BiblioVault - Books about Greek drama (Comedy)

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy

Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon

Mario Telò

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (active 427–386 BCE) is often portrayed as the poet who brought stability, discipline, and sophistication to the rowdy theatrical genre of Old Comedy. In this groundbreaking book, situated within the affective turn in the humanities, Mario Telò explores a vital yet understudied question: how did this view of Aristophanes arise, and why did his popularity eventually eclipse that of his rivals?

Telò boldly traces Aristophanes’s rise, ironically, to the defeat of his play Clouds at the Great Dionysia of 423 BCE. Close readings of his revised Clouds and other works, such as Wasps, uncover references to the earlier Clouds, presented by Aristophanes as his failed attempt to heal the audience, who are reflected in the plays as a kind of dysfunctional father. In this proto-canonical narrative of failure, grounded in the distinctive feelings of different comic modes, Aristophanic comedy becomes cast as a prestigious object, a soft, protective cloak meant to shield viewers from the debilitating effects of competitors’ comedies and restore a sense of paternal responsibility and authority. Associations between afflicted fathers and healing sons, between audience and poet, are shown to be at the center of the discourse that has shaped Aristophanes’s canonical dominance ever since.

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The Court of Comedy

Wilfred E. Major

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

The Court of Comedy: Aristophanes, Rhetoric, and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens, by Wilfred E. Major, analyzes how writers of comedy in Classical Greece satirized the emerging art of rhetoric and its role in political life. In the fifth century BCE, the development of rhetoric proceeded hand in hand with the growth of democracy both on Sicily and at Athens. In turn, comic playwrights in Athens, most notably Aristophanes, lampooned oratory as part of their commentary on the successes and failures of the young democracy.

This innovative study is the first book to survey all the surviving comedy from the fifth century BCE on these important topics. The evidence reveals that Greek comedy provides a revealing commentary on the incipient craft of rhetoric before its formal conventions were stabilized. Furthermore, Aristophanes’ depiction of rhetoric and of Athenian democratic institutions indicates that he fundamentally supports the Athenian democracy and not, as is often argued, oligarchic opposition to it.

These conclusions confirm recent work that reinterprets the early development of rhetoric in Classical Greece and offer fresh perspectives on the debate over the role of comedy in early Greek democracy. Throughout, Major capitalizes on recent progress in understanding of the performance dynamics of Classical Greek theater.

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Democratic Swarms

Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People

Page duBois

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics.

With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy.

Ancient comedy has been underplayed in the study of Greek drama. Yet, with the irrepressible energy of the comic swarm, it provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. Using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, duBois augments tragic thought with the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy, and she connects the lively anti-authoritarianism of the ancient comic chorus with the social justice movements of today.

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Fragments of Old Comedy, Volume I

Alcaeus to Diocles

Ian C. Storey

Harvard University Press, 2011

Laughter in stitches.

The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485 – ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. This new Loeb edition, the most extensive selection of the fragments available in English, presents the work of more than fifty-five poets, including Cratinus and Eupolis, the other members (along with Aristophanes) of the canonical Old Comic triad.

For each poet and play there is an introduction, and for many there are brief notes and recent bibliography. Also included are a selection of ancient testimonia to Old Comedy, nearly one hundred unattributed fragments (both book and papyri), and descriptions of thirty vase paintings illustrating Old Comic scenes. The texts are based on the monumental edition of Kassel and Austin, updated to reflect the latest scholarship. The complete Loeb Fragments of Old Comedy is in three volumes.

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Fragments of Old Comedy, Volume II

Diopeithes to Pherecrates

Ian C. Storey

Harvard University Press, 2011

Laughter in stitches.

The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485 – ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. This new Loeb edition, the most extensive selection of the fragments available in English, presents the work of more than fifty-five poets, including Cratinus and Eupolis, the other members (along with Aristophanes) of the canonical Old Comic triad.

For each poet and play there is an introduction, and for many there are brief notes and recent bibliography. Also included are a selection of ancient testimonia to Old Comedy, nearly one hundred unattributed fragments (both book and papyri), and descriptions of thirty vase paintings illustrating Old Comic scenes. The texts are based on the monumental edition of Kassel and Austin, updated to reflect the latest scholarship. The complete Loeb Fragments of Old Comedy is in three volumes.

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Fragments of Old Comedy, Volume III

Philonicus to Xenophon. Adespota

Ian C. Storey

Harvard University Press, 2011

Laughter in stitches.

The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485 – ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. This new Loeb edition, the most extensive selection of the fragments available in English, presents the work of more than fifty-five poets, including Cratinus and Eupolis, the other members (along with Aristophanes) of the canonical Old Comic triad.

For each poet and play there is an introduction, and for many there are brief notes and recent bibliography. Also included are a selection of ancient testimonia to Old Comedy, nearly one hundred unattributed fragments (both book and papyri), and descriptions of thirty vase paintings illustrating Old Comic scenes. The texts are based on the monumental edition of Kassel and Austin, updated to reflect the latest scholarship. The complete Loeb Fragments of Old Comedy is in three volumes.

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Pericles on Stage

Political Comedy in Aristophanes' Early Plays

By Michael Vickers

University of Texas Press, 1996

Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds.

In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact commented on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles and his ward Alcibiades.

According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes—far from being nonpolitical—actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events that followed Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.

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Plato and Aristophanes

Comedy, Politics, and the Pursuit of a Just Life

Marina Marren

Northwestern University Press, 2022

In Plato and Aristophanes, Marina Marren contends that our search for communal justice must start with self-examination. The realization that there are things that we cannot know about ourselves unless we become the subject of a joke is integral to such self-scrutiny. Jokes provide a new perspective on our politics and ethics; they are essential to our civic self-awareness.

Marren makes this case by delving into Plato’s Republic, a foundational work of political philosophy. While the Republic straightforwardly condemns the decadence and greed of a tyrant, Plato’s attack on political idealism is both solemn and comedic. In fact, Plato draws on the same comedic stock and tropes as do Aristophanes’s plays. Marren’s book strikes up an innovative conversation between three works by Aristophanes—Assembly Women, Knights, and Birds—and Plato’s philosophy, prompting important questions about individual convictions and one’s personal search for justice. These dialogic works offer critiques of tyranny that are by turns brilliant, scathing, and exuberant, making light of faults and ideals alike. Philosophical comedy exposes despotism in individuals as well as systems of government claiming to be just and good. This critique holds as much bite against contemporary injustices as it did at the time of Aristophanes and Plato.

An ingenious new work by an emerging scholar, Plato and Aristophanes shows that comedy—in tandem with philosophy and politics—is essential to self-examination. And without such examination, there is no hope for a just life.

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Ritual and Performativity

The Chorus in Old Comedy

Anton Bierl

Harvard University Press, 2009

In this groundbreaking study, Anton Bierl uses recent approaches in literary and cultural studies to investigate the chorus of Old Comedy. After an extensive theoretical introduction that also serves as a general introduction to the dramatic chorus from the comic vantage point, a close reading of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae shows that ritual is indeed present in both the micro- and macrostructure of Attic comedy, not as a fossilized remnant of the origins of the genre but as part of a still existing performative choral culture. The chorus members do play a role within the dramatic plot, but they simultaneously refer to their own performance in the here and now and to their function as participants in a ritual. Bierl's investigation also includes an unparalleled treatment of the phallic songs preserved by Semos.

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Socrates and Aristophanes

Leo Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In one of his last books, Socrates and Aristophanes, Leo Strauss's examines the confrontation between Socrates and Aristophanes in Aristophanes' comedies. Looking at eleven plays, Strauss shows that this confrontation is essentially one between poetry and philosophy, and that poetry emerges as an autonomous wisdom capable of rivaling philosophy.

"Strauss gives us an impressive addition to his life's work—the recovery of the Great Tradition in political philosophy. The problem the book proposes centers formally upon Socrates. As is typical of Strauss, he raises profound issues with great courage. . . . [He addresses] a problem that has been inherent in Western life ever since [Socrates'] execution: the tension between reason and religion. . . . Thus, we come to Aristophanes, the great comic poet, and his attack on Socrates in the play The Clouds. . . [Strauss] translates it into the basic problem of the relation between poetry and philosophy, and resolves this by an analysis of the function of comedy in the life of the city." —Stanley Parry, National Review

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