Aristotelian Comedy

This paper examines the evidence for Aristotle's theory of comedy in the Poetics and other works. Since he defines comedy in terms of its 'inferior' characters, he cannot have objected in principle to ethical impropriety, obscenity and personal abuse in comedy; comedy cannot be judged by the ethical standards appropriate in everyday life. His account of the historical development of comedy is discussed, together with the application of the concept of poetic universality to comedy. It is argued that Aristotelian theory is consistent with Aristophanic practice. My aim in this paper is to reconsider a number of aspects of Aristotle’s thinking on comedy in the light of the acknowledged Aristotelian corpus. I shall have nothing to say about the Tractatus Coislinianus, an obscure and contentious little document which must (despite Janko’s energetic attempt to restore its credit) remain an inappropriate starting-point for discussion. There is still, I believe, something to be learnt from the extant works

Transposing Aristophanes: the theory and practice of translating Aristophanic lyric

The reception of Aristophanes has gained extraordinary momentum as a topic of academic interest in the last few years. Contributions range from Gonda Van Steen's ground-breaking Venom in Verse. Aristophanes in Modern Greece to Hall and Wrigley's Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007, which contains contributions from a wide range of scholars and writers, a number of whom have had experience of staging Aristophanes' plays as live theatre. In Found in Translation, J. Michael Walton has also made strides towards marrying the theory of translation to the practice of translating Aristophanes (something I have myself also sought to do in print). And with the history of Aristophanic translation, adaptation, and staging being rapidly pieced together (in the English-speaking world at least, where Hall, Steggle, Halliwell, Sowerby, Walsh, and Walton, for example, have all made their own contributions), much of the groundwork has been laid for a study such as is attempted in this article. Here I aim to take a broad look across a range of translations in order to see how one particular text type within Aristophanic drama has been approached by translators, namely Aristophanes' lyric passages. The aim of this study will be to give both an insight into the numerous considerations that translators take into account when translating Aristophanic lyric and an impression of the range of end products that have emerged over the last two hundred years

Political Comedy in Aristophanes

This paper argues that Aristophanic comedy, although it takes contemporary political life as its point of departure, is not political in the sense of aiming to influence politics outside the theatre. Brief discussions of Clouds, Knights, Lysistrata and Acharnians are used to cast initial doubt on interpretations that attribute serious intent to Aristophanes. It is then argued that Aristophanes’ treatment of the poet’s role as adviser, abuse of the audience and of individuals, the themes of rich and poor and the power of the dêmos, support this conclusion. In general, the assumptions of Aristophanes’ comedy are too closely attuned to those of the majority of his audience to warrant inferences about Aristophanes’ own political attitudes. This conclusion throws light on the democracy’s exercise of control over the theatre. An appendix argues that the main unifying element in Aristophanic comedy is not theme, but plot, and that Aristophanes took more care over coherence of plot-structure than is sometimes recognised

John Tzetzes and the blemish examiners : a Byzantine teacher on schedography, everyday language and writerly disposition

The paper focuses on John Tzetzes (ca. 1110-after 1166), a well-known teacher and scholar of the Komnenian era, with the aim of examining two issues. On the one hand, Tzetzes’ opinions about the teaching practice of schedography are collected and analysed, while, on the other, his opinions about everyday language and its possible uses are scrutinised through a close reading of many different passages from his works. In particular, the long epilogue of his Theogony (with its three parts united for the first time on the printed page), written for the sebastokratorissa Eirene around the middle of the Twelfth Century, is discussed in detail as a unique source of debate on what is the appropriate way of addressing and writing for audiences of different social and educational status. The analysis and interpretation of the texts demonstrates that the “idiosyncratic” personality Tzetzes shows in his writings is not a purely personal matter, but is strongly related to the competitive environment of the capital and to Tzetzes’ “middle-class” position in the Constantinopolitan society. The paper also demonstrates that the boundaries of usage between “learned” and “colloquial” discourse are quite fluid and this fluidity can be used in certain contexts to the advantage of a teacher in promoting his status and financial success, or to his disadvantage if he has to defend his choices against a rival. The paper ends with a broader analysis of the term oijkonomiva used by Tzetzes in the Theogony epilogue and of the meaning of this term within the system of literary patronage under the Komnenoi

The Work of Tragic Productions: Towards a New History of Drama as Labor Culture

Preliminary analysis of the representation of laborers in Greek tragedy and satyr drama

Comedy in Plutarch’s <i>Parallel Lives</i>

Plutarch quotes Attic comedy as evidence, but he also uses both invective and stereotypes from comedy in order to illustrate and judge the character of his protagonists, as seen in the Lives of Demetrius, Antony, Pericles, and Fabius Maximus