Comedy

This subject enables you to read works by all the surviving comic writers of antiquity, and to survey the development of this genre from the exuberant comic fantasy of ‘Old’ Comedy, as composed in the fifth century by Aristophanes, through the elegant sophistication of the ‘New’ comedy of Menander at the end of the fourth, to the Latin plays of his imitators,  Plautus and Terence (c. 210-160 B.C.). The plays of Aristophanes on the syllabus display the variety of his output, and show him pointing the way towards later developments in one of his last surviving plays, Ecclesiazusae. The plays of Menander had been lost since late antiquity, but during the twentieth century substantial portions of several plays by Menander were rediscovered (including one complete play, Dyscolus, first published in 1959). We can now see why he was so admired in antiquity for the ‘realism’ of his drama, with its concentration on family relationships and love. Plautus and Terence adapted plays by Menander and his contemporaries; theirs are the earliest complete works of Latin literature that survive. Widely read and imitated for many centuries, they have played a key role in the history of European culture, above all in the history of the theatre. They were much more than translators, and it is now possible to see more clearly their relation to their Greek models, and their own originality.

The texts are studied in much the same way as any other dramatic texts; questions discussed include techniques of humour (irony, surprise, slapstick, jokes, puns, parody etc.), stagecraft, characterisation, use of stock characters, language, plot construction, the relationship of comedy to tragedy, the role of moralising and of philosophy, and the relationship of the theatre to society. The distinctive qualities of each author are examined.

For introductions to different aspects, see K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (London 1972); D.M. MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens (Oxford 1995) R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge 1985).