ANCIENT GREEK COMEDY The first known comedies were performed at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens in 487–486 BCE, perhaps as a cultural celebration and self-affirmation after the Athenian victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE (the theatrical competitions at the festival had started with tragedy, probably in 501 BCE). Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided into three periods or styles; Old Comedy (487–486 to 404 BCE), Middle Comedy (403 BCE to ca. 321 BCE), and New Comedy (from 321 BCE, reaching its peak in the mid-3rd century BCE). Nine complete old comedies and two middle comedies by one playwright, Aristophanes, survive; and one complete new comedy, and substantial fragments of seven more, survive—all of them written by Menander. In addition, there are fragments of lost plays both by these two playwrights and by their predecessors and contemporaries. Comedy at the Festivals of Dionysus Comedies were performed at Athens at two festivals of the god Dionysus: the winter festival of the Lenaea (January) and the Great Dionysia held at the start of the sailing season in March, which attracted visitors from elsewhere in the Greek world. Dionysus was the god of ekstasis—literally, “standing outside yourself”—an elevated state which could be attained by ritual, by the consumption of alcohol, and most importantly by either taking part in, or spectating at, an intense theatrical performance. His festivals also affirmed the ideology of the democracy through commemorations and displays before the plays began, which were designed to enhance civic pride and celebrate the city’s achievements. At the festivals during the period of free democracy when old comedies were being written and performed, there was freedom of speech for both comic and tragic dramatists—though one of Aristophanes’s principal targets, the leading politician Cleon, attempted without success to prosecute Aristophanes in the courts for the satire and abuse heaped on him in Acharnians (425 BCE) and especially Knights (424 BCE). This was because the festival performances were held in a theater over a kilometer away from the centers of Athenian political and legal life and during a public holiday. These two factors enabled the playwrights to see the burning issues of Athenian life from a distance, literally and metaphorically detached from the cutand-thrust of daily politics and judicial proceedings in the Assembly and the law courts. Aristophanes tells us in Frogs that he sees it not merely as the right, but as the duty of tragic and comic poets, to “teach what’s right” (Trans. 2010, 205); and if his surviving output is characteristic, Old Comedy was a remarkable blend of a wide range of types of Thalia, one of the nine Greek muses, in an image from the 2nd century CE. She presided over comedy and idyllic poetry. Source: National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona in Spain; Wikimedia Commons. 32 Ancient Greek Comedy humor with outspoken comment on serious political and social issues. Performance Conditions Like tragedies, comedies were presented by a number of playwrights (this number varied between three and five), competing for a prize. The actors performed in a rectangular orchēstra around 20 meters in length on each side; on three of these sides, it was surrounded by spectators whose seats rose steeply up the hillside in a natural amphitheater. On the fourth, the back side of the orchēstra was a long, low building called the skēnē, with a pair of doors opening onto the back of the playing space, and several windows. (By the time of New Comedy there were three doors or sets of doors in the front of the skēnē). The actors used this building to change masks and costumes, since between three and five actors played all the speaking roles—apart from the chorus. There were also “dumb masks”—silent extras. The chorus of 24 played a collective character, often in comedy a fantastic one—for example wasps in Aristophanes’s play of that name (422 BCE), who symbolized vividly by their yellow- and blackstriped costumes and their stings, the Athenian jurors’ love of a guilty verdict; or birds, in the fantasy play set in Cloudcuckooland (414 BCE), the kingdom of the birds. In Birds, the dialogue makes plain that Aristophanes’s sponsor spared no expense on elaborate costumes, as each of the 24 chorus members plays a different identifiable bird. By the time of the New Comedy, the chorus had declined in importance; in Old Comedy, their reactions in each scene and the sharp political and social commentary in their parabasis (the audience address often placed at the midpoint) were a very important part of the plays. But in Menander, whose New Comedy wholly lacks the barbed sociopolitical commentary of Aristophanes, the chorus does not play a specific character in dialogue with the solo actors; and the choral odes of Old Comedy, which were specifically written for each scene of each individual play, have been replaced simply by moments where a “choral interlude” is specified without being written out. Presumably, the director chose an appropriate song for each interlude, which might even have been originally used previously in another play. All of the actors were male; they wore padded costumes and full head-covering “faces” (the Greek word prosōpon does not imply concealment, as does the modern word mask), about two to two-and-a-half times life size. The origins of the mask are much disputed; what is not in dispute is that when plays were performed before up to 17,000 people in the Theatre of Dionysus, these larger-than-life sized “faces” were essential to convey basic information about the gender and age of each character to audience members who might be seated up to 100 meters away from the action. In Old Comedy, there were also portrait masks, representing (with appropriate caricature) named individuals who were being satirized in person in the plays. By the time of the New Comedy, a wider variety of masks had been developed to represent stock characters, such as the ardent young lover, the cunning slave, the grumpy old man, and the beautiful young woman who was often the object of the young lover’s thwarted but eventually triumphant affections. In Old Comedy, actors playing the parts of males wore a short chitōn, a costume extending only to midthigh; under it they wore a large artificial leather penis or phallus, in keeping with the humor of these plays, which is often bawdy and occasionally quite obscene. It would appear that at some time during the evolution toward the more gentle style of New Comedy, which is wholly without obscenity, the phallus disappeared from use. Old Comedy Old Comedies were based either on contemporary settings with bizarre twists or on send-ups of mythological situations. Though the extant titles and fragments suggest that the second of these types was quite common, it happens that the nine surviving Old Comedies by Aristophanes all conform to the first model. In each of them, the playwright invents a fantasy-idea, which though unattainable in real life is treated in the comedy as if it were perfectly achievable, and the hero or heroine sets out on a quest to achieve it. From the first play to the last, Aristophanes’s surviving plays thrive on the excellence of these fantasy-ideas, which provide not so much a coherent plot in any normal sense of that word as a set of pegs on which humorous episodes may be hung. For example in Acharnians the hero, fed up with the belligerence and corruption of the leading Athenians, decides to make a private peace with Sparta, and in the second half of the play he fends off assorted freeloaders who attempt to profit from his peace; his happiness is contrasted Ancient Greek Comedy 33 with the misery of the Athenian general Lamachos. In Peace the hero, Trygaios, flies up to heaven on a giant dung beetle (mounted on the crane which was by then part of the stage machinery) to confront Zeus and excavate the goddess Peace from the cave in which War has buried her. He returns to earth with two charming girls, Harvest and Festival; he marries the first and gives the second to the Council of Athens. In the justly famous Lysistrata (411 BCE), the heroine persuades the other wives of Athens, and representatives from the enemy states of Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth, to abstain from sex until their husbands make peace. In the second half of the play, as the sex strike starts to make an impact, Aristophanes has great fun with assorted frustrated males entering with giant erect phalluses protruding under their chitōns; not surprisingly, Lysistrata is then able to enforce peace between the warring states, and the play concludes with a kōmos or scene of revelry; the men receive their wives back and they dance together to a Spartan song, symbolizing a reconciliation after 20 years of almost continuous warfare (everyone in the audience knew too well that this reconciliation was unlikely in real life). In the last surviving Old Comedy, Frogs (405 BCE), Dionysus himself, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, despairs of the quality of the poets who are still alive and presenting tragedies at his festival; he embarks on a quest down to Hades to bring back Euripides. Much of the humor of the first half of this play—the journey to Hades—depends on the comic interaction between Dionysus, who is here presented not as the aweinspiring power he is in tragedy, but as a fat, cowardly, lecherous, and none-too-intelligent buffoon, and his witty and ingenious slave Xanthias; the two alternate between “straight man” and “gag man” effortlessly. (Aristophanes must have had a great comic duo of actors at his disposal that year.) In the second half, there is a contest between Aeschylus, the long-dead grand old man of tragedy who is made to symbolize the upright, courageous Athens of the wars against Persia early in the 5th century BCE, and Euripides, who is made responsible for the moral decay that Aristophanes diagnoses in contemporary Athens. Euripides loses and Aeschylus goes back with Dionysus to save the city. The play includes a remarkable parabasis, a powerful plea for reconciliation between the bitterly divided factions at Athens, and indeed it not only won the first prize but was also revived the year after its first performance (an unparalleled honor for a comedy) because its message was so topical and pertinent. One month after the revival, Athens was conquered by Sparta, and the vigorous, independent, and highly participatory democracy that had nurtured this remarkable art form was brought to an end. Middle Comedy Our only two surviving examples of this style are by Aristophanes. In Assemblywomen (392 BCE) and Wealth (388 BCE), it is as if much of the life has been taken out of Aristophanes’s writing, as well as out of the democracy, with the defeat of Athens in 404 BCE. Assemblywomen involves an infiltration of the Assembly by women disguised as men, who get the Athenians to hand power over to them. They then establish a communist state in which everything is shared equally among all; in one of the best scenes, a young man is forced to sleep with three ugly old hags before he is allowed to make love to the girl of his dreams. But elsewhere, the fantasy-idea is pursued with much less vividness and effectiveness than in the play with which Assemblywomen must inevitably be compared, Lysistrata. Wealth is a gentle satire of human greed; the god Wealth receives his sight back and distributes wealth only to good people, instead of to scoundrels as he had done when he was blind. In both plays, the sharp social and political commentary of Aristophanes’s wartime Old Comedies has disappeared; there are no real-life Athenians in the cast of characters, though Assemblywomen has frequent humorous references to actual citizens—members of Aristophanes’s audience. The importance of the chorus has also been diminished; there is no parabasis in either play, and in several places where there should be a purposewritten choral song, there is simply a mark “song by the chorus.” Middle Comedy is the beginning of a transition toward New Comedy. Puns, bawdy, lazzi, and the other comic devices that are characteristic of Old Comedy are already less prominent in Aristophanes’s two surviving late works than in Old Comedy; in the New Comedy, they were to disappear altogether. It would appear from the fragments that some political comedy was still practiced, for example by Eubulus and Mnesimachus; and that many plays were either burlesques of a myth or parodies of a tragedian’s version of a myth. But the gentle mocking of contemporary manners in 34 Ancient Greek Comedy ordinary daily-life situations, which became dominant in New Comedy, also emerged in the Middle Comedy period. New Comedy In New Comedy, the chorus no longer plays any part in the action; it simply supplies choral interludes between the five acts. Realistic, often complex plots, realistic (though stereotyped) characters, and gently humorous situations replace the predominant, grand fantasy-idea, outrageously larger-than-life characters and robust humor of Old Comedy. Because of the conquest of Greece by the Macedonians, and the imposition of rulers chosen by them, there was now almost no political comedy. Only one author of New Comedy survives, Menander—and only in papyrus fragments. But the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence take themes, and often whole plots, from New Comedy; and the one play by Menander which survives complete (The Bad-Tempered Man), and the substantial fragments of seven others, confirm the impression that we gain from the Latin adaptations. The other two leading practitioners were Diphilus and Philemon—who was actually more successful in competition than his contemporary Menander—who was not recognized as the leading New Comedy playwright until after his death. Both survive only in short fragments. New Comedy laid the foundations for the mainstream of comedy, both in ancient Rome and subsequently in the whole of Europe from the Renaissance to the present day. For example, Shakespeare’s early comedies are much indebted to Plautus and Terence, and therefore through them to New Comedy; Molière’s comedies would have been very different without his use of devices from New Comedy; and Oscar Wilde exploits the conventions and themes of New Comedy to brilliant effect. The characters in New Comedy are realistic, fictional individuals—ordinary Athenians—caught up in complex circumstances, frequently generated by rape, seduction, or the separation of infants from their parents. The complex plots often create scenes involving mistaken identity or ironic situations in which a character onstage knows less than the audience, and misunderstandings—sometimes severe— develop between characters. It is no surprise that the goddesses Misapprehension and Chance speak the prologues of Menander’s The Shorn Girl and The Shield; they may be said to preside over the course of the plots of the surviving plays. Scenes are often generated by social tensions— especially between rich and poor, fathers and sons, townsmen and country folk, and free men and women and slaves; and heterosexual love, triumphing eventually over obstacles, frequently plays a prominent part. There were recurrent stock characters (including plotting slaves, vain and abusive cooks, and boastful parasites) and stock situations; Menander once ingeniously arranged, in The Shorn Girl, for the recognition of long-lost children to coincide with the removal of obstacles between lovers, so the play ends in celebration both of a recognition and of a forthcoming wedding. A similar dénouement is achieved in The Girl from Samos. Unlike Old Comedy, New Comedy only rarely referred to contemporary political issues, almost never made jokes that would only be appreciated by one Athenian audience in one particular year (there is however a reference to two audience members in The Girl from Samos), and never (as far as we know) introduced caricatures of real individuals from the audience. In consequence, it provided an attractive export industry; travelling companies toured New Comedy throughout the Greek-speaking world. And this kind of comedy possesses the lasting capacity to appeal to a wide audience, since it gently mocks universal features of human nature. As a result, New Comedies could be—and were—readily adapted for their own purposes by subsequent playwrights. The absence of slavery from the Elizabethan world, for example, gave Shakespeare no problem when he adapted The Comedy of Errors from Plautus’s The Brothers Menaechmus; that play was itself adapted from a lost New (or possibly Middle) Comedy that had originated the fundamental idea of mistaken identity between identical twins. Twins separated in infancy, this time of opposite sexes, are also central to Menander’s The Shorn Girl; and this second device was brilliantly reused (and parodied) by Joe Orton, over two millennia later, in What the Butler Saw (1969). Michael Ewans