Traditionally, the criticism of tragedy has assumed that there is (or should be) something that can be called a 'true' tragic plot. The most widely accepted master narrative is an integral part of the Aristotelian tradition that for centuries dominated tragic criticism and is still surpisingly resilient today. This schema emphasises hamartia, generally understood as the 'tragic flaw' of overweening pride, and its punishment. The tragic hero, although caught in circumstances beyond his ken and control, is finally to be understood as destroyed by the gods (or fate) because of his own failings. Even cursory examination of the plots of the extant tragedies will suggest some obvious ways in which this schema is inadequate and even irrelevant...It has at any rate created an situation in which the small corpus of surviving Greek tragedy has been further subdivided, leaving only a tiny group universally recognised as 'true' tragedies. The rest are treated as failed attempts at tragedy, relegated to mixed genres invented ad hoc, or left to specialists.
'Conflict' has been a central term in criticism of tragedy only since Hegel's Vorlesungen uber die Aesthetik of the 1820s, surprisingly, since from our perspective it is in many ways the crucial one...
In speaking of story patterns, I am not claiming to isolate a set of master plots to which all the narrative forms of tragedy can be referred; I am simply highlighting particular forms used repeatedly by the tragic poets in shaping their plots... The commonest of these story patterns are those I shall refer to as retribution, sacrifice, supplication, rescue and return-recognition.
Peter Burian
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Yet despite tragedy’s ethnic plurality, and its interest in heroes and communities spread over vast distances across the known world, the Athenian focus, the ‘Athenocentrism’ of tragedy is manifested in several ways. Many plays include explicit panegyrics of Athens, for example in Aeschylus’Persians (231-45) and Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus (668-719); the women of Troy, about to be sent off to slavery in Greece, hope that their destination is Athens (Trojan Women, 208-209). Secondly, even plays, with no obvious Athenian focus often include an aition, an explanation through myth, of the origins of an Athenian custom (Iphigenia among the Taurians, 1459-69). Thirdly, the tragedians used communities other than Athens as sites for ethnic self-definition; the barbarian world often functions in the tragic imagination as the home of vices (for example, Persian despotism, Thracian lawlessness, eastern effeminacy and cowardice) conceived as correlatives to the idealised Athenian democratic virtues of freedom of speech, equality before the law, and masculine courage. Nearer home it can also be helpful to see other Greek cities, especially Thebes, as imagined communities whose negative characteristics are partly determined by their deviation from the Athenians’ own positive self-representations...
Fourthly, a subspecies of tragedy emerged enacting transparently ‘patriotic’ myths, concerned with the early mythical history of Athens and Attica, and stressing such vital components of the Athenians’ identity as their claim to autochthony. The repertoire included Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Ion, and his Erechtheus, of which considerable fragments survive...
Even in plays set in Athenian territory, the Athenian characters always interact with representatives of other city-states. Some plots seek to display the superiority of Athenian democratic culture over other cities, especially Thebes or Argos, and imply that Athens is entitled to the imperial role of ‘moral policeman’ in Greece. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women Theseus, the mythical founder of the Athenian democracy, is portrayed as a pious and egalitarian constitutional monarch of a democracy (352-353). He takes action against the despotic Thebans to impose ‘the common law of Hellas’ protecting the rights of the dead.
The Athenocentrism of tragedy is revealed when myths involving heroes from other cities are manipulated to serve Athenian interests. Until the sixth century Athens had enshrined little of its own local mythology in poetry and art; it had no hero equal in status to Heracles, Achilles, Orestes, Agamemnon, or Oedipus. There was an attempt in the late sixth and fifth centuries to develop a nexus of myths around the Athenian king Theseus, who appears in several tragedies; but the Argive, Theban, and other non-Athenian heroes from the old epic cycle, while remaining central to tragedy, are often appropriated to the Athenian past, in each case conferring on the city some special advantage.
Edith Hall
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The main surviving mass of ancient Greek comedy begins only with Aristophanes, who was born within a few years of the mid fifth century, long after the great tragedians and too late to tell us much about the riotous early days of the comic chorus, before the state took it over… In his early plays traditional Athenian comedy, the Old Style, as it came to be called, had already reached its full development; it has, as Aristotle remarked of tragedy, ‘attained its nature’. The chorus was all-important, and the revelation of its dress and dances and music… was central to the competition.
The comic theatre in the fifth century was directly political in a way that tragedy was not; its jokes had a bite and were often meant to be taken seriously. Aristophanes used his chorus at a certain moment in the play to address the audience directly; sometimes the chorus itself, the Birds or Clouds or Wasps or Frogs or whatever, seems to be speaking to us, sometimes the poet himself speaks through them…All the same, real Athenians could be parodied by name ot only thinly disguised, and plays could even be named after them. We know that politicians resented this, which is hardly surprising, but there is no evidence that they ever managed to stamp it out under the fifth-century democracy…
The greatest comic poet we know much about before Aristophanes is Cratinus. They overlapped; young Aristophanes attacked old Cratinus as a drunk who had given up poetry… The nearest contemporaries to Aristophanes in his working lifetime were Eupolis, who started producing comedies in 429 BC and died young in the course of the war, by drowning at sea, and a comic poet called Plato, younger than either of them, at work from about 410 to some time after 390… In the course of his career, Aristophanes spans the first two of the three phases or styles of Greek comedy. We must leave Epicharmus in Sicily out of account; Sicily and Athens in his day were separate planets. But starting in the twenties with vigorous and farcical burlesque, intermingled with savage onslaughts on politicians, he moved through the sadder, and in places more solemn, schemes of comedies such as the Frogs (405 BC) to the revival of comedy after the fall of Athens…
The essential plot of the Frogs is the descent of Dionysus, a god with many human weaknesses, to the underworld, mocked by the Frogs as he learns to row in Charon’s boat; he is searching for a great tragic poet, and chooses between Aeschylus and Euripides by a contest in which they destroy one anther’s lines with parody and mockery…
Of the plays we have, the very first is like a bucket of cold water in the face. It not only sounds, it trumpets the great themes of comic poetry: sex, life on the farm, the good old days, the nightmare of politics, the oddities of religion, the strange manners of the town. It is called the Acharnians (425 BC). The Knights, in the next year, adds to the old mixture some stern moralizing, some furious invective and some lyrical patriotic politics…
His early comedies were political, his latest began to be social. In the second phase of Athenian comedy, to which Aristophanes is virtually our only witness, the chorus withered away to some musical interludes, plots knitted together into coherence, and a kind of realism took over… His Wealth (388 BC) reflects only the transition. What was coming was comedy as the modern world has known it, beginning with Menander.
Peter Levi
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Plautus frequently parades the fact that his drama is adapted from an original in Greek New Comedy. In doing so he positively embraces the implication that he has debased his model by stating that he has translated it into barbarian. The criticisms of the Greek-speaking snob are not deflected, they are made part of the comic experience…
It is not easy to account for the popularity of Greek mythological tragedy in the early years of the Roman theatre. In comedy, it is possible to analyze the process of adaptation involved in the presentation of Greek New Comedy at Rome. It is clear, for instance, that nobody attempted to Romanize the exuberant fantasies or contemporary political humour of Aristophanes, and the other masters of fifth-century Old Comedy. Rather, the pieces which won such favour with Roman audiences were those which adapted the domestic, bourgeois New Comedy of late fourth- and early third-century authors such as Menander, Diphilos and Philemon.
Some ancient critics praised Menander in particular for his naturalism, for the mirror which he held to life. When he presented an Athenian youth on the stage he wore clothes which had been subject to some degree of stylization but which were not dissimilar to those typical of his class in the world outside the theatre. In a Roman palliate comedy (named after the pallium - Greek-style cloak, to designate the Greek origins of the genre, contrasted with partly Roman 'togate' comedy), every time a character refers to 'my pallium' he is also drawing attention to his theatrical costume, to the marker of the burlesque national identity which he has embraced. Plautus veritably proclaims the Greekness of his comic world, even to the extent of having his characters make comments about Romans as barbarians...
The poets and chorus of Greek Old Comedy frequently step out of their roles and address the theatrical audience directly on issues of dramatic technique, rivalry between authors and the competition between the plays on show, but they do so in the formal section of the drama known as the parabasis. Menandrean New Comedy features a range of divine prologue-speakers who address the audience directly and sketch out the plot of the drama to follow; characters in Menander occasionally recount some off-stage incident to the audience and address them as 'Gentlemen'. Terence in turn will adopt the prologues of Menander, but eliminate all expository content in favour of literary criticism and polemic against competitors. None of these writers, however, comes close to the intense interaction between actor and audience which typifies Plautine comedy.
Matthew Leigh
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Peter Burian. Myth and muthos:the shaping of tragic plot. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Edith Hall. The Sociology of Athenian tragedy. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Peter Levi. Greek Drama. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Matthew Leigh. Primitivism and power: The beginnings of Latin literature. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001
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