Bloomsbury (2024) p/b 227pp £23.39 (ISBN 9781350440692)
This is Volume I of six ‘Cultural Histories of Comedy’ at various times, from Antiquity to the Modern Age. After what amounts to a summary of the book in the Introduction by the Editor, there are 8 chapters, by nine contributors (Ethics has two contributors): Form, Theory, Praxis, Identities, The Body, Politics and Power, Laughter, and Ethics. There are also ten illustrations. Of necessity, there is some overlapping and repetition (but the protagonist of Birds, accepted as Peisetairos, also appears in this book [and MSS] as the etymologically unacceptable Peisthetairos [Dunbar, Aristophanes, Birds,(1995), pp. 128-9]; the correction was made by Dobree). The still unresolved question of whether women were present at theatrical performances is not discussed; the argumentum e silentio at Peace (50ff) perhaps implies that women were not present: Dunbar (op. cit.) p. 483 is equivocal. All Latin and Greek is translated.
Chapter 1, Form, by Gesine Manuwald, tells us that a comic competition was introduced at Athens at the Dionysia (486 BC) followed (c440 BC) by another competition at the Lenaea (at which attendance was limited to Athenians, though M. does not say so; it is also the case that in terms of prizes, Aristophanes was far more successful here than at the Dionysia). She goes on to describe the form of the typical play—all written in a ‘rich variety of spoken and sung verses’. Importantly, in most of Aristophanes’ plays there is a parabasis, in which ‘the chorus may serve as a vehicle for the playwright’s direct engagement with the audience’—outside the plot of the play. This is Old Comedy, exemplified by the first nine plays of Aristophanes; his final two plays—Ecclesiazusae and Wealth—are different in style and staging, and are regarded as precursors of Middle Comedy, which ran throughout most of the 4th century BC. No complete play survives from that period (which has not stopped scholars from fighting over the scraps which remain). With Menander’s New Comedy in the 3rd century BC we are in a world miles away from the coarse language and accoutrements of Old Comedy; the formal ‘sitcom’ has taken over from the pantomime: thanks to papyri, we do have one Menandrian play almost complete, Dyskolos (‘The Grouch’), and useful sections of several other ones. Later we shall wonder whether the famous question posed by Aristophanes of Byzantium—did Menander imitate life, or life Menander?—is as ‘insightful’ as first appears.
In Rome, comedy, known as fabula palliata (drama in Greek dress), can be said to date from 240 BC. However, of predecessors to Plautus (c. 250-184 BC), little remains and almost nothing is known of e.g. Naevius, except for the rather sinister Saturnian ‘dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae’ [not cited here, but see p.134). Again, more will be said later of Plautus and the rather later Terence (who may well have started life as a slave and was described by Julius Caesar as a ‘half-price Menander’).
Caleb Dance’s long, complex and interesting Chapter 2, Theory, ‘highlights various concepts of comedy and the comic as articulated by Greek and Roman authors to their contemporary audiences’ and covers Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Horace—as well as the Tractatus Coislinianus, seen by Richard Janko as a ‘continuation to the Poetics of some sort’. Horace’s ridentem dicere verum is cited here in English, and does much to summarise that worldly-wise poet’s attitude to satire, while Dance himself says ‘the line between comedy of the stage and the comedy of life occasionally dissolves’.
Chapter 3, Praxis, by Michael Ewans, examines (from both literary and archaeological evidence) ‘what kinds of comic performance existed in antiquity’. Thus for Greece he considers the Occasion of Performance, the Playing Space and Actor-Audience Relationship, the three (or occasionally four) actors, Masks, Costumes and Properties—including leather phalli, which are put to notably good use in Lysistrata, but had vanished, at the latest, by the arrival of the New Comedy. E. goes on to explain that the dramatic ‘illusion’ is often broken by Aristophanes, remarkably so in Acharnians, while the audience address in the opening scene of Frogs is ‘extraordinary’. Little is known about Middle Comedy, but in the New Comedy there appears to be no use of the stage machines used so liberally by Aristophanes, and no more than three speaking actors are needed for the surviving plays and fragments of Menander. At Rome, Plautus and Terence freely used and adapted the plots of Greek originals (e.g. we read Diphilus scripsit; Maccus vortit barbare in a Prologue): obviously, this means that copies of New Comedy plays were available. E. goes on to describe in considerable detail the Playing Space and Actor-Audience relationship; of Actors, E. says that acting in a grex (theatrical company) seems to have been ‘a high-stakes activity’; the actors were of low social status, being slaves or freemen, but could be influential: as Juvenal writes—not cited here— quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio (Satires, 7.90). E. also gives lively examples of stage ‘business’; ‘asides’ are frequent. However, although Terence (and Menander) have been ‘enormously influential’ in the history of comedy, their relative ‘realism’ has led to their eclipse by e.g. ‘romcom’ and ‘soap opera’, which echo the relatively limiting performance conventions of their predecessors—and are about as plausible as Menander in ‘imitating life’.
Natalia Tsoumpra. in Identities (Chapter 4) contrasts rural excellence with the city’s ‘corrupting influence’: the hardships of rural life are curiously passed over in Old Comedy, even in Acharnians, where the chorus are in favour of continuing the war (your reviewer wonders whether any political factors were involved), and T. develops this theme, without coming to a definite conclusion. Other topics considered here are Nationhood and Language (‘the practice of ascribing marked/barbarian Greek to the discourse of certain politicians as a slander reveals an ideological, social and political prejudice against a new class of politicians’). T. goes on to introduce the standard comic characters of the plays: the Cook (who could become a ‘cordon bleu’ chef in fragments of Alexis, and be mocked for his pretensions), the Doctor, the Courtesan, the braggart Soldier, the Parasite (or ‘hanger-on’), the Cunning Slave (especially manifest in Plautus, less so in Terence). Finally, in an important section, T. looks at issues of Gender. ‘Old Comedy … delights in the constant transgression of gender boundaries’; however, ‘comedy is an essentially phallocentric genre which eventually confirms and upholds gender stereotypes’, and there is further discussion of the role of comedy’s highly visible phallus; although T. also discusses rape, consideration of this subject can await its development in Chapter 8, Ethics.
The theme is continued in Chapter 5, The Body, by Louise Peacock. In Costume and Mask she describes the ‘grotesque’ body padding worn by comic actors, highlighting their ridiculousness—a visual echo, it is suggested, of the anticivic behaviour found in comedy: and ‘the comic potential of a swinging phallus, a motion which could be exaggerated by the actor’s movements, should not be underestimated’. However, apparently the ‘Plautine mask is a vexed topic’; yet were they not essential when twins or doubles have to meet, as they do in several plays? In Menander and Terence, too, it seems that masks were worn. Peacock follows this with a section on Physical Comedy, in which she gives full coverage to phalli, and their ‘status’, especially in Lysistrata; it is hardly news that Aristophanes and Plautus both ‘used sex as a source of comedy’. More interesting is her section on Cross-Dressing, Disguise, and Mistaken Identity: a lively account follows of the physical action in (especially) Thesmphoriazusai, with Ecclesiazusai. Cross-dressing as disguise is missing from the extant plays of Menander, but ‘resurfaces’ in Plautus, notably in Casina, and disguise is a motif in Terence’s Eunuchus (a play which might find opposition if a producer today were to wish to stage it). Peacock concludes by observing that many of the techniques employed by the four playwrights who are the main subjects of this book are ‘still used by playwrights and screenwriters today’, though Terence is particularly remembered for his ‘verbal wit’.
In Chapter 6, Politics and Power, we mercifully emerge from the phalli as Isabel Ruffell explains how a highly politically engaged form of comedy emerged in the 5th C at Athens, and dominated the rest of the century: the most famous representative of this generation and form of comedy was Cratinus (450s to 420s BC), of whom, however, no play survives; his Dionysalexandros is known only from a plot summary on papyrus: perhaps it was some kind of satire on Pericles via the medium of mythological parallels, with Pericles as Dionysus ( the ‘Alexandros’ of course is Paris, and the play reworked the Judgment of Paris and the origins of the Trojan War). Interestingly, R. shows via Ploutoi that ad hominem abuse of prominent politicians was not precluded. Social comedy was associated with Crates and Pherecrates; in the latter case, fragments show ‘some engagement with social stereotypes’. R.is decisive in finding political engagement in the first nine plays of Aristophanes, whether via specific political issues, individual politicians as targets, aspects of the political system and institutions, or even management of the empire. R. goes on to explore all these matters in greater detail in the various plays, though ‘less clear-cut, and hotly contested, is whether comic poets sought to or actually did influence political developments’: the cases of Cleon and Socrates are instanced—though whether comedy had political impact, ‘it was not in any literal sense’, and ‘finding a positive and consistent policy position for (Aristophanes) has … proved problematic’. R. goes on to look at length and in detail at Menander, into whose plays the ‘dangerous, complex world of Alexander’s successors keeps intruding’, even if they finally offer a ‘comforting set of outcomes for characters that largely mirror their audiences’—and so the question raised by Aristophanes of Byzantium is perhaps answered. This is an interesting and most important chapter.
That Laughter is a serious topic is argued at some length by Marcus L. Lech: ‘comedy brings forth laughter and amusement in an entirely different context and far more complex manner than simply by jokes’. Greek laughter? It would be rash to assume that it was very different from our laughs: L. lists the words used of the Greek laughter vocabulary (‘gelan has a wider sematic field than meidian and may cover the function of meidian at least figuratively’). Archilochus and Hipponax ‘seem not to have elicited outright laughter’: the genre is ‘clouded by our ignorance’. L. goes on to consider visual humour (Attic vases), symposia, and of course Aristophanes, with examples from Birds, Peace, and Wealth, particular attention being paid to the connotative, aggressive, and interpersonal katagelan. But ‘scholars have wondered where and how laughter fits into the world of Menander’s comedy’; as Arnott (1997) observed, he evoked ‘smiles rather than laughter ‘. Roman Laughter is so serious a subject that a series of the Sather Classical Lectures was devoted to it: it has even been doubted if the Romans had a word for ‘smile’. L. gives examples of the sound of laughter written into the script of a play: it is the ‘fictional and conventional sound of a laugh, hahahae’: mainly in Terence, but also occasionally in Plautus, with Pseudolus receiving detailed attention via its ‘deliberate occlusion of spectatorial laughter’. L. concludes by suggesting that the conspicuous lack of laughter in the ancient comedies is a result of the use of masks: ‘ha ha hae was a means to show a character’s personality, not a cue for the audience to laugh’. (It was news to the reviewer that there was a 5th C AD Roman comedy Querolus, in which ‘nine times a character laughs out loud, and this equals the number of laughs in all the plays of Plautus and Terence taken together’).
The final chapter, Ethics, has two contributors: Valeria Cinaglia for Greek Comedy, and Serena S. Witzke for Roman Comedy. C. finds a delicate ethical balance between the interests of the individual and those of the community, household and city to be a recurrent theme in Aristophanes (Strepsiades and Pheidippides in Clouds provide the example); by contrast, Menander’s Smikrines in Aspis is presented as a different example of the dangers of self-concern and isolation, which, thanks to his greed and self-centredness ‘pose a danger to his community of philoi’. But can the figures in the plays develop ethical reasoning and progress in their ethical understanding? The examples chosen are Wasps and, again, Dyskolos; C. sees Philokleon in Wasps as failing to advance in ethical understanding—unlike Knemon’s conversion in Dyskolos. Menander’s plays seem to have an ethical focus that differs from Aristophanic comedy, with its extravagant characters and often ludicrous behaviour.
In Rome, Plautus took his plots from New Comedy, but he beefed them up by his introduction—as E. Fraenkel showed in his Plautinisches im Plautus (English translation, 2007)—of specifically Plautine elements, notably an enhanced role for slaves, who were not troubled by questions of ethical advancement. W. shows that Terence rejected the verbal and slapstick comedy of his predecessor, and goes on to consider slavery, abuse, and torture, as well as sex, labour, and trafficking: we have already noted that Terence may well have started life as a slave. In the typical plot, a youthful Lothario will have encountered and had sex (consensual or not) with a girl of dubious status—possibly a prostitute—at some kind of Festival. He will have abandoned her, but before the end of the play, he will have realised that he loves her and—financial problems all sorted out—will marry her. The ‘most egregious rape’ of a citizen girl occurs in Terence’s Eunuchus. The rapist, Chaerea, unaware of Pamphila’s status, but relying on his wealth and social position, and dressed as a eunuch to gain access, raped Pamphila, later saying that he believed the girl to be his conserva: he claimed not citizen privilege but masculine privilege—the right of men to possess the bodies of vulnerable women. He then brags about the crime, while Pamphila, we learn, had tried to fight off her aggressor. Terence has ‘borrowed Menander’s plot, but not his tone’, and in so doing he signals to the audience the wrongness of the events, attitudes and traditions which he depicts. W. concludes by showing how the playwrights highlight the moral and ethical failings of Roman society, via perspective that ‘differs from the normative masculine, privileged, freeborn and elite view of the ancient Roman world’. (Rape was not a crime as we understand the word—the rape of a freeborn woman at Athens (cf. Lysias 1) would be regarded as a threat to the bloodline, and vengeance would be taken not by the polis but by the woman’s relations. When a man was executed after raping a woman at the Eleusinian Mysteries, it was the setting of the deed, not its enaction, that led to his death.)
This is an unpretentious and inexpensive book which packs a lot into its 174 pages plus 24 pages of end-notes (a substantial Bibliography is also included); as noted, there is the occasional inconsistency and a good deal of repetition (those phalli especially would have benefited from some editorial pruning), but as a wide-ranging and scholarly account of an important subject it can be welcomed: but bearing in mind that it is a cultural history, it is a pity that room was not found for consideration of whether or not women could be present at some (if not all) performances. As for our ever having more of Menander than one (virtually) full play, and a large part of another (The Woman from Samos), we must pin our hopes, as ever, on the rubbish dumps of the Fayyum.
Colin Leach