Comic Poet Research Articles

Comedy after postmodernism: rereading comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford

The Comic Poets against the Sublime Edward Lear: Deleuzian Landscape Painter Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist Comic Fiction Writers and the Problem of the Just Philippe Soupault and the Comedy of the Parisian Derive Bertie and Jeeves at the End of History: P.G. Wodehouse as Political Scientist The War on the Home Front: Comedy and Political Identity in the Work of Stewart Home Postmodernism and the Crisis of Judgment in Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy

Kleon's eyebrows (Cratin. fr. 228 K-A) and late 5th-century comic portrait-masks

At Aristophanes, Equites 230–2, one of the slaves who speak the prologue informs the audience that, when the Paphlagonian (i.e. Kleon) appears onstage, his mask will not resemble him, for the σκεϒoπoιoí (‘stage-property manufacturers’ vel sim.) were afraid to make one that depicted him accurately. In an important article, K. J. Dover argued that it must in fact have been very difficult to create easily recognizable portrait-masks, and suggested that the joke in Eq. 230–2 may be that the Paphlagonian's mask is horribly ugly but allegedly still nowhere near ugly enough. In response, D. Welsh, following an anonymous ancient commentator on Lucian, argued that Cratinus fr. 228 K-A shows that the historical Kleon had strikingly unattractive eyebrows. Had anyone wished to caricature the demagogue's physical appearance, therefore, he coule easily have done so, and portrait-masks may not have been so uncommon after all. Welsh's argument is at first glance quite appealing, and has been endorsed without further comment or argument by Sommerstein and Storey. I suggest, however, that the ancient commentator was confused, and that Cratinus’ remark is much more easily explained by reference to what is known about the use of facial expression as a communicative strategy in classical and early Hellenistic Athens, particularly as it appears in the comic poets. Kleon's eyebrows were probably no more ugly than those of anyone else, although he may have used them in an offensive way, and as Dover saw long ago, Eq. 230–2 cannot be taken as evidence for the use of portrait-masks on the late 5th-century comic stage.

Isocrates' Civic Invective: Acharnians and On the Peace

On the Peace attacks traditional Athenian patriotic myths and ceremonies with a violence unexampled elsewhere in Isocrates' work. To explicate and justify his unusual approach, the orator assimilates his role to that of the comic poet as defined in Aristophanes' Acharnians. On the Peace suggests that the only effective remedy for Athenian vice would be to permit an honest rhetor the same freedom in invective as the comic poet.

Brian Friel: a casebook

This volume brings together thirteen essays interpreting the work of Ireland's most formidable puzzling playwright. Brian Friel's work has earned renown on both sides of the Atlantic, plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, and Dancing Lugnasa have been box office hits still produced to large audiences. But both these popular plays other Friel works-including Freedom of the City, Volunteers, Molly Sweeney-have produced a variety of interpretations, evidence of the difficulty of defining Friel's art. Friel has been celebrated for his ability to capture feelings of loss emotional pain, as well as for his portraits of complex political historical conflicts. Because of his position as playwright of both the heart the social world, as tragic comic poet, as someone who connects the Irish Renaissance of Joyce, Gregory, Synge with the epistemological inquiries of post-modernism, Friel is an author who escapes easy classification Confinement freedom, politics the human spirit, suspicion beauty-Friel sets all of these oppositions in play. Friel greatest achievement, the one which will be intriguing audiences readers long into the future, may be his refusal to allow us to choose between these too easy alternatives, as he depicts language's dual potential to destroy or nourish. In a period in which cultural debate often divides people over just such lines, as humanism cultural studies become warring turfs, Friel stands out because of his demands that we rethink our own definitions of cultural authority. This volume of essays demonstrates-especially in the different readings provided of Dancing at Lughnasa-that Friel's plays provide windows into a wide range of studies of Irish culture: the volume includes what can be given the short-hand titles of literary, feminist, philosophical, political, historical analysis. The essays in the volume bring out different facets of this rich playwright. Index. Bibliography.

Poetic Rivalry and the Caricature of Comic Poets: Cratinus' Pytine and Aristophanes' Wasps

Poetic Rivalry and the Caricature of Comic Poets: Cratinus' Pytine and Aristophanes' Wasps

Self-Reflexive Moments in the Poetry of Cecco Angiolieri

It is an unfortunate fact that the preponderance of critical studies on Cecco Angiolieri, and the medieval comic poets in general, took place in the early part of the twentieth century, in the wake of the many important philological discoveries regarding these so-called minor poets. The majority of these studies are now clearly dated, relying as they do on outmoded approaches to literary criticism. Alessandro D'Ancona, who published the first critical study on Angiolieri in 1912, attempted to reconstruct a biography from his sonnets. At times this biographical reconstruction borders on fiction.1 .Benedetto Croce, in his Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte continues in this vein, calling Angiolieri not a comic poet, but un poeta autobiografico (134). Luigi Pirandello objected to D'Ancona's assertion that Cecco was a humorist and showed, again using Angiolieri's sonnets as biographical information, that he never learned from his own mistakes. As all the misfortunes which befall Cecco are due to his own errors, one cannot rightly call him a humorist, Pirandello argues. In contrast to the biographical approach, Ferdinando Figurelli reads Angiolieri' s sonnets in a Crocean manner to conclude that Cecco's production is nonpoesia, for while it accurately expresses the feelings of the poet, at no time does it rise to a universal level. While scholars of Angiolieri have since been kinder to the comic poet, and by extension, the comic style of medieval poetry, the criticism of the early twentieth century has left its mark regarding these poets. The notion of these poets being popular, that is, of the lower-classes, at times conceived of as semi-literate, is still very prevalent. The image of the poet Angiolieri is still confused with the persona he creates in his sonnets, as Tracy Turner Barrett strongly argues in her

The Comic Poet Archedikos

The Comic Poet Archedikos

Tragedy and Comedy in the Frogs of Aristophanes

Whenever we discuss the Frogs of Aristophanes we find ourselves discussing Athenian tragedy in the Frogs, because Frogs is the play that sends Dionysos down to Hades to recall the tragedian Euripides to Athens, the play that pits Aeschylus and Euripides against one another in a contest that provides one of the earliest specimens of Western literary criticism, and the play in which Aeschylus is finally resurrected to bring the Athenians the teaching that will save the city in its hour of distress. Athenian comedy in Frogs, in contrast, is a much less urgent topic, for while Frogs is a comedy, it does not seem to be about comedy in the same way that it is about tragedy. It includes no comic poets among its characters, it makes no mention whatsoever of comedy in the agōn of the tragic poets, and it even lacks the section of the parabasis praising Aristophanes' art, so familiar from the plays of the 420s. The few references to comedy that do appear in Frogs all occur in the first third of the play; after the parodos, there is silence.

Euripides’ NewfangledHelen

When Euripides’Helenwas first produced in 412 B.C., it seems to have created a literary sensation. We have Aristophanes’ word for it. In theThesmophoriazusae, staged almost certainly at the Dionysia of the following year, the comic poet introduces an old relative of Euripides, who says at line 850 ‘I’m going to copy that newfangled Helen’τήν καινήν ΈΧένψ μιμήσομαι, and this he proceeds to do by burlesquing four scenes from the tragedy.

A Case for Aristomenes

Recent discussions of Aristophanes' early career raise again the question who was recognized as a victor with the Babylonians and the Acharnians and his name officially recorded, Aristophanes the poet or Kallistratos his didaskalos. This old-new controversy has brought back into focus the City Victors' list (IG II 2325) and the reconstruction of' API [in the second column of the comic poets. The inscription itself has not been studied anew and the reader is referred to earlier examinations of it, especially to two articles of E. Capps and to the verdict of A. Pickard-Cambridge, who maintains that it is needless to follow the controversy in detail: ‘For the fifth century, the name of Aristophanes is restored with practical certainty in the list of victors at the Dionysia, between those of Hermippus and Eupolis, it now being proved that the first victory of Aristomenes, the other candidate for the place, fell much later. One can hardly blame Pickard-Cambridge and others for evading the intricate calculations and boring details. Yet, it seems that they deserve, or rather require a re-examination, for Capps, although a meticulous and distinguished epigraphist, had the tendency to jump easily to rash conclusions. Indeed, his frankness in readily admitting his mistakes and recanting untenable positions evokes admiration, but, since his work belongs to a period in which hypotheses were more easily advanced and less rigorously defended than today, an attempt should be made to take a look at his argumentations and see whether they are still valid.

Hipponax, Boupalos, and the Conventions of the Psogos

Students the Greek iambos continue to dispute whether the poets' targets abuse were fictional or real characters. Most recently the Cologne Archilochos has challenged scholars to square the received biographical tradition about the poet with its new evidence. Is the the poem Archilochos himself? Are the characters generic stock-figures, each bearing an appropriately significant name: Lycambes the Wolf-walker, Neobule the woman of New Plan, for example? I Did the iambic poet wish to vent his private enmity against real figures, whether out a desire for personal vengeance or for the purpose exposing reprobates to the public?2 Or did his inspiration spring less from real life and more from a desire to demonstrate his skill in a literary tradition in which invective and obscenity were de rigueur? For that matter, could the poet pursue a middle course, enlisting real figures, but in entirely fictional situations? We may never be able to answer these questions definitively in the absence any further evidence, but scholars have in recent decades come at least near consensus on one crucial point: iambographic poetry comprises a specific genre, and its practitioners shared certain generic conventions3 The term iapifd i&6a, which Aristotle applied to certain Old Comic poets (Poet. 1448b31), has

Hazlitt, the Novel, and the French Revolution

Hazlitt, the Novel, and the French Revolution ROBERT W. U P H AU S Two of the more influential approaches to the topic, the French Revo­ lution and the English novel, are those by Gary Kelly and Ronald Paul­ son. Focusing on Thomas Holcroft’s idea of “unity of design” as the distinctive impulse behind English Jacobin fiction, Kelly argues that such novelists as Bage, Inchbald, Holcroft, and Godwin “tried to show how their characters had been formed by circumstances, and how character and incident were linked together like parts of a syllogism.”1 Employing a “perfectibilian” technique that is the literary corollary of the basic millenarian philosophy of the French Revolution, these novelists used their fiction as “imaginative enactments of a philosophical argument” (Kelly, 16); the primary goal of their efforts was, as Kelly argues, to “effect a moral revolution in [their] readers” (Kelly, 19). Such a moral revolution, presuma­ bly, would function as the reader’s surrogate experience of the transfor­ mation of philosophical and political values associated with the French Revolution. In a similar fashion, though drawing on a more extensive range of materials, Ronald Paulson also deals with the subject of artistic technique and how it was accommodated to the fact (and aftermath) of the French Revolution. Paulson writes, “The ‘figuration’ of revolution could well have been my title.”2 As Paulson sees it, “The sheer novelty of the French Revolution required new forms of representation and even more basical­ ly raised the central aesthetic challenge: how to represent the unprecedent­ ed” (Paulson, 26). An example of how Paulson reads the representation of the unprecedented may be seen in his assertion that “I do not think 217 218 / U P H A u s there is any doubt that the popularity of gothic fiction in the 1790s and well into the nineteenth century was due in part to the widespread anxieof sublimation or catharsis in tales of darkness, confusion, blood, and horror” (Paulson, 221). Such a remark invites comparison with Hazlitt’s aside regarding the contemporary historical context of Radcliffe’s fiction: that is, “Mrs. Radcliffe’s ‘enchantments drear,’ and mouldering castles, derived part of their interest, no doubt, from the supposed tottering state of all old structures at the time.”3 I do not wish to dispute the views of either Kelly or Paulson; rather, I wish to extend their focus so that it falls as much on reading and readers as it does on technique or artistic representation. Through William Hazlitt we can witness the process of how one attentive and sympathetic reader read some of the principal texts that either directly or indirectly respon­ ded to the fact and consequences of the French Revolution. As a Dissenter, Hazlitt was bred a child of the French Revolution who, commenting on the revolution and its aftermath, asserted, “In the late quarrel about Liberty, upwards of five millions of men have been killed, and one king" (20:40), and who to his dying day celebrated Napoleon as “a thorn in the side of kings” (13:ix). Hazlitt’s criticism offers several important vantage points on the French Revolution and the novel: first, as a Dissenter he knew the key issues, key terms, and key English figures who were sympathetic to the French Revo­ lution; second, he was a contemporary of that generation of writers (in­ cluding Godwin, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey) who were initially enthusiastic about, and then subsequently appalled by, the revo­ lution; third, Hazlitt was the best critic of the novel in his time. His best essays on the novel are collected in Lectures on the English Comic Poets (1819) and The Spirit of the Age (1825). Many of these essays show that Hazlitt, like so many of his contemporaries (whether for or against the revolution), knew how to read ideologically. That is, he realized that the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was based on and expressed a system of interconnected literary, political, and philosophical values. Clearly, if William Blake could read Reynolds’ Dis­ courses on Art and conclude, somewhat astonishingly, “This Whole Book was Written to Serve Political Purposes,”4 it is pretty obvious that the novels of Holcroft...

Some Types of Abnormal Word-Order in Attic Comedy

Some Types of Abnormal Word-Order in Attic Comedy

All's Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy

Renaissance theories of comedy generally stress its moral function: Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, says Sidney, which the comic poet <represents in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.' Comedy, then, is at once critical and corrective, holding the mirror up to degenerate nature so that the viewer may see and repudiate its images of human folly. Thomas Heywood similarly conceives comedy's function:

Rationalism &amp; Political Responsibility: Just Speech &amp; Just Deed in the "Clouds" &amp; the "Apology of Socrates"

Almost a quarter century before the Athenians tried Socrates for impiety and for corrupting the youth, Aristophanes, the comic poet, had made similar accusations against him in his play, the Clouds. Reading Plato's Apology, the principal account of Socrates' trial, alongside the Clouds, Michael Zuckert observes that the two works are similar in structure, and that the Apology is a response to Aristophanes' claim, implicit in his criticism of Socrates' that rationalism is politically irresponsible in addition to being defective as an avenue to knowledge. The structural similarity may also aid our understanding of why Socrates' defense failed, a matter that has troubled students since antiquity.

Grégoire de Nazianze et le poète comique Anaxilas

Gregory of Nazianzus and Anaxilas the comic poet . In the fifth epistle of Gregory of Nazianzus, two words are open to discussion. The adjective λαμνρός, of Semitic origin, originally means «impressive», then weakens and eventually means «a seducer». Βοτρύων comes from a mistake by the copist. It is suggested to read Βοτρύνων, a «cattle-drover», and to see in that word the subtitle of a lost comedy by Anaxilas. The comparison of the couple formed by Gregory and his friend Basil with a pair of duettists in an old attic comedy shows that the play was still extant in the fourth century A. D. It also throws light on the lay culture of the Cappadocians.

Un fragmento de Estratis

A new fragment by the comic poet Strattis which comes to us on the Berlin ms. of Photius’ Lexicon published by Reitzenstein.

Tension, Frustration and Surprise: A Study of Theatrical Techniques in some Scenes of Euripides’ Orestes

Euripides’ Orestes is a paradox. Few critics of drama today would place it at the summit of the playwright’s achievement, on a level with the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae. In antiquity, however, it appears to have been one of the most popular Greek tragedies, performed and praised without stint. The hypothesis prefixed to the play’s text in one mediaeval manuscript called the Orestes ‘one of those dramas with a great reputation on the stage’. The comic poet Strattis referred to it as ‘a most clever play’, Menander used one of its scenes as the model for a long messenger’s speech in his Sikyonioi, and several other comedians in Athens parody or quote phrases from the play. A house in Ephesus has an incident from the Orestes painted on one of its walls. Such evidence for the play’s popularity can be corroborated further by the state of its text in the mediaeval manuscripts and by epigraphy. The former is grossly adulterated with actors’ revisions, the latter provides evidence for a performance of the play at the Dionysia of 340 B.C.

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

Mushrooms and philosophers

The fifth-century philosopher Socrates was satirized by his contemporary, the comic poet Aristophanes, in the Birds as conducting a rite of necromancy in the company of a group of people called the “Shade-foots”, a fabulous tribe from India who were thought to jump about on a single foot that could also be used as a parasol. The historical reference for this imagined scene of necromancy is the scandal that had recently occurred in which it was discovered that many prominent Athenians, including a notorious disciple of Socrates, were guilty of profanely celebrating a secret religious rite with friends in their private homes. This rite was the so-called Eleusinian Mystery, the major religion of the pre-Christian era, and it involved a shamanic ceremony in which initiates, who were sworn to secrecy, drank a special potion and experienced a vision of spirits from the world of the dead. The scandal had uncovered that some people were apparently using the sacred drug for their own entertainment. The Eleusinian Mystery was a Hellenized version of a primordial Indo-European shamanic religion that was carried into Greece and combined with indigenous agrarian traditions when the Indo-Europeans migrated into the Mediterranean lands in the second millennium before Christ. A similar migration brought them and their religion into Iran and India at about the same time. There the religion survived as the ancient Soma cult, which originally also involved shamanic experience induced by the drinking of a sacred drug. R. Gordon Wasson has shown that this drug was a fungal extract and that a similar role was reserved for the fungi in the traditions of the Eleusinian Mystery, both apparently survivals from the primordial religion. The Aristophanic parody of Socrates' supposed rite of necromancy confirms that a fungal drug was indeed used in the Eleusinian Mystery, for the creatures with single, parasol-like feet can be related to a very ancient epithet for Soma and they survive in contemporary Asiatic shamanism and in European folk traditions about mushrooms. Furthermore, the Greek myth about the theft of fire, which is also part of the context for the Aristophanic parody, can be shown to have reference to shamanic experience, with parallels in Indo-Iranian traditions. Thus, in accusing Socrates of profaning the Mystery, Aristophanes was suggesting that the philosopher had derived his theories from drug-induced visions. Such was, in fact, the common presupposition about Socrates and other ancient philosophers.