UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS
2011/12
Autumn Semester
Q84505
APPROACHES TO ANCIENT DRAMA
30 credits
Convener: Prof. A.H. Sommerstein
([email protected])
MODULE BOOKLET
2011/12
CONTENTS
I.
Module Aims, Content and Role
2
II.
Objectives
2
III.
Teaching and Study Methods
3
IV.
Schedule of Classes
4
V.
Assessment
4
VI.
Bibliography
6
Important Notes
Please note that the information contained in this booklet is provisional. In particular,
the dates and times of classes will be notified to you separately. It is your responsibility
to make sure that you are aware of these, and of any other changes that have to be
made, by regularly checking your email and consulting the noticeboards in the Classics
Department, Humanities Building.
This booklet does not repeat information given in the Department of Classics
Postgraduate Handbook (available online at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/).
Everything in this booklet , so far as it is relevant to this module, should be deemed to
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form part of this booklet, unless explicitly superseded below.
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I. MODULE AIMS, CONTENT AND ROLE
Q84505 is a one-semester 30-credit module which examines a series of key topics in the
study of ancient Greek drama, including among others: the structural analysis of drama in
its various genres; relationships between drama and myth, ritual, society, politics and
religion; the study of performance; the reconstruction of lost or fragmentary plays; the
transmission and criticism of dramatic texts; critical approaches in recent scholarship.
Its aim is to develop a critical understanding of major aspects of current Greek drama
studies, including areas of academic controversy. The module forms one-quarter of the
taught component of the MA course in Ancient Drama and its Reception. It is an
obligatory “key” module for students taking this course, but may also be taken by
students on other MA courses.
II. OBJECTIVES/LEARNING OUTCOMES
On successful completion of this module you should have developed knowledge and skills
in the following ways:
Knowledge and Understanding:
Knowledge and understanding of selected topics and issues in ancient drama
Knowledge and understanding of a range of methodologies and theoretical approaches
which can be deployed in relation to ancient drama in its historical context
An enhanced degree of expertise in dealing with the range of ancient dramatic texts and
responses to those texts
A broad awareness of how the academic discipline of Classics has evolved in recent
centuries
Intellectual Skills:
Ability to identify and evaluate key problems in the study and use of ancient drama
within an intellectual framework informed by current scholarship and to engage
with theoretical approaches
Ability to locate, select and evaluate critically at an advanced level a variety of ancient
texts and modern literature relevant to specific issues and problems
Ability to show initiative in approach to topics, with evidence of advanced critical and
original thinking
Ability to devise a research topic and select appropriate methodologies
Ability to reflect critically upon the discipline and develop an awareness of it as an
evolving entity
Professional Practical Skills:
Ability to articulate knowledge and critical awareness of chosen topics in ancient drama,
both orally and in written format
Ability to plan, research and write up a coherent piece of extended work Ability to
present written work to a high standard
Ability to make effective use of a range of bibliographic resources, both printed and
electronic
Transferable (key) skills:
Enhanced ability to communicate effectively in writing
Enhanced ability to communicate effectively orally, especially in formal presentations
Enhanced ability to work productively with others
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III. TEACHING AND STUDY METHODS
Teaching for the module will comprise 10 two-hour seminars, making a total of 20 contact
hours. These will be held in every teaching week of the Autumn Term except the
Consolidation Week (see Teaching Schedule below); the times and location of classes will
have been notified to you before the start of teaching via the online University timetable,
the Classics Department noticeboards, and printed timetables issued by the School of
History & Humanities Office.
Student presentations or reports will be a major feature of the teaching in this module,
and you will be expected to read around the topics in considerable depth in advance of the
seminars, whether you are making a presentation yourself or not. Some required reading
will normally be specified for each seminar. In general, each topic will be dealt with in the
second half of one class (to prepare and orient students for independent reading) and in
the first half of the next (when, normally, a report or reports on a previously specified
topic will be presented and discussed).
Details of presentation/report responsibilities will be settled and circulated as soon as
possible after the commencement of the semester. The first actual presentations will be
no earlier than the third week of teaching (October 17-21). Reports will not be directly
assessed.
You will not, we are sure, need reminding that seminar attendance is compulsory, and
that if you have to miss one for a good reason, it is your responsibility to inform the
Module Convener of this reason by e-mail as soon as possible – preferably before the
class in question. Persistent absenteeism will be penalised by awarding a mark of
0% for any remaining assessment on the module (including exams). Any student
who fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for absences will be asked for such an
explanation, and if one is not forthcoming, will be warned that the penalty will be
imposed unless matters improve. This request and warning will be sent to your
University e-mail. It is your responsibility to check your University e-mail
regularly.
You will also increase the benefit you get from this module by regularly attending research
workshops and similar events in the Department and elsewhere – especially those with a
bearing on Greek drama, such as the seminar series run by CADRE (the Centre for Ancient
Drama and its Reception). There are CADRE meetings on Wednesday 19 October (Prof.
C.W. Marshall, University of British Columbia: Sex Slaves in New Comedy) and Wednesday
23 November (Prof. Lorna Hardwick, Open University: Audiences across the Pond – oceans
apart or shared experiences?) These and other events will be publicized in the
Department, and the module convener will draw your attention to those which he
considers particularly relevant.
If you are experiencing any difficulties in this module – or if you want more information or
guidance about any matter connected with it – you should consult the module convener as
soon as possible, either at the end of a class or during his regular consultation hours
(which are posted on the door of his office – B48 on the middle floor of the Humanities
Building).
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IV.
SCHEDULE OF CLASSES
Note that there is no teaching during the Classics Department Consolidation Week (7-11
November), which should be used for concentrated initial research on your agreed essay
subject.
Week
First half (normally
retrospective)
Second half (normally
prospective)
2 (3-7 Oct)
(Introduction to the module)
Structural patterns in tragedy
3 (10-14 Oct)
Structural patterns in comedy
Satyr-drama
4 (17-21 Oct)
Satyr-drama
Drama and myth
5 (24-28 Oct)
Drama and myth
Drama as a visual art
6 (31 Oct – 4 Nov)
Drama as a visual art
The reconstruction of lost or
fragmentary plays
7 (7-11 Nov)
No class – Classics Department Consolidation Week
8 (14-18 Nov)
The reconstruction of lost or
fragmentary plays
Drama and gender
9 (21-25 Nov)
Drama and gender
Drama and politics
10 (28 Nov – 2 Dec)
Drama and politics
Drama and religion
11 (5-9 Dec)
Drama and religion
Critical methodologies
12 (12-16 Dec)
Critical methodologies
(Review)
V. ASSESSMENT
Assessment will be by one essay of about 6000 words.
The essay subject will be chosen by each student in consultation with the convener, not
later than 4 November (no essay topic of your own choice will be valid for
assessment purposes without the convener's prior approval). It must relate to
one of the ten unbracketed topics listed in the above Teaching Schedule, and must make
detailed use of the evidence of one or more specific plays. Examples (they are only
examples!) of possible topics would be:
Problems in the reconstruction of Euripides' Telephus
Does Euripides' Alcestis have satyric features?
Is an understanding of fifth-century Dionysiac mystery-cults necessary to
a satisfactory understanding of Euripides‟ Bacchae?
In the preparation of your essay you are encouraged to incorporate relevant material
from your seminar reports and (with due acknowledgement) from the presentations, or
contributions to discussion, of other students. It is quite acceptable to choose for your
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essay subject a topic on which you reported in a seminar, or one growing out of it,
provided that it meets the requirements stated above.
Your essay must be submitted, in accordance with the rules governing Classics
coursework submissions, by 12 noon on Tuesday 17 January. Any essay submitted
after this time will incur a 5% lateness penalty. An essay submitted after 12 noon on the
following day will incur a 10% lateness penalty, and so on. See further the relevant
sections of the Postgraduate Handbook, and any supplementary instructions about
coursework submission that are issued at the start of the semester.
You must provide a word-count for your essay; your word processor will have a tool for
this purpose. When calculating the word-count, you should include footnotes (or
endnotes as the case may be), but exclude the title and bibliography. If there is no
word-count on your cover-sheet, the marker will estimate the word-count of your essay,
and will penalise the essay if it appears to be overlength.
The word-limit on the essay is 6000 words. A variation of 5% in either direction (i.e.
ranging from 5700 to 6300 words) is acceptable. A variation of more than 5% is
unacceptable: an essay of less then 5700 words is unlikely to cover the topic adequately,
and an essay of more than 6300 words, however good it is, will be penalised by 5%
for excessive length.
Guidance on the preparation of coursework, and the criteria used for marking it, will be
found in the Postgraduate Handbook. If you have fulfilled the module objectives set out
in section II above, you will have written an essay showing, at the least, most of the
qualities described in the Handbook as typical of an essay reaching the MA merit
standard.
You will get feedback on your written coursework through a Coursework Report Form,
which will be sent to you no later than Tuesday 31 January. You should take careful note
of these comments, which are designed principally to help you to improve further your
writing, argumentative and presentational skills.
WARNING
Coursework must be wholly your own work. You must not quote or paraphrase
the words of published authors without acknowledgement. Failure to
acknowledge your sources may lead to your being suspected of plagiarism, that
is, the academic offence of seeking an unfair advantage by using other people's
work as though it were your own. Your coursework coversheet will include a
declaration, which you must sign, stating that the work is your own and that you
have acknowledged all material taken from other sources.
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VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY
This reading list is extremely selective1, and you should aim to expand it as your reading
itself leads you, via references, to fresh material. In general, books rather than articles
are listed; and there is no listing of editions or translations of, or commentaries on,
individual plays or collected works (except fragments).
1(a). General
In many respects the best place to start is still P.E. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox ed. The
Cambridge History of Classical Literature vol. 1 (1985), which has sections on the origins
of tragedy, on tragedy in performance, on the major and minor tragic dramatists, on
satyr-play, and on comedy, with bibliographies on each genre and each author (up to
about 1982). These sections have also been published as a separate paperback entitled
Greek Drama (1989).
A wide range of translated ancient texts bearing on all aspects of drama is collected by
E.G. Csapo and W.J. Slater in The Context of Ancient Drama (1994).
The standard online bibliographical guides to publications on the ancient world are
L'Année Philologique (APh) and the bibliographical database maintained in association
with the periodical Gnomon. As of September 2011, the online version of APh was
complete to the end of 2009 (with “interim records” for some 2010 items); from the
University's eLibrary Gateway, click on the “Find Database” tab (if not already
foregrounded), choose Classics from the Arts & Humanities menu, and when the Classics
page comes up, choose "Annee Philologique" from the alphabetical list of resources.
Once in APh you can search under a wide range of criteria, the most important being
"Modern Authors", "Ancient Authors and Texts", and “Full Text” (i.e. any word or words
in the entry)2. Entries for books include references to published reviews of the book;
entries for journal articles (and usually also those for chapters in multi-author volumes)
include brief abstracts of the article (in English, French, German, Spanish or Italian
according to the country in which the journal or volume was published).
For very recent material the best source is Gnomon Online, which however gives only
author, title and publication details, not abstracts (though it does often have separate
entries for book reviews). Go to http://www.gnomon.kueichstaett.de/Gnomon/en/Gnomon.html ; click on “Title Search”, then on “Suche”3, then
proceed as follows4:
1. Click the tab “Personen, Jahr, Titel”.
1
It also concentrates on works in English. For the advanced study of Classics (to doctoral level and
beyond) it is highly desirable to acquire a reading knowledge of French, German and Italian; of
publications in the field in the last half century, about 20% are in each of these languages, 30% in
English, and 10% in other languages (Spanish and Modern Greek being the most important of
these). You will find information in the Postgraduate Handbook on language learning facilities
available to postgraduates.
2
Further criteria can be found by clicking on “Advanced Search”, which also gives you the facility to
search on two criteria simultaneously and to add “filters” that select only items in a particular
language or those published between particular dates.
3
German for “search”; for some reason, the English version of the site goes no deeper than the
front page!
4
This procedure is necessary because the simple search facility will call up every item that includes
any one or more of the keywords you list!
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2. Under “Personen”, enter the author‟s surname.
3. Under “Suchworte”, enter one or more distinctive words from the title.
4. Make sure you have chosen the option “Felder der Suchmaske mit „und‟
verknüpfen” (“Link search fields with „and‟”)
5. Click “Start”.
Most significant books in the Classics field are reviewed (sometimes more than once!),
soon after they appear, in the electronic publication Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR),
which is accessible from the eLibrary Gateway via the “Find eJournal” tab. To find a
review (if there is one), click "Archives" on the BMCR home page, then "Index by Author
of Work", then look for the author and title.
On Euripides, special mention should be made of the excellent bibliographies found in
each volume of the Aris & Phillips series of editions; with each new volume the
bibliography is updated, and the latest will be found in the edition of Medea by Judith
Mossman (2011).
For Aristophanes a unique resource is the massive bibliography by Niklas Holzberg at
http://www.klassphil.uni-muenchen.de/worddokumente/aristoph.doc (current version
June 2008), with excellent analytical indexing (headings in German). I have tried to
supply an introductory bibliography for Aristophanes in my Aris & Phillips editions, most
recently in Wealth (2001); I can provide addenda to this on request. Similarly my 2008
Loeb edition of Aeschylus contains bibliographies for Aeschylus generally, for all the
extant plays and for many fragmentary ones; here too I can provide addenda.
Almost all general works in the field of Greek drama deal with tragedy or comedy
separately; two which cover both, at an introductory level, are A.H. Sommerstein, Greek
Drama and Dramatists (2002), and (with a rather fuller treatment) I.C. Storey and A.
Allan, A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama (2005).
On tragedy the most comprehensive book by a single author is A. Lesky, Greek Tragic
Poetry (Eng.tr. 1983); useful also is the smaller introductory text by R.S. Scodel, An
Introduction to Greek Tragedy (2010). N.S. Rabinowitz, Greek Tragedy (2008), has a
strong literary-theoretical orientation (see section 11 below). P.E. Easterling ed. The
Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997) was in its time the best introduction to
serious study of the subject; it is particularly valuable on tragedy's connections with
society, myth and religion, and on the "reception" of Greek tragedy in later antiquity and
in the modern world. It is now outclassed, however, by J. Gregory ed. A Companion to
Greek Tragedy (2005); there curiously also appeared at nearly the same time, from the
same publisher, R. Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy (2005) which, covering as it
has to the whole history of the genre, is less comprehensive on Greek tragedy, but
includes some good contributions. M.S. Silk ed. Tragedy and the Tragic (1996) offers a
wide variety of approaches to the problem of defining the concept of the tragic, and in
the process sheds light on many aspects of the genre. See also M. McDonald and J.M.
Walton ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (2007), though this
concentrates on performance- and society-related issues.
On comedy, fundamental now is G.W. Dobrov ed. Brill’s Companion to the Study of
Greek Comedy (2010), soon to be followed by M. Revermann ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Comedy (forthcoming). These volumes could only have been
created by teams; scarcely any individual writers – except for E.W. Handley in The
Cambridge History of Classical Literature (see above), the relatively elementary book by
F.H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (1977), and the survey of recent
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scholarship by N.J. Lowe, Comedy (2008) – have even tried to bridge the gap that
yawns in our surviving material between the "old" comedy of ca.486-385 BC and the
"new" comedy of ca.325 onwards. The best general book in English on old comedy is
probably now James Robson, Aristophanes: An Introduction (2009), though K.J. Dover,
Aristophanic Comedy (1972) remains invaluable and M.S. Silk, Aristophanes and the
Definition of Comedy (2000) is more sophisticated than either; F.D. Harvey and J.
Wilkins ed. The Rivals of Aristophanes (2000), despite its title, deals extensively with all
of old comedy, Aristophanes not excepted. On new comedy, see notably R.L. Hunter,
The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (1985). On the intervening period – aside from
W.G. Arnott‟s invaluable contribution to Brill’s Companion – we now have, at a rather
more advanced level, H.G. Nesselrath, Die attische Mittlere Komödie (1990), and
(concentrating on the early fourth century) G.W. Dobrov ed. Beyond Aristophanes:
Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy (1995); also worth consulting is E.G. Csapo,
“From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre transformation in Greek comedy”, in M. Depew
and D. Obbink ed. Matrices of Genre (2000).
1(b). Individual dramatists
There are chapters on Aeschylus (S. Saïd), Sophocles (R.S. Scodel) and Euripides (J.
Gregory) in Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy.
There has been no good comprehensive book on Aeschylus; A.H. Sommerstein,
Aeschylean Tragedy (2nd ed. 2010) was designed to fill this gap, but I express no view
on whether it has succeeded. R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Studies in Aeschylus (1983) is a
collection of extremely sensitive separate essays, but arguably the best study of
Aeschylus' dramatic technique is O.P. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) which
is nominally just about entrances and exits! Thirteen classic papers on Aeschylus
(mostly on individual plays), from 1960 to 1998, are now collected in M. Lloyd ed.
Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Aeschylus (2007).
On Sophocles, in contrast, there is a very wide selection, among which may be noted
R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (1980); C.P. Segal, Tragedy and
Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (1981) and Sophocles' Tragic World (1995);
and the difficult but rewarding work of K. Reinhardt, Sophocles (Eng.tr. 1979). Jacques
Jouanna, Sophocle (2007), is by far the most comprehensive treatment, although he is
sometimes unreliable in detail, and insufficiently critical of ancient sources for the poet‟s
life.
Euripides has in the past been less well supplied, perhaps because he has so many more
plays extant, but we now have D.J. Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides: Dramatic
Technique and Social Context (2010). Some of the best of Euripidean criticism over the
last quarter-century will be found in P. Burian ed. Directions in Euripidean Criticism
(1985), A.N. Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (1987), M.J. Cropp et al. ed.
Euripides and Tragic Drama in the Late Fifth Century (= Illinois Classical Studies 24/25
[1999-2000]), and J.R.C. Cousland and J.R. Hume ed. The Play of Texts and Fragments:
Essays in Honour of Martin Cropp (2009). J.M. Mossman ed. Oxford Readings in
Classical Studies: Euripides (2001) is an anthology of outstanding articles published
since 1960.
For Aristophanes, in addition to the books by Dover, Silk, and Robson noted in 1(a)
above, special notice is due to A.M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy
(1993) which concentrates on elements related to myth and religion; D.M. MacDowell,
Aristophanes and Athens (1995), comprehensive if a bit pedestrian; N.W. Slater,
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Spectator Politics: Metatheater and Performance in Aristophanes (2002); M. Revermann,
Comic Business (2006); and the conference volume edited by P. Thiercy and M. Menu,
Aristophane: la langue, la scène, la cité (1997). A short treatment of remarkable
breadth and judgement is N.J. Lowe, "Greek stagecraft and Aristophanes", in J.
Redmond ed. Themes in Drama 10: Farce (1988) 33-52. E. Segal ed. Oxford Readings
in Classical Studies: Aristophanes (1996) is an anthology of articles published (with one
exception) since 1967.
On Menander see N. Zagagi, The Comedy of Menander (1995); S.M. Goldberg, The
Making of Menander's Comedy (1980); D. Wiles, The Masks of Menander (1991) which
concentrates on masking and its implications for performance and characterization; and
A.E. Traill, Women and the Comic Plot in Menander (2008).
The series of Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique published by the Fondation Hardt brings
together, in each volume, contributions on a topic from seven to nine leading specialists
(with a record of the conference discussion on each paper). There have been volumes
on Ménandre (vol. 16 [1970]), Sophocle (vol. 29 [1983]), Aristophane (vol. 38 [1993]),
and Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental (vol. 55 [2009]); each chapter (and each
contribution to discussion) is normally in the language of the speaker.
2. Structural patterns in tragedy and comedy
On structural features of tragedy, there is no good comprehensive treatment in English,
but P.E. Easterling provides a very enlightening sketch in Easterling ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Tragedy ch.7. There are a number of studies of particular
structural elements, e.g., on choral songs, H. Parry, Lyric Poems of Greek Tragedy
(1978) and W.C. Scott, Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater (1984) and Musical Design
in Sophoclean Theater (1996); on formal debates, M. Lloyd, The Agon in Euripides
(1992) and the tragic section of E.T.E. Barker, Entering the Agon (2009); on messengerspeeches, I.J.F. de Jong, Narrative in Drama (1991) and J. Barrett, Staged Narrative:
Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy (2002); on prologues, D.G. Fitzpatrick,
Opening Strategies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Nottingham PhD thesis, 2001). Gregory ed.
A Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005) has chapters on tragic beginnings and endings
(D.H. Roberts), on lyric (L. Battezzato), on episodes (M.R. Halleran), and on music (P.J.
Wilson).
There is a good brief study of the structure of Old (and, even more briefly, New) Comedy
by Bernhard Zimmermann in Dobrov ed. Brill’s Companion 455-463. Three key
structural elements of Old Comedy are discussed by T. Gelzer, Der epirrhematische Agon
bei Aristophanes (1960), by G.M. Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal Choruses (1971) (see
also T.K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis
(1991)), and by B. Zimmermann, "The parodoi of the Aristophanic comedies", most
easily found in E. Segal ed. Oxford Readings in Aristophanes (1996) 182-193. The
formal structure of Greek New Comedy, as revealed by papyrus discoveries, proved to
be so simple that it has attracted little recent scholarly attention.
3. Satyr-drama
Until recently there was no reliable study of satyr-drama in English, and in many ways
the most valuable treatment was the introduction to R.A.S. Seaford's edition of
Euripides' Cyclops (1984). Now, however, we have G.W.M. Harrison ed. Satyr Drama:
Tragedy at Play (2005). See also P.E. Easterling in Easterling ed. The Cambridge
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Companion to Greek Tragedy 37-44; E.M. Hall, "Ithyphallic males behaving badly, or,
satyr drama as gendered tragic ending", in M. Wyke ed. Parchments of Gender:
Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity (1998) 13-37; M. Griffith, "Slaves of Dionysos:
satyrs, audience, and the ends of the Oresteia", Classical Antiquity 21 (2002) 195-258
(with very rich bibliography); B. Seidensticker, “The chorus of Greek satyrplay”, in E.G.
Csapo and M.C. Miller ed. Poetry, Theory, Praxis (2003) 100-121; P. Voelke, "Figure du
satyre et fonctions du drame satyrique", Métis 13 (1998 [2003]) 227-248 (copy
available from me); M. Griffith, "Sophocles' satyr-plays and the language of romance", in
I.J.F. de Jong and A. Rijksbaron ed. Sophocles and the Greek Language (2006) 51-72;
E.M. Hall, “Horny satyrs and tragic tetralogies”, in Hall, The Theatrical Cast of Athens
(2006); B. Seidensticker, “Dithyramb, comedy, and satyr-play”, in Gregory ed. A
Companion to Greek Tragedy; and E. Bakola, Cratinus and the Art of Comedy (2010)
ch.2, on the relationship between satyr-drama and comedy. Those who can read
German should consult what is now the standard work on the subject, R. Krumeich et al.
Das griechische Satyrspiel (1999).
4. Drama and myth
The fullest account of the myths known to the fifth-century dramatists and their
audiences, and the one that most stresses their unceasing changeability, is T.R. Gantz,
Early Greek Myths (1993). The development of particular myths before and during this
period is regularly explored in the introductions to editions of tragedies based on those
myths; see also A.J.N.W. Prag, The Oresteia: Iconographic and Narrative Traditions
(1985) and J.R. March, The Creative Poets (1987). I discuss and exemplify tragedy's
treatment of myth in "Tragedy and myth", in R. Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy
163-180, and in The Tangled Ways of Zeus (2010) ch.15; see also P. Burian, "Myth into
muthos", in Easterling ed. Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997); M.J.
Anderson, “Myth”, in Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005); and R.G.A.
Buxton, “Tragedy and Greek myth”, in R.D. Woodard ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Greek Mythology (2007) 166-189. There has been considerable interest in the study of
allusions, especially in comedy, to myths that the text does not explicitly mention or
mentions only in passing – see A.M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy
(1993) and I. Lada-Richards, Initiating Dionysus (1999); there has been less discussion
of the limits within which this interpretative technique is legitimate, though for tragedy
T.C.W. Stinton, “The scope and limits of allusion in Greek tragedy”, in M. Cropp et al. ed.
Greek Tragedy and its Legacy (1985) 67-102 (reprinted in Stinton, Collected Papers in
Greek Tragedy [1990] 454-492), is a classic.
5. The reconstruction of lost or fragmentary plays
Until recently there were few accessible discussions of the methodology of this
enterprise, but this has been in great measure remedied by the appearance of F.
McHardy et al., Lost Dramas of Classical Athens (2005), particularly the contributions by
Rudolf Kassel and David Harvey on the history of fragment study and by Christopher
Collard on “the nature of sources [for Euripides‟ fragmentary plays] and their effect on
reconstruction”; see also M.J. Cropp, “Lost tragedies: a survey”, in Gregory ed. A
Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005), and A.H. Sommerstein, “Sherlockismus and the
study of fragmentary tragedies”, in The Tangled Ways of Zeus ch.4. A cautionary lesson
for those (like the convener of this module) who are optimistic about the prospects of
reconstructing, at least in part, the plots of fragmentary Old Comedies is given in the
three masterly pages of Sir Kenneth Dover‟s foreword (“Frogments”) to D. Harvey and J.
Wilkins ed. The Rivals of Aristophanes (2000). But not everyone has been discouraged,
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as witness I.C. Storey, Eupolis, Poet of Old Comedy (2003), and E. Bakola, Cratinus and
the Art of Comedy (2010), on two dramatists whose work is known only from quotations
and a few papyri.
The standard editions of the dramatic fragments are Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,
now complete (Aeschylus ed. S.L. Radt, 1985; Sophocles ed. S.L. Radt, 1977 [2nd ed.
1999]; Euripides ed. R. Kannicht, 2004; Minor Tragedians ed. B. Snell, 1971; Adespota
ed. R. Kannicht & B. Snell, 1981) and Poetae Comici Graeci ed. R. Kassel and C. Austin
(1983-2001) which contains all surviving comic fragments (Epicharmus and other Doric
comedy and mime in vol. 1; Attic dramatists, in alphabetical order, in vols. 2-7;
anonymous fragments in vol. 8) except for the nineteen plays of Menander included in
W.G. Arnott‟s Loeb edition (1979-2000)1 and those papyri published within the last
decade. Both editions are valuably annotated (in Latin), but neither has, or professes to
have, discursive introductions or commentaries. For these one must turn to the
excellent Budé edition of the Euripidean fragments by F. Jouan and H. van Looy (19982003) and to the many editions of individual fragmentary plays, or groups of plays, by
Sophocles, Euripides and Menander, notably C. Collard et al., Euripides: Selected
Fragmentary Plays i (1995) and ii (2004) and A.H. Sommerstein et al., Sophocles:
Selected Fragmentary Plays i (2006) and ii (forthcoming 2011).
The Loeb series is rapidly moving towards complete coverage of the fragmentary plays
of the major dramatists, with the exception, at present, of Menander (A.H. Sommerstein,
Aeschylus III [2008]; H. Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles III [1996]; C. Collard and M.J. Cropp,
Euripides VII-VIII [2008]; J.J. Henderson, Aristophanes V [2007]). These volumes
provide text, facing translation, a short introduction to each of the 300 or so plays
covered, and limited annotation. The Aristophanes edition includes all fragments, even
those consisting of just a single word; the tragic volumes print only fragments of at least
one line in length (with some flexibility at the margins), but the Euripides editors
summarize the briefer fragments in their play-introductions. Three volumes of
Fragments of Old Comedy have just been published (2011) in the Loeb series by I.C.
Storey, with volumes on Middle and New Comedy to follow; in the meantime, S.D.
Olson, Broken Laughter (2007) has produced an excellent anthology (over 200
fragments by over 50 dramatists) with full commentary. J.S. Rusten ed. The Birth of
Comedy (2011), is a much bigger selection (in translation only) and offers up-to-date
bibliography, valuable coverage of visual evidence, and a fine “Short History of Athenian
Comedy” by Rusten himself (pp. 16-41); but it is rather difficult to use for serious study
of the fragments themselves, since the translations sometimes privilege reader-appeal
over fidelity (the play-title Asotodidaskalos [Teacher of the Dissolute] is rendered as
Ph.D. in Profligacy) and the annotations are not always reliable.
See also the discussions of lost plays in my Aeschylean Tragedy (chapters 5.5, 6.2, 8.4,
9 and 10) and The Tangled Ways of Zeus (chapters 4, 6, 17 and 18); the highly
persuasive reconstruction of Sophocles' Tereus by D.G. Fitzpatrick, CQ 51 (2001) 90101; the contributions by Dover, Arnott, Rosen, Harvey and Storey to F.D. Harvey and J.
Wilkins ed. The Rivals of Aristophanes (2000); the contributions by Clark, March,
Hahnemann, Sommerstein and Rosen (among others) to A.H. Sommerstein ed. Shards
from Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments (2003); and the contributions by Arnott
and Nesselrath to G.W. Dobrov ed. Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy
(2010). I can also make available copies of my discussion of the fragments and lost
1
One play included in Arnott‟s first volume, Epitrepontes, has been augmented since then (and
even since Sandbach‟s revised Oxford text of 1990) by several important new papyri; all of this
material, some of which appeared only in 2009, is now incorporated in the edition of the play by
W.D. Furley (2009).
13
tragedies of Sophocles in A. Markantonatos ed. Brill’s Companion to Sophocles
(forthcoming).
A contribution of exceptional value is D.J. Mastronarde, “The lost Phoenissae: an
experiment in reconstruction from fragments”, in Cousland & Hume ed. The Play of Texts
and Fragments (2009) 63-76, 461-496. He imagines that Phoenissae had failed to
survive in the medieval manuscript tradition, and that we knew it only from papyri,
quotations, and references to the play in other texts; and he asks what we would have
known, and what we would have been able to infer, about the play (a) in 1889 and (b)
today. The answer turns out to be remarkably reassuring for those who think that the
reconstruction of fragmentary plays is a worthwhile endeavour. But has Mastronarde
really managed to think away his (matchless) knowledge of the actual surviving text?
6. The transmission and criticism of dramatic texts
The best introductory account of the transmission of Greek (and Latin) texts is L.D.
Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (3rd ed. 1991); of the principles of
textual criticism, M.L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (1973); of the
transmission and fortunes of tragic texts in particular, R. Garland, Surviving Greek
Tragedy (2004); see also now D. Kovacs, “Text and transmission”, in Gregory ed. A
Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005). On the textual tradition of individual dramatists,
see the introductions (in Latin, I fear) to the Oxford edition of Euripides (J. Diggle) and
the Teubner edition of Aeschylus (M.L. West); also M.L. West, Studies in Aeschylus
(1990); J. Diggle, The Textual Tradition of Euripides' Orestes (1991); D.J. Mastronarde
and J.M. Bremer, The Textual Tradition of Euripides' Phoinissai (1982); and the relevant
sections of the introductions to K.J. Dover's editions of Aristophanes' Clouds (1968) and
Frogs (1993) as well as his articles "Ancient interpolation in Aristophanes", Illinois
Classical Studies 2 (1977) 136-162, and "Explorations in the history of the text of
Aristophanes", in Dover, The Greeks and their Legacy (1989). An exemplary analysis of
part of a fairly simple textual tradition is provided by S.D. Olson, "Studies in the later
manuscript tradition of Aristophanes' Peace", CQ 48 (1998) 62-74; see also the
introductions to his editions of Peace (1998) and Acharnians (2002). I have outlined the
history of the text of Aristophanes in G.W. Dobrov ed. Brill’s Companion to the Study of
Greek Comedy (2010) 399-422, and Patrick Finglass will be happy to make available on
request his discussion of the transmission of Sophocles‟ text in K. Ormand ed. The
Blackwell Companion to Sophocles (forthcoming).
7. Drama as a visual art
There are useful brief surveys of the performance aspects of Greek tragedy by M.R.
Halleran in Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy (2005) 198-214 and by J. Davidson in
Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005). For comedy, see the contributions
by J.R. Green and E.G. Csapo in Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy (2010).
On the physical conditions of production see N.G.L. Hammond, "The conditions of
dramatic production to the death of Aeschylus", GRBS 13 (1972) 387-450; E. Simon,
The Ancient Theatre (Eng.tr. 1982); H.J. Newiger, "Drama und Theater", in G.A. Seeck
ed. Das griechische Drama (1979) 434-503. E. Pöhlmann, "Die Proedrie des
Dionysostheaters im 5. Jahrhundert und das Bühnenspiel der Klassik", Museum
Helveticum 38 (1981) 129-146, formulated the now widely-accepted hypothesis that
until the mid fourth century the orchestra in the Theatre of Dionysos was not circular but
rectangular or trapezoidal (see also now, in English, J.C. Moretti, “The theater of the
14
sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus in late fifth-century Athens”, in M.J. Cropp et al. ed.
Euripides and Tragic Theater [2001] 377-398, and H.R. Goette, “An archaeological
appendix” [to an article by Eric Csapo], in P.J. Wilson ed. The Greek Theatre and
Festivals [2007] 116-121); there is strong archaeological evidence in favour of this
hypothesis, and Goette‟s latest study disposes, for me, of its greatest weakness (the
difficulty of explaining how circular dithyrambic choruses of 50 could perform in an area
of the postulated shape and dimensions) – but see, on the other side, S. Scullion, Three
Studies in Athenian Dramaturgy (1994). The evidence of the dramatic texts is put to
good use by O.P. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977), R. Rehm, Greek Tragic
Theater (1992) and The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (2002),
and D. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens (1997); C.F. Russo, Aristophanes: An Author for the
Stage (3rd ed. 1994) while often wrong-headed is always thoughtful and thoughtprovoking, but on Aristophanes M. Revermann, Comic Business (2006) is beyond
compare. The relationship between words and stage action in tragedy is studied in almost
simultaneous articles by W.J. Slater, "Split-vision: secondary action in Greek tragedy",
GRBS 43 (2002/3) 341-372, and J.P. Poe, "Word and deed: on 'stage-directions' in Greek
tragedy", Mnemosyne 54 (2003) 420-448, both of whom, to different degrees, reject the
Taplin dogma that all significant stage action is signalled in the text. M. Heath and E.R.
OKell [sic], "Sophocles' Ajax: expect the unexpected", CQ 57 (2007) 363-380, offer a
closely reasoned and extremely detailed analysis of the stage-movements in this play
(though based on a dubious interpretation taken over from Scullion); there are equally
detailed counter-arguments in the edition of Ajax by P.J. Finglass (2011).
On the festival competitions, see A.W. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of
Athens (3rd ed. 1988, rev. J. Gould and D.M. Lewis); P.J. Wilson, The Athenian
Institution of the Khoregia (2000); and P.J. Wilson ed. The Greek Theatre and Festivals
(2007) – especially useful for the world beyond Athens. For the evidence of art, see
A.D. Trendall and T.B.L. Webster, Illustrations of Greek Drama (1971); O.P. Taplin,
Comic Angels and other approaches to Greek drama through vase-paintings (1993) and
Pots and Plays (2007), and especially J.R. Green and E.W. Handley, Images of the Greek
Theatre (1994); also the catalogues in T.B.L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating Tragedy
and Satyr-Play (2nd ed. 1967); T.B.L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle
Comedy (3rd ed. 1978, rev. J.R. Green); T.B.L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating New
Comedy 3rd ed. 1995, rev. J.R. Green and A. Seeberg).
The first good modern study of tragic costuming is M.R. Wyles, Costume in Greek
Tragedy (2011); on masks, see D. Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy
(2007). For comedy, see L.M. Stone, Costume in Aristophanic Comedy (1981); D. Wiles,
The Masks of Menander (1991); Wiles, "The poetics of the mask in Old Comedy", in M.
Revermann and P.J. Wilson ed. Performance, Iconography, Reception [2008] 374-392;
and A. Hughes, "The costume of Old and Middle Comedy", BICS 49 (2006) 39-68. The
use made by Wiles (and by Webster, Green and many others) of the mask-catalogue
preserved by the lexicographer Pollux is criticized by J.P. Poe, "The supposed
conventional meanings of dramatic masks: a re-examination of Pollux 4.133-54",
Philologus 140 (1996) 306-328, who argues that Pollux's catalogue is probably not a list
of "standard" types but is based on the actual mask inventory of a specific acting
company, and that the primary function of New Comic masks was not to code for
personality traits but, prosaically and practically, to make sure that every character in a
play looked different from every other.
On dramatists' theatrical techniques, see O.P. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977)
and Greek Tragedy in Action (1978); D. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles
(1982); N.C. Hourmouziades, Production and Imagination in Euripides (1965); M.
Revermann, Comic Business (2006); and G.K.H. Ley, The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy
15
(2007), who presents a radical view insisting on the centrality of the chorus throughout
the fifth century. Of unique value are the Everyman translations (now, scandalously, out
of print) of Aeschylus (2 vols., 1995-6) and Sophocles (2 vols., 1999-2000) by Michael
Ewans, which are accompanied by a detailed study of the staging of the plays, with
particular reference to movements ("blocking"), based on production experience and
taking full account of the findings of more traditional scholarship.
On all matters connected with actors and acting, see now P.E. Easterling and E.M. Hall ed.
Greek and Roman Actors (2002), and E.G. Csapo, Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater
(2010). On acting styles see further J.R. Green, "Comic cuts: snippets of action on the
Greek comic stage", BICS 45 (2001) 37-64 (exploiting artistic evidence). On the ancient
image of the actor (which has given us the words “hypocritical” and “histrionic”), see A.
Duncan, Performance and Identity in the Classical World (2005).
On an important and little-studied aspect of performance, see A.L. Boegehold, When a
Gesture was Expected (1999); his specific suggestions are often implausible, but it is
certainly true, especially in comedy, that a script often becomes much more intelligible
when it is remembered that the characters could speak with their hands as well as their
mouths.
An almost completely new approach will be offered by P. Meineck, The Topography of
Opsis (forthcoming); I should be able to ask him to make draft chapters available to
interested students.
8. Drama and gender
There is now an enormous literature on this subject. Particularly worth attention are N.
Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (1987); C.A. Powell ed. Euripides, Women and
Sexuality (1990); S. des Bouvrie, Women in Greek Tragedy (1991); V. Wohl, Intimate
Commerce : Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (1998); L.K. Taaffe,
Aristophanes & Women (1993); V.J. Rosivach, When a Young Man Falls in Love: The
Sexual Exploitation of Women in New Comedy (1998); L. McClure, Spoken like a Woman:
Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (1999); H.P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy
(2001); J.M. Mossman, “Women‟s voices”, in Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy
(2005); V. Wohl, “Tragedy and feminism”, and S. Murnaghan, “Women in Greek tragedy”,
in Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy (2005); A. Traill, Women and the Comic Plot in
Menander (2008); and K. Cawthorn, Becoming Female: The Male Body in Greek Tragedy
(2008).
9. Drama, society and politics
As on many other matters, Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy
offers an excellent starting-point; see esp. the contributions by P.A. Cartledge (pp.3-35)
and S.D. Goldhill (at pp.343-6), both of whom give plentiful references. Bushnell ed. A
Companion to Tragedy (2005) contains a chapter on “Tragedy and city” by D. Boedeker
and K.A. Raaflaub; see also now P.E. Easterling, “The image of the polis in Greek tragedy”,
in M.H. Hansen ed. The Imaginary Polis (2005).
Seven collections of papers exemplifying a number of important trends in thinking on this
subject in the 1990s are J.J. Winkler and F.I. Zeitlin ed. Nothing to do with Dionysos?
(1990); A.H. Sommerstein et al. ed. Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (1993); R.S. Scodel
ed. Theater and Society in the Classical World (1993); C.B.R. Pelling ed. Greek Tragedy
16
and the Historian (1997); G.W. Dobrov ed. The City as Comedy (1997); S.D. Goldhill and
R.G. Osborne ed. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (1999); and, with a
broader remit, D. Boedeker and K.A. Raaflaub ed. Democracy, Empire and the Arts in
Fifth-century Athens (1998). The view that Athenian tragedy was essentially and
militantly “democratic” has been most strongly championed by Richard Seaford, especially
in Reciprocity and Ritual (1994); see also his chapter “Tragic tyranny” in K.A. Morgan ed.
Popular Tyranny (2003).
An important paper bucking most of these trends was J. Griffin, "The social function of
Attic tragedy", CQ 48 (1998) 39-61 (cf. also P.J. Rhodes, "Nothing to do with democracy:
Athenian drama and the polis", JHS 123 [2003] 104-119; D.M. Carter, “Was Attic tragedy
democratic?”, Polis 21 [2004] 1-25 [copy available from module convener]; and D.M.
Carter, The Politics of Greek Tragedy [2007]); one of Griffin's main targets, Seaford,
responded in CQ 50 (2000) 30-44, and the other, Goldhill, in JHS 120 (2000) 34-56. A
valuable, balanced contribution to the debate is offered by J. Gregory, "Euripides as social
critic", G&R 49 (2002) 145-162. Some relevant (though restored!) inscriptional evidence,
claimed as supporting Goldhill‟s case, is offered by P.J. Wilson, “Tragic honours and
democracy: neglected evidence for the politics of the Athenian Dionysia”, CQ 59 (2009) 829; see also P.J. Rhodes, “The Dionysia and democracy again”, CQ 61 (2011) 71-74, who
disagrees with Wilson on many matters, but agrees with him that the Dionysia of 409 –
the first after the restoration of full democracy, at which Sophocles was victorious with
Philoctetes – did go out of its way to celebrate democracy as such (for some important
evidence related to this, see J.L. Shear, “The oath of Demophantus and the politics of
Athenian identity”, in A.H. Sommerstein and J. Fletcher ed. Horkos [2007] 148-160).
A distinctive position has been taken in some important articles by Mark Griffith, especially
“Brilliant dynasts: power and politics in the Oresteia”, Classical Antiquity 14 (1995) 62-129
and “The king and eye: the rule of the father in Greek tragedy”, PCPS 44 (1998) 20-84;
see also the introduction to his 1999 edition of Sophocles‟ Antigone, a play which he sees
as “contriv[ing] … to provide both an aesthetic and a social resolution that is as
conservative and hierarchical as it is predictable” (p.58).
M. Heath, “The „social function‟ of tragedy: clarifications and questions”, in D.L. Cairns
and V. Liapis ed. Dionysalexandros: Essays … in Honour of Alexander F. Garvie (2006)
253-281, continues the debate with a salutary warning that “our own ideological bias
may lead us to overstate the ideological importance of the social phenomena we are
studying” and that “it is not clear how … a claim [that tragedy had a significant effect in
perpetuating and/or modifying the structure and ideologies of Athenian society] could be
supported by evidence”. See now also J.J. Henderson, “Drama and democracy”, in L.J.
Samons ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles (2007); A.F. Garvie,
“Greek tragedy: text and context”, in P.J. Finglass et al. ed. Hesperos: Studies …
Presented to M.L. West (2007) 170-188; and J.C. Gibert, “Greek drama and political
thought”, in R.K. Balot ed. A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought (2009),
and, on the whole subject, D.M. Carter ed. Why Athens? A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics
(2011).
C. Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (1993), is particularly valuable on Aeschylus,
on whom see also A.J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (1967),
C.W. Macleod, "Politics in the Oresteia", JHS 102 (1982) 122-144, and A.H. Sommerstein,
Aeschylean Tragedy2 (2010) 204-9, 281-307; on Euripides, J. Gregory, Euripides and the
Instruction of the Athenians (1991).
The claim that tragedy was "written by citizens … performed by citizens, and watched
almost exclusively by citizens" (Goldhill in the Cambridge Companion, p.344) is
17
comprehensively exploded by M. Kaimio, "The citizenship of the theatre-makers in
Athens", Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 23 (1999) 43-61 (copy
available from me): by "theatre-makers" she means those responsible for creating
theatrical performances (poets, actors, chorus members, choregoi). On the composition of
the theatre audience, see now D.K. Roselli, Theater of the People (2011), who emphasizes
(perhaps over-emphasizes) the importance in it of elements other than adult male
citizens; she is responding to (among others) A.H. Sommerstein, “The theatre audience,
the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus”, in C.B.R. Pelling ed. Greek Tragedy and the
Historian (1997) 63-79 (updated in Sommerstein, The Tangled Ways of Zeus [2010] 118142), which has frequently been misread as claiming that the audience consisted entirely
of the “elite”.
E.M. Harris et al. ed. Law and Drama in Ancient Greece (2010) contains several essays
that may be found valuable, including those by Sommerstein, Leão, Naiden and Silva on
the trials of Orestes in Aeschylus and Euripides, and by Brock on citizens and non-citizens
in tragedy.
Discussions of the relationship between Old Comedy and Athenian culture, society and
politics are innumerable. In addition to those offered by various contributors to the
Winkler-Zeitlin and Sommerstein et al. volumes (see above), see M. Heath, "Aristophanes
and the discourse of politics", in Dobrov ed. The City as Comedy, and S. Halliwell, "Comic
satire and freedom of speech in classical Athens", JHS 111 (1991) 48-70, who both take
the view that comedy neither affected nor was expected to affect the public life of the
state. Against this, A.T. Edwards in the Scodel volume (see above) shows, with the help
of Bakhtin's theory of carnival masquerade, how what was originally a downmarket
popular entertainment may have been hijacked by an élite and used as an anti-democratic
weapon, and J.J. Henderson, "Attic Old Comedy, frank speech, and democracy", in
Boedeker & Raaflaub (above) 255-273, argues (not necessarily contradicting Edwards!)
that comedy's chosen voice was that of the ordinary man who felt, even in a democracy,
that in practice he was controlled by an élite; see also his chapter “Demos, demagogue,
tyrant in Old Comedy”, in K.A. Morgan ed. Popular Tyranny (2003). A thoughtfully argued
intermediate view will be found in C. Carey, "Comic ridicule and democracy", in R.G.
Osborne and S. Hornblower ed. Ritual, Finance, Politics (Oxford, 1994), while G.O.
Hutchinson, “House politics and city politics in Aristophanes”, CQ 61 (2011) 48-70, looks
at Aristophanes‟ presentation of both oikos and polis structures from a new angle while
leaving the drawing of conclusions therefrom to his readers.
A.H. Sommerstein, "How to avoid being a komodoumenos", CQ 46 (1996) 327-356,
examines whether comedy was politically biased in its choice of satirical targets; in
“Nephelokokkygia and Gynaikopolis: Aristophanes‟ dream cities” (in M.H. Hansen ed. The
Imaginary Polis [2005] 73-99) he explores the nature and values of Old Comedy‟s ideal
state, and in “An alternative democracy and an alternative to democracy in Aristophanic
comedy” (most easily accessed in Talking about Laughter and Other Studies in Greek
Comedy; [2009] ch.10) he argues – as had Geoffrey de Ste. Croix (The Origins of the
Peloponnesian War [1972] 355-376) and Paul Cartledge (Aristophanes and his Theatre of
the Absurd [1990]) – that Aristophanes‟ plays betray him as a committed (though not
avowed) anti-democrat and pro-Spartan. See also Talking about Laughter ch. 5, 6, 7, 11
and 13.
There has been less on New Comedy, whose social connections are more ethically than
politically oriented; but see W.G. Arnott, "Moral values in Menander", Philologus 125
(1981) 215-227; P.G.McC. Brown, "Love and marriage in Greek new comedy", CQ 43
(1993) 189-205; and S. Lape, Reproducing Athens: Menander’s Comedy, Democratic
Culture, and the Hellenistic City (2004). At least one contemporary of Menander‟s,
18
Philippides, is known to have taken strong political stands both inside and outside the
theatre; see L. O‟Sullivan, “History from comic hypotheses: Stratocles, Lachares, and
P.Oxy. 1235”, GRBS 49 (2009) 53-79. Both Old and New Comedy are covered in A.H.
Sommerstein, “The politics of Greek comedy”, in M. Revermann ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Comedy (forthcoming) (copy available from me).
On the presentation of non-Greeks in drama, especially tragedy, see E.M. Hall, Inventing
the Barbarian (1989), and P.A. Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (1993);
also, from a linguistic angle, A. Willi, The Languages of Aristophanes (2003) 198-225 and
his chapter “Languages on stage: Aristophanic language, cultural history, and Athenian
identity” in Willi ed. The Language of Greek Comedy (2002) 111-149 (which also includes
discussion of the presentation of non-Athenian Greeks).
An important institution linking theatre, society and (sometimes) politics is discussed
comprehensively in P.J. Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia (2000).
On the problems and principles of using drama (and other literary texts) as sources of
evidence about contemporary society, see C.B.R. Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek
Historian (2000).
10.
Drama and religion
There are now several good introductions to ancient Greek religion – which is perhaps the
most difficult of all aspects of the ancient Greek world for the modern mind (whether
religious or not) to understand. The best, by a long way, is R.C.T. Parker, Polytheism and
Society at Athens (2005), which includes (pp.136-152) a discussion of “religion in the
theatre”; see also Parker‟s contribution to J. Boardman et al. ed. The Oxford History of the
Classical World (1986) and, more specifically on tragedy, his chapters in C.B.R. Pelling ed.
Greek Tragedy and the Historian (1997), in J. Griffin ed. Sophocles Revisited (1999) 1130, and in Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique 55: Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental
(2009) 127-164. Other works that can be recommended are J.N. Bremmer, Greek
Religion (1994); L.B. Zaidman and P.S. Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City (1992);
R. Garland, Religion and the Greeks (1994); S.R.L. Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks
(2000); J.D. Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion (2004); T. Harrison, Greek Religion: Belief
and Experience (2006); and W. Burkert, Greek Religion (1985). On gods and ritual acts in
drama, see C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion [2003] (and her
contributions to Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy and to Gregory ed. A Companion to
Greek Tragedy); E. Stehle, “Choral prayer in Greek tragedy: euphemia or aischrologia?”,
in P.A. Murray and P.J. Wilson ed. Music and the Muses [2004] 121-155); D.J.
Mastronarde, “The gods”, in Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005) 321-332;
and F. Graf, “Religion and drama”, in McDonald & Walton ed. The Cambridge Companion
to Greek and Roman Theatre (2007) 55-71.
It was an old complaint (older than Aeschylus!) that tragedy had "nothing to do with
Dionysus", at whose festivals it was performed; recent scholarship has been much
concerned with proving, or trying to prove, that this complaint was misguided. See for
example the chapters by Winkler and Goldhill in Winkler & Zeitlin ed. Nothing to do with
Dionysos? (1990), and by Cartledge and Easterling in Easterling ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997); also, on drama and the Dionysiac, T.H. Carpenter
and C.A. Faraone ed. Masks of Dionysus (1993), especially the contributions by Seaford
and Zeitlin, A.F.H. Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie (1991), and I. LadaRichards, Initiating Dionysus (1999); and on a wide variety of aspects of the relationship
between tragedy, ritual and society, R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) – though this
19
is a highly controversial work. Seaford debates with Rainer Friedrich in M.S. Silk ed.
Tragedy and "The Tragic" (1996) 257-294, and is one of the contributors to Bushnell ed.
A Companion to Tragedy (2005). The whole trend of the last generation's scholarship in
this area is vigorously opposed by S. Scullion in "'Nothing to do with Dionysus': tragedy
misconceived as ritual", CQ 52 (2002) 102-137; see also his chapter in Gregory ed. A
Companion to Greek Tragedy. The ritual paradigm has been applied to comedy by
A.F.H. Bierl, Ritual and Performativity: The Chorus of Old Comedy (Eng. tr. 2009).
The very old subject of the role of ritual in the origins of drama has recently been
discussed in C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion (2003); E.G. Csapo
and M.C. Miller ed. The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond (2007); and
K.S. Rothwell, Nature, Culture, and the Origins of Greek Comedy (2007).
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11.
Critical methodologies
The modern (and postmodern) critical theories and techniques that have been applied to
Greek tragedy (and, to a lesser extent, comedy) may mostly be grouped into two
categories:
(1)
The application to Greek drama of the findings of, and of methods, theories and
ideologies developed in, disciplines not primarily concerned with the study of literary
texts, such as anthropology (e.g. structuralism), sociology (e.g. Marxism, feminism) and
psychology (e.g. psychoanalysis). Apart from the feminist approaches (for which see §8
above), the works in this area most likely to appeal to the uncommitted are those
inspired by Lévi-Straussian structuralism; outstanding examples are J.P. Vernant & P.
Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Eng. tr. 1990) and C.P. Segal,
Tragedy and Civilization (1981), Interpreting Greek Tragedy (1986) and Sophocles’
Tragic World (1995). This approach, indeed, has been so influential that it has now, as
Goldhill writes (Cambridge Companion 343), “been very widely absorbed into the
mainstream of criticism, often without acknowledgement as such”. In the study of
comedy there may well be a bright future for the application of “humour theory”, for
which see J. Robson, Humour, Obscenity and Aristophanes (2006) – though one hopes
that others will be able to apply it with a defter touch than he, and maybe make use of
the extraordinarily insightful treatment of laughter in a work he does not mention,
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997) 545-554. Pinker, in this and other works,
has been a powerful advocate of applying to literary criticism the insights of the
relatively new field of “cognitive science”, and a recent trend resulting from this has
been to rehabilitate the practice of trying to infer the thoughts and motives of characters
from their words and actions, on the ground that this is what people do all the time in
their ordinary lives; on this “cognitive turn” (as it has been called) see F. Budelmann and
P.E. Easterling, “Reading minds in Greek tragedy”, Greece and Rome 57 (2010) 289-303
(actually students of New Comedy may feel that they have been practising cognitive
criticism all along without being aware of it!)
(2)
The application to Greek drama of explicitly formulated theories of literary
criticism. The approach that has attracted most attention in this regard is that
associated with the names of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, characterized by a
focus on the text rather than the author and on the problematization of language and
communication; the most notable articulator of this approach in English has been Simon
Goldhill, especially in The Oresteia: language, sexuality, narrative (1984) and the
somewhat more accessible Reading Greek Tragedy (1986) and The Poet’s Voice (1991) –
the latter also has an interesting discussion of Aristophanes. Since drama is itself
(among other things) a form of linguistic communication, considerable attention has
come to be paid to the presentation of drama (or of drama-like activities) within drama
(often called “metatheatre”); this is a leading concern, for example, of Mark Ringer‟s
Electra and the Empty Urn (1998), of Niall Slater‟s Aristophanic study Spectator Politics
(2002), and of much recent discussion of the most metatheatrical of all surviving ancient
dramas, Aristophanes‟ Thesmophoriazusae. Here too there has been a tendency to
absorb once-controversial approaches “into the mainstream” while smoothing away
some of their most controversial features (such as a tendency, in some hands, virtually
to elide from critical consideration the designing mind of the author and the historical
context of a work – though there are still plenty of critics for whom “positivist”,
“historicist” and “intentionalist” are dirty words!) An approach which is not, or should
not be, controversial at all is narratology, which is simply a conceptual framework
making it easier to focus explicitly on the question “through whose eyes are we being
invited to look at these events or this situation?”; see I. de Jong, Narrative in Drama
(1991; on Euripidean messenger-speeches) and especially de Jong et al. ed. Narrators,
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Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature (2004). Mikhail Bakhtin‟s theory
of carnival culture has been applied to Aristophanes by C.L. Platter, Aristophanes and the
Carnival of Genres (2007), though some will feel it was done better and more
enlighteningly by A.T. Edwards, “Historicizing the popular grotesque: Bakhtin‟s Rabelais
and Attic Old Comedy”, in Scodel ed. Theater and Society in the Classical World (1993)
89-117.
General surveys of recent critical approaches to Greek drama long tended to concentrate
on (1) rather than (2); this applies to Goldhill's chapter in Easterling ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997) 324-347, and also to the chapters on critical
approaches in Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy (2005), which cover psychoanalysis
(J.R. Lupton), Marxist and post-Marxist materialism (H. Grady), and feminism (V. Wohl),
but do not treat any literary-critical theory as a separate object of discussion.
T. Schmitz, Modern Literary Theory and Ancient Texts: An Introduction (2007) is the first
attempt at textbook coverage of the whole area; see also I.J.F. de Jong and J.P.
Sullivan, Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (1994); R. Hexter and D.
Selden, Innovations of Antiquity (1992); S. J. Harrison, Texts, Ideas, and the Classics
(2001); and M. Heath, Interpreting Classical Texts (2003).