, law, philosophy, politics, and religion; meter, music, language, and style; comic authors whose works survive only in fragments (the appendices are catalogues of recent papyrus fi nds and names of lost authors); farcical genre called mime; and reception of comedy in antiquity, including textual transmission, commentaries, and influence of comedy on both literature and visual arts. The primary approach of most essays is a review of history of scholarship on topic, combined with author's own views on current scholarly controversies. The chapters include paragraphs on additional reading as well as bibliographies. It should be noted that volume does not include essays dedicated to important influence ancient comedy has had on modern literature. I assess here chapters to which scholars, teachers, and students of English literature are most likely to turn for guidance.Bernhard Zimmermann's wide-ranging essay on Aristophanes offers an efficient introduction to playwright's life and works to those teaching author in translation. The fourth-century-BCE Greek playwright Menander, whose works were lost until papyrus finds in twentieth century, is less often taught in translation; but anyone wanting an accurate understanding of history of European comedy needs to know his plays, which provided foundation for many features of comedy that have survived through present. Adele C. Scafuro's chapter on Menander reviews these features. Michael Fontaine's essays on Plautus and Terence are both excellent works of scholarship but will probably be less useful to those teaching Roman comedy in translation or investigating pervasive influence of Roman comedy on its modern descendants. Fontaine's chapter on two paradigms in Plautine studies oversimplifies distinction between what he calls Saturnalian and Hellenistic approaches, refusing to acknowledge that same audience members could appreciate both sophisticated verbal play and wide farce. In a daring essay on Terence, Fontaine argues that playwright wrote for readers as well as spectators. Whatever one concludes about Fontaine's thesis, essay is a good piece to think with for anyone pondering relationship between performance and reading in appreciation of drama.Several other chapters will also be of special interest to readers of this journal. Scafuro's introduction reviews scholarship on Greek and Roman comedy since 1960s. Though somewhat idiosyncratic, it provides a good starting point for anyone wanting to know how ancient comedy has been approached during last half century. Jeff rey Rusten's piece on the essence of Old Comedy includes a review of theories, ancient and modern, about origins of comedy in Greece. …