Ancient Comedy Research Articles

The Comic Affixation to Myth: a survey of the Poetae Comici Graeci

The comic affixation to mythology: a survey of the Poetae Comici GraeciThe comic poet Philemon (4th c. BC, New Comic) writes about Niobe as follows (K-A 102):ἐγὼ λίθον μὲν τὴν Νιόβην, μὰ τοὺς θeούς,οὐδέποτ’ ἐπeίσθην, οὐδὲ νῦν πeισθήσομαιὡς τοῦτ’ ἐγένeτ’ ἄνθρωπος• ὑπὸ δὲ τῶν κακῶντῶν συμπeσόντων τοῦ τe συμβάντος πάθουςοὐδὲν λαλῆσαι δυναμένη πρὸς οὐδένα, προσηγορeύθη διὰ τὸ μὴ φωνeῖν λίθος. have never been convinced, by the gods, that the rock is Niobe and not now will I be convinced that a human turned into this thing. But by the evils that happened and the affliction that occurred she was not able to say anything to anyone, she was called a rock because she wouldn’t speak.His rationalizing of the myth stands out; the approach and language are borrowed from the mythographer Palaephatus (4th c. BC) who de-mythologizes the same story. As H. G. Nesselrath (1990, 217, 231) notes, myth rationalization (der Mythenrationalisierung) was a popular device of Middle Comedy and he cites two additional mythographers – Euhemerus and Hecataeus – whose approach comics picked up for themselves. For example in a fragment (K-A 31) of Anaxandrides (4th c. BC, Middle Comedy) the poet portrays the god Nereus as the inventor of expensive seafood delicacies which may be compared to some of the Euhemerus narrations found in Diodorus Siculus. It is possible that ancient comics borrowed some of their material from historians and mythographers, since they parodied every other genre including epic and tragedy. Old Comedy does not shy from fixing myths either as this fragment of Aristophanes (5th c., Old Comedy) shows with its false/unexpected etymology (K-A 373): ἐνταῦθα δ’ ἐτυράννeυeν Ὑψιπύλης πατὴρ Θόας, βραδύτατος ὢν ἐν ἀνθρώποις δραμeῖν. (And here the father of Hypsipyle ruled Thoas, who was the slowest to run amongst men.) And even earlier comedy from Sicily like Epicharmus (5th c., Sicilian Comedy) shows a comic rationalizing of myth (K-A 100): ἁ δ’ Ἁσυχία χαρίeσσα γυνά, καὶ Σωφροσύνας πλατίον οἰκeῖ. (And Hesychia is a beautiful woman and she lives near Sophrosyne.) Ancient comedy tends to omit the marvelous side of the myth and instead replaces it with some humanized form, but unlike their models, these de-mythologies have a comic spin. Regardless of period (5th c. Sicilian, Old, Middle, or New) and treatment, gods/goddesses and mythological narrative make up a large portion of all Greek comedies – either in part or full. The following talk will elucidate comic fragments that have a mythological bent and attempt to categorize them based on the assumed comic mechanism of each. Bowie (2000, 322) warns against reading too much into comic titles and categorizing each poem’s approach to mythology just as Rosen (1995, 120) warns against categorizing poets by period. Yet there is much to gain in categorizing each fragment’s approach to mythology whether it’s a rationalization of a story, a first invention of something attributed to a god, or a comic etymology. I will show that ancient comedy had a myriad of different approaches to myth, all of which constitute some comic inversion of models and narrations found in other genres.Select BibliographyBowie, A. “Myth and Ritual and the Rivals of Aristophanes,” in The Rivals of Aristophanes, ed. D. Harvey & J. Wilkens. London, UK: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2000.Kassel, R. & Austin, C. Poetae Comici Graeca (PCG) [vol. i-viii]. Berlin, Germany: Walter deGruyter & Co., 1983-2001.Nesselrath, H-G. Die attsche Mittlere Komodie. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1990.Rosen, R. “Plato Comicus and the Evolution of Greek Comedy,” in Beyond Aristophanes (APAACS #38) , ed. G. W. Dobrov. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995.Stern, J. Palaephatus: On Unbelievable Tales. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1996.

Teaching Uncomfortable Subjects in the Classics Classroom

We propose a workshop designed to follow up on the very successful roundtable and workshop on teaching rape at the 2008 and 2009 meetings of the APA. We wish to broaden the discussion to encompass a wider range of uncomfortable issues – uncomfortable for teachers or for students or for both. Ancient texts raise a variety of issues - slavery, infanticide, adoption, abortion, abuse, incest and domestic violence as well as rape - that may be difficult to discuss in a classroom where some students will have had personal experiences that might generate distress or make discussion difficult. The emphasis of the session will be on raising awareness of unforeseen difficulties and sharing strategies for dealing withose difficulties. Four brief presentations from classicists teaching in the UK and the US, both senior and junior scholars, men and women, will tackle a range of sensitive issues, as follows.Paper #1: ‘How to Teach Gender and Crime in Ancient Greece’ This is a report from two UK scholars on their experience in teaching an MA level module on ‘Gender and Crime in Ancient Greece’, whose syllabus includes rape, infanticide, domestic violence, and ‘honour’ killings. These scholars are undertaking a funded research project to investigate techniques and strategies employed by teachers of sensitive subjects in other disciplinary areas such as Psychology, Social Anthropology, Education and Criminology. Paper #2: ‘Homophobia, Homoeroticism, and Handling Charged Discussions in the Classroom’In this presentation, a young US scholar will suggest some guidelines for dealing with issues of homophobia, homoeroticism, and pederasty in the classroom.Paper #3: ‘Slavery in the US classroom’A senior US classicist will explore the guilt, denial and anger she has observed when the topic of slavery arises in her classroom. She proposes that a more complex and nuanced understanding of the racializing of slavery in modernity is available through an examination of ancient slavery and its theorization.Paper #4: ‘Teaching Ancient Comedy: Race Matters’In this presentation, another senior US scholar will propose ways of presenting slavery and the torture of slaves when teaching ancient comedy along with strategies for getting students to confront these topics in a productive way. Following the four 15 minute presentations, the two organizers will act as respondents to the presentations and will then stimulate discussion from the audience. We would request a room with a non-hierarchical seating arrangement, ideally a round table, as experience suggests that that maximizes the participation rate. Judging from last year’s experience at the workshop on teaching rape, the audience is just as likely as the presenters to have valuable material to share.

Lionel Casson (1914–2009)

Lionel Casson (1914–2009) Larissa Bonfante In accepting the Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2005, Jimmy Casson, as his friends called him, tells the story of the encounter that confirmed his early fascination with ships and the sea. In 1953 he met Jacques Cousteau, the noted oceanographer, at the now famous site of the Grand Congloué, near Marseilles. He was involved in a TV taping showing how he used his special vessel to raise ancient amphoras from sunken ships on the bottom of the sea. "It was an eye-opening experience. I knew at once that I was in on the beginning of a totally new source of information about ancient maritime matters and I determined then and there to exploit it." An excellent classical scholar, he was in a position to do so, using evidence from literature, papyri, coins, and iconography, along with his own familiarity with the sea, to build up a picture of ancient ships and seamanship and to become the undisputed master of the field. The Ancient Mariners (1959), and later Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (1971, often reprinted) made the maritime story of the ancient world available to both the scholar and to the non-specialist. His interests and many publications extended far beyond seamanship. Like Cousteau, he had a gift for communication, wrote clearly and elegantly, and was much in demand by publishers for both scholarly and popular books and articles, as well as for advice on matters of scholarship. His first major book was on the papyri of Nessana, Egypt (1950). The New York Times review of his last book, on ancient libraries, entitled "Shh! There's no Talking in the Papyrus Section," (July 11, 2001), is studded with typically witty asides, such as his reference to "the prolific author Didymus (known as Bronze Guts for his mind-boggling output of an estimated 3,500 to 4,000 books)". During World War II (1942–1946) he served as Lieutenant in the Department of Naval Intelligence, where he was trained to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war. Except for this period, Casson's scholarly career was spent at New York University, where he taught from 1936 through 1979. He was twice chair of the Classics Department, but his leadership was crucial for a much longer time, and the practical sense and decisiveness I admired in later years as his colleague helped the Department to survive the difficult years of the Depression, when it developed innovative courses and became involved in projects for the WPA. He developed and long taught a course on Ancient Comedy when scholarly circles ignored the subject as being too frivolous, translated Plautus and Lucian's Satires, and wrote Masters of Ancient Comedy as a textbook for the course. His Travel in the Ancient World opened up another field of research. The Periplus Mari Erythrae (1989) was written when Jimmy was leading the monthly meetings of the informal Ancient Civilization Group, where he managed—in [End Page 495] almost every case—to cut the speaker off after 10 minutes. Regular members were Bluma Trell, Blanche Brown, Annalina Levi, Morton Smith, Alan Schulman, who regaled us with tales of Egypt, Tessie Goell, who reported on Nemrud Dagh, Arthur Schiller who discussed points of Roman Law, and frequent visitors Cyrus Gordon, Theodore Gaster, and many others. He will be missed in all the worlds to which he belonged, by his colleagues, friends, and family—Judy, his wife of 63 years, and their daughters, Andrea and Gail. We honor him for what he has done here and abroad for scholarship, and for the vision of antiquity that his books have made a little clearer and more exciting. This is a democracy, and there are no titles. Otherwise, we would be remembering Sir Lionel Casson—or Sir Jimmy—today. Larissa Bonfante New York University Copyright © 2009 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

L'Homère tragique d'Aristophane

Aristophanes' tragic Homer lambic poetry and tragedy are usually thought to be the major literary sources of ancient comedy. Nevertheless, homeric poetry and Homer himself do play their part in Aristophanes' comedies, and a very special one. We shall see that there are in fact more quotations of homeric poetry than one would think at first. Moreover, those quotations do not beloiig to a tradition of homeric quotations but are specific to Aristophanes. When not, those quotations are in fact parodies of tragic quotations from Homer, that are to be understood within the frame of the agonistic relationships opposing tragedy and comedy. And when Homers name is used, the poet is described as teaching war to the Greeks : as a matter of fact, Homer and tragedy are both rejected for similar reasons, and for a single aim : leaving place to comedy.

Rönesans ve Barok Döneminde Macar Okul Dramaları

Ancient comedy and humanist school plays started developing with the influence of Humanism and Renaissance on Hungarian schools. The teachers of these schools used this literary genre as a tool for the development of Latin education. On the other hand, plays in the mother tongue emerged owing to the Reformation. The main subject of the Protestant Hungarian drama in the 16th century was polemics among denominations. It is known that the Jesuits, who campaigned against the Reformation in the 17th century, put nearly a hundred plays on the stage. College of Enyed, a Calvinist school, became a real center for school plays. Kolozsvar School came into prominence among the Unitarianists. The common feature of Evangelical school plays was the fact that they included political and current events. In this context, Helena Menelao reddita and Hungaria respirans, which was inspired by the Kuruc Movement, can be given as examples.

Bakhtin and the Classics

Mikhail Bakhtin's critical and theoretical experiments have inspired original work in the humanities and social sciences but little in the realm of classical studies, the discipline in which Bakhtin himself was trained. This volume focuses on the relationship between Bakhtin and the study of classical antiquity and demonstrates the fundamental importance of classical literature in his work. Clarifying and elaborating this connection, these essays aim to expand our understanding of both Bakhtin's thought and the literary and cultural history of antiquity. The contributors put Bakhtin into dialogue with the classics - and classicists into dialogue with Bakhtin. Each essay offers a critical account of an important aspect of Bakhtin's thought and then examines the value of this approach in the context of a significant area of literary or cultural history. Beginning with an overview of Bakhtin's notion of carnival laughter, perhaps his central critical concept, the volume explores Bakhtin's thought and writing in relation to Homer's epic verse and Catullus's lyric poetry; ancient Roman novels; and Greek philosophy from Aristotle's theory of narrative to the work of Antiphon the Sophist. Considering important questions and arguing on a level of abstraction in keeping with Bakhtin's own vision, the authors at the same time are scrupulous in illuminating specific texts and showing how attention to the ancient novel, comedy, lyric, epic, philosophy, literary criticism and other genres can extend or deepen Bakhtin's insights.

O impasse trágico e a via cômica na ética da psicanálise

Trata-se de uma análise do comentário feito por Lacan sobre a peça Antígona, de Sófocles, no seminário A Ética da Psicanálise, com o intuito de se indagar sobre o alcance e as limitações da designação trágica do desejo. Em seguida, procura-se resgatar o interesse lacaniano pela comédia antiga - por meio do exame de algumas passagens do teatro de Aristófanes - explorando-se as contribuições dessa outra via para a perspectiva ética da psicanálise.

What's so Funny about Ancient Comedy?

What's so Funny about Ancient Comedy?

The Tragic Mask of Comedy: Metatheatricality in Menander

The plays of Menander have been largely absent from the recent critical attention given the metatheatrical aspects of ancient comedy because they avoid direct reference to performance and maintain dramatic illusion. But as readings of tragic self-reflexivity have shown, even consistently illusionistic drama can make reference to itself as drama so that the audience is encouraged to view the play in double focus, as both a pretense of reality and as an evident dramatic artifice. Metatheatricality in Menander has its basis in the recurring view of the characters that life is like a tragedy. A number of characters state that the events at hand resemble a tragic situation, comment on events by quoting from a tragedy, or ask other characters to view the current situation through the lens of a particular tragic drama. In other instances, reference is made to aspects of dramatic staging or to the constitutive parts of plays. Such comments are realistic, or probable, because it is likely that Greeks of the fourth century regularly interpreted their own lives through the paradigm of myth, best known in dramatized form, and used theatrical metaphors to refer to everyday events. At the same time, however, audience members may experience a character's comparison of the dramatic situation to tragedy as humorously ironic because they know that the plot is destined to fulfill itself in a comic mode. Tragedy is in fact a mask worn by Menander's comedy, and the audience has a metadramatic experience whenever it focuses on the fact of masking. Analysis of passages from the Dyscolos, Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, and Samia, as well as fuller discussion of the Aspis, demonstrates that Menader's plays invite metadramatic readings in which the plot develops through the struggles of characters to impose on themselves and others tragic readings of their comic situation.

Hooking in harbours: Dioscurides XIII Gow-Page

Klaus Alpers has recently recovered from the obscurity of Byzantine lexica the fragments of what appears to be a novel dating from c. A.D. 100, and notable to us, as it was for the Byzantine excerptor, for the elegant verbal borrowings from ancient comedy, always a favourite source of good Attic Greek for the atticists of imperial times. One of these glosses gives occasion to look again at fishing metaphors for erotic business, a subject discussed often enough by scholars, but still perhaps capable of revealing new nuances. These hunting and fishing metaphors are used as one would expect in many non-amatory contexts, but in both love poetry and its allied genres they occur throughout antiquity in such quantity that the metaphorical complexity reaches into very allusive language. Long ago Preston had already pointed out that ‘Figures from hunting, fowling and fishing as parallel to the arts of the meretrix, are very frequent, and are developed at unusual length.’ There was undoubtedly a realistic side to all of this metaphorical hunting. ‘The lover is a fish to be baked, as long he has juice in him’, says the bawd at Plautus, Asinaria 177, and one needs little imagination to realize what plays can be made on such a theme, and indeed were made at all levels throughout antiquity.

Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum ed. by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner

Reviews597 and organization is the chance occurrence of a term or allusion in a given text. As such, they are a great convenience for students of ancient literature, and enable an appreciation of local nuances that are now opaque and thereby improve our understanding of great works of art. Unfortunately, the pitiful remains of Alexis's comedies do not permit the latter pleasure. But scholars are grateful for every amelioration and explication of the texts that survive, however humble they may be. Someday, perhaps soon, new electronic technologies will render the commentary form as such obsolete. But the enormous learning and good judgment that have gone into Arnott's Alexis are a permanent treasure, and a major contribution to our knowledge of ancient comedy as a whole. DAVID KONSTAN Brown University Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, ed. R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996. Pp. 324. $45.00. A festschrift for Sam Schoenbaum is a special occasion, in view of his long illness and his unusual place of honor in the Shakespeare world. For that reason, this festschrift has built-in attractions—so much so that I very much hope this particular collection will survive the neglect that has attended too many such collections in the past. Sam was an admirable scholar, whose life was in the Folger Library, the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, and other research institutions. He had many devoted friends. Most of the contributors to this volume are not former students of his but fellow scholars. Brian Parker and Sheldon Zitner have had no trouble in assembling a glittering roster of essayists, a distinguished sample of the Shakespeare Establishment. The editors have made a brave attempt at providing a taxonomy for the contents of this volume, with a section on the biographical record, another on "The Idea of Authorship," and two more sections that move out into the broader terrain of "The Playwright in the Play" and "Playwrights and Contexts." These four categories are offered as reflecting the areas of research in which Sam Schoenbaum was especially interested , though I think it would be more accurate to say that they cover the waterfront of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama studies and thus provide a safe haven for each particular essay, whatever its focus. Even the biographical portion of the volume, in which field Sam Schoenbaum especially shone, is rather dispersed in its topics. Insofar as the concept of this volume purports to be Sam Schoenbaum and the "Elizabethan Theater" (not a memorable title, though usefully reminiscent of the fact that Sam did start and edit the journal called Renaissance Drama), it quickly becomes what it appears to be, a display case of various aspects 598Comparative Drama of Renaissance drama research. Let me particularize, then, since the value of the collection must lie in its individual contents. The most remarkable essay for my money is that of Richard Dutton. In the vein of refreshingly sensible revisionism for which he has already won a name in his Mastering the Revels— where he argues with great common sense that Elizabethan dramatists' difficulties with official censorship were not simply the case of artistic freedom versus governmental oppression that our modern sensibilities too readily suppose—Dutton here asks why Shakespeare did not print his own plays. He raises a quizzical eyebrow at the common assumption that Shakespeare did not care about this form of publication, or at least about a reading audience. Why, if Shakespeare was indifferent to readership , are so many of his finest plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida too long for performance? Dutton presents evidence that acting companies were not nearly as worried about publication as has been too often assumed; publication does not seem to have reduced the value of plays as theatrical pieces. Shakespeare may have refrained from publication out of a sense of loyalty to his company and to the contractual terms that bound him to that organization, or possibly out of a wish to avoid a certain social stigma attached to the writing of plays, but he was far from indifferent, in Dutton's view, "to his...

Catharsis of Comedy by Dana F. Sutton

Reviews323 important reading not only for students of the Restoration and eighteenth century but for Shakespeare specialists and, more generally, all who are interested in the history of ideas and in how tastes and canons are formed. CLAUDIA THOMAS Wake Forest University Dana F. Sutton. Catharsis of Comedy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. Pp. vii + 126. $18.95. This book seeks to locate the pleasure peculiar to comic drama in a catharsis that is analogous to Aristotle's tragic catharsis through fear and pity. A view of ancient comedy possibly attributable to Aristotle serves as the cornerstone of this book. However, the author argues that the derivation of Western comedy from the classical tradition and his own emphasis on spectator psychology (which, he seems to assume, transcends culture) may give his theory wider utility. Sutton notes that although tragic catharsis is better known, the catharsis of comedy is in fact more intuitive and may be pinpointed in "the good honest explosive laugh." If Aristotle had written about comic catharsis, the work has not survived, but a tenth-century manuscript that may reflect an Aristotelian theory of comedy, the Tractatus Coislinianus , is extant. According to the Tractatus, comedy accomplishes "by means of pleasure and laughter the catharsis of such emotions." Tragedy and comedy appear to offer two different kinds of catharsis: the former purges the spectator of bad feelings; the latter induces a surfeit of good feelings which bubble over into laughter. Thus the Tractatus seems to say that comedy makes us feel good by making us laugh. Combining Aristotle's statement on tragic catharsis with that of the Tractatus on comedy, Sutton produces a definition of comic catharsis more complex than this solipsism. The definition depends on a reading of the ambiguous Greek at Poetics 1449b, ten ton toiouton pathematon katharsin, which Sutton takes to refer to a purgation not only of pity (which he understands as "anxiety") and fear, but of pity, fear, and other such feelings. In this reading he follows Jacob Bernays, who in Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristotles über Wirkung der Tragödie (Breslau, 1857), describing the medical connotations of catharsis , suggested that tragedy provokes fear and pity in the spectator and induces a purgation of these and similar emotions much as an emetic causes a patient to vomit out both the emetic itself and the poison for which it had been taken. Thus, Sutton concludes, as tragedy employs pity and fear to achieve a catharsis of pity, fear, and similar feelings, so does comedy achieve a catharsis of pity, fear, and similar feelings, but through pleasure and laughter. In other words, though tragedy and 324Comparative Drama comedy use different means, their ends are the same, the purgation of negative emotions. Sutton overcomes the apparent paradox that comedy has the power to provoke bad feelings in his consideration of laughter. Herbert Spencer 's essay "The Physiology of Laughter," in Essays on Education Etc. (London, 1911), provides Sutton with the idea that laughter is the result of excess energy generated from extreme pleasure or pain which cannot be discharged physically. The source of this excess energy subsists in the psychic energy that, according to Freud in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, was expended in repressing direct expression of taboo subjects such as sexual aggression and hostility. Sutton includes these feelings with Aristotle's pity and fear among the emotions that might be purged in comic catharsis; however, the energy released in laughter is invested in the bad feelings themselves rather than in the process of repressing them, as Freud maintained. Comic catharsis is characteristic of tendentious humor—that is, humor that makes reference to bad feelings. Comedy itself is a species of tendentious humor involving representation, and Sutton locates the specific workings of comic catharsis in comedy's mimetic nature. Comic mimesis is a process of ridicule in which the similarity of the comic surrogate to its real target evokes the bad feelings associated with the latter. The ridiculousness of the surrogate on stage brings about laughter that purges those feelings; furthermore, ridicule allows the spectator to feel superior to the real-life target and to limit the target's ability to...

Ancient comedy: the war of the generations

Ancient comedy: the war of the generations

Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy

Research Article| April 01 1989 Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy Nicholas D. Smith Nicholas D. Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Classical Antiquity (1989) 8 (1): 140–158. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010899 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nicholas D. Smith; Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy. Classical Antiquity 1 April 1989; 8 (1): 140–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25010899 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentClassical Antiquity Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Roman Comedy by David Konstan

REVIEWS David Konstan. Roman Comedy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983. Pp. 182. $19.50. On the whole, students of Roman comedy have not served the general public very well. Because metrical technicalities and abstruse debates over lost Greek originals dominate the scholarly literature, non-specialist readers interested in this engaging and seminal genre are too often left to their own devices. The only reliable guide in English is George Duck­ worth’s The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, 1952), badly dated now after thirty years. Gilbert Norwood’s The Art of Terence (Oxford, 1923), an odd book even in its own day, remains in use only for lack of a successor, and much the same is true of Erich Segal’s Roman Laughter (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968), which deals with Plautus. David Konstan’s new book is thus especially welcome. It has both the thorough grounding in contemporary scholarship to satisfy the specialist and the breadth of vision necessary to interest the generalist. It is also both a little less and a little more than the title suggests. This is neither a hand­ book nor a survey. Its introductory chapter introduces not the genre itself, but a particular way of looking at the genre. Eight chapters follow on individual plays, six of the twenty-one Plautine plays (Aulularia, Asinaria, Captivi, Rudens, Cistellaria, Truculentus) and two of the six by Terence (Phormio, Hecyra). There is then a brief conclusion. Four of these essays have appeared previously as articles, but they gain from being drawn together and developed into an explicit statement of the author’s approach to Roman comedy. Just what is that approach? Let Professor Konstan speak for himself: “Taken together, the dramas of ancient comedy map out the ideology of city-state society and reveal to us the sensitive areas where the borders were vague, weak, or changing under the pressure of new historical circumstances” (p. 21). For each play, Konstan discusses the social tensions that the comic medium explores: tensions among family mem­ bers, between individual and society, between citizen and non-citizen, etc. This emphasis on comedy’s social role is analogous to that of Segal’s Roman Laughter, but with a vaguely Marxist rather than Freudian overlay and with much closer, more careful reading of the plays them­ selves. Since Konstan concentrates on comedy’s social function, other purely literary aspects of the genre receive only passing mention, but the sacrifice is worth the cost. His precisely focused vision is arrestingly clear and succeeds in making Roman comedy truly interesting. Each chapter is packed with interpretations of actions and characters that force the reader to confront basic questions too often ignored in scholarly discussions—e.g., what is the appeal of the genre? What gives eternal 175 176 Comparative Drama youth to its formulae? What are its true concerns? These essays stimulate an exhilarating process of thought and analysis, but even as we learn to read Roman comedy Konstan’s way, certain caveats are in order. Consider again the sentence quoted above. “Ancient comedy” em­ braces both the New Comedy of fourth- and third-century Athens and the Latin hybrid that flourished at Rome in the third and second centuries B.C. “City-state society” thus encompasses both the Athenian polls stifled under Macedonian hegemony and the imperialistic republic of central Italy as it began its meteoric rise. Menander’s Athenians faced the political demise of their city-state system. The Romans scrapped theirs for something better. The “new historical circumstances” were adverse and externally imposed in the one case, self-generated and advantageous in the other. Were the Athenian and Roman “city-states” nevertheless a single society? Did they have a single ideology? A little later, as Konstan narrows his focus to the Roman plays, he addresses this problem: “What­ ever degree of native invention in the comedies that have survived, the world they represent is clearly of a piece with Menander’s” (p. 23). Despite the confident “clearly,” readers must recognize that the thrust of Latin scholarship since the 1920’s has been to display how great is that “degree of native invention” and to demonstrate that, where Menander put his own world...

Tradition and Change in Greek Shadow Theater

GREEK SHADOW THEATER, which is primarily an urban phenomenon, was largely ignored until recently by folklorists, who focused their attention almost exclusively on culture of rural Greece. The decades of 1960s and 1970s, however, witnessed a remarkable surge in interest in shadow theater.' Much attention was devoted to link between shadow theater and ancient comedy, relationship between and Turkish traditions of shadow theater, and Hellenization of shadow theater in 19th century.2 Works in latter area focused on such topics as evolution of full cast of traditional characters and development of complete repertoire of classical plays. In stressing importance of shadow theater, folklorists have claimed that Karagiozis, poor, hungry trickster, with his hunchback, bare feet, and long arm, who has come to personify tradition of shadow theater, is the genuine stereotype of common Greek (Zarikos 1976:75), the only genuine expression of modern reality and the voice of modern (Trezou 1976:62). However, while popular and scholarly interest in shadow theater was increasing dramatically, tradition itself was undergoing drastic, and what many considered disturbing, changes. Well-known puppeteers were growing old, and no young people were taking their place. Fewer and fewer puppeteers were traveling through Greece giving performances in small cities and towns, while open-air theaters in large cities were being forced to close, to make way for apartment buildings and stores. Furthermore, live shadow theater performances were declining in popularity because of increased competition from movie theaters and television. Puppeteers recorded plays on long-playing records and gave short weekly performances for children on national television. Comic booklike pamphlets, orfiladhia,3 containing shadow theater plays were published inexpensively and anonymously and were advertised as the indispensable companion of every child. Karagiozis, then, had taken his place beside Mickey Mouse, Davy Crockett, and other comic book characters on shelves of kiosks and stationery stores throughout Greece. The reaction of folklorists to entry of shadow theater plays

Terence and the Death of Comedy

and nearly a whole century before Latin literature reached maturity in the time of Augustus. The golden age of Roman comedy is thus quite clearly divorced from the golden age of Roman literature itself, but something more than a minor literary genre died with Turpilius. The very interest in stage comedy that had survived the change in conditions from Aristophanes to Menander and the change in culture from Greece to Rome died with a whimper late in the second century B.C. No further comedy of literary stature was written in antiquity, and the ancient tradition lay dormant until revived by the Italian humanists of our own fourteenth century. 1 What happened? Why did the Romans lose interest in stage comedy? The death of a genre is as common an occurrence in the history of literature as it is complex, and there can be no simple answer to such a question. Yet some of the responsibility must lie with Terence, the author who brought to Roman comedy both a peak of sophistication and an end of creative vitality. What was it about his achievement that brought the development of ancient comedy to a halt? Since all Roman drama, both tragic and comic, evolved from Greek forms, it may prove helpful to begin with the place of drama in Athenian culture. The constant, creative re-working of old myths that gave fifth-century tragedy its intellectual tension and vitality established drama as a legitimate medium for serious thought, and tragedy's profound appeal enriched the substance of Athenian comedy even as the comic poets parodied

The Distribution of Parts in Menander's Dyskolos

The distribution of parts between the available actors in ancient comedy has frequently engaged critical attention, but it has only recently become possible to test the principles believed to be at work against a play of Menander which is for practical purposes preserved complete. The present inquiry will suggest that either four principal actors are needed or, alternatively, that three actors can carry the major roles between them, provided that the part of Getas is split between two of them and that a supernumerary actor is available for two small parts, together with parachoregemata in a few places and a kophon prosopon twice. It is not easy to choose between these two possibilities, but there may be sufficient hints in the dramatic economy of the play to warrant preference for the three-actor alternative.

Robert Munford's "The Candidates"

C_ OLONEL ROBERT MUNFORD'S play The Candidates is notable for several reasons. Strange as it may seem, this short, slapstick farce written in 1770 tells more about the inner workings of Virginia's colonial politics than many a thick book on that subject. The play is also one of the earliest native American comedies, antedating Royall Tyler's The Contrast which the textbooks generally regard as our first comedy by well over a decade. It introduces for the first time on any stage the Negro (in the person of Ralpho) as a comic type. It is, also, the first of a long line of rollicking American political satires, including such modern examples as Of Thee I Sing and State of the Union, to poke fun at that self-proclaimed peoples' choice-the office-hungry politician. Moreover, The Candidates, unlike many another ancient comedy, is still funny. Any reader with patience to work through a slow and prosy first act will be rewarded thereafter by rough and rowdy action as comic today as when Munford portrayed it in 1770. The success of The Candidates results more from its author's choice of subject than from his skill as a dramatic craftsman. Although more properly termed a man of letters than any of his Virginia contemporaries, the busy life and aristocratic viewpoint of a great planter kept Munford among the amateurs in the arts. In politics, however, he was strictly a professional, as his biography shows. Robert Munford was born at in Prince George County not later than 1730. Although practically nothing is known of his early years the fact that he completed his education abroad at the Wakefield School in Leeds, Yorkshire, where his cousin Theodorick Bland, Jr. and Richard Henry Lee also studied, indicates his family's position in the top rank of Virginia society.' In 1758 he served as captain in the French and Indian War under Colonel William Byrd III, whose son Otway later mar-

Soliloquy in Ancient Comedy. John Dean Bickford

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsSoliloquy in Ancient Comedy. John Dean Bickford Blanche BrothertonBlanche Brotherton Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 18, Number 4Oct., 1923 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/360547 Views: 8 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.