at the IU Theatre and Drama Center:

Aristophanic Comedy
by Kenneth McLeish

Kenneth McLeish (1940-1997) taught and translated the classics for most of his professional life. His writing career included books about food, wine, and the arts, as well as serious translations of Ibsen, Euripides, Sophocles, and all the comedies of Aristophanes. This essay is taken from his introduction to Patric Dickinson’s translation of the Lysistrata. It’s a smart little essay on Aristophaes’ dramaturgy, and the piece has been read by most of the members of our company. We think it may deepen an appreciation and understanding of Aristophanes and the way he built his comedies.

Aristophanes’ work is sometimes called “Old” comedy, to distinguish his plays from the “New” comedy of such later writers as Menander in Greece and Plautus and Terence in Rome. “Old” comedy is surreal and fantastical, and its butts are specific individuals or current political ideas. “New” comedy is realistic, and its satire is directed at human nature at large. “New” comedy became the ancestor of most Western “literary” comedy, of the character-based kind written by such authors as Shakespeare, Molière, Sheridan or Wilde. “Old” comedy, with its slapstick routines, its physical energy and its music and dance, influenced other kinds of comedy, those once dismissed as “low”: circus, music-hall, variety, stand-up, film and TV slapstick—styles whose potential has only recently begun to be rediscovered by practitioners and scholars of what is loftily called “legitimate” theatre.

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     It was Aristophanes’ stroke of genius to develop this carefree, bawdy spectacle into a form of comedy which allowed him to make serious points in a light way, to explore the dilemmas of human life and the follies and failings of his contemporaries. In most of his surviving plays, the hero opens the action by complaining of some insoluble problem: unpayable debts in Clouds, the awfulness of Athenian life in Birds, the corruptness of politicians in Knights, the lack of good poets in Frogs, the endlessness of war in Acharnians, Peace and above all Lysistrata. The hero then announces that he or she has devised a way to solve this problem, and proceeds to put it into practice. The way chosen is always surreal—flying to Heaven to bring back the goddess of Peace (Peace), going to the Underworld to bring back a poet from the “good old days” (Frogs), making a private peace-treaty with Sparta (Acharnians). But once the deed is done, it works, and the hero’s fantasy-world becomes the play’s reality.
     Once fantasy is reality, anything is possible. Birds, clouds, corpses, dogs, gods, monsters, statues, even pots and pans turn into characters, and the hero talks on equal terms with them, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As in dreams, not only is anything possible, but the unlikely is treated as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world. How do you fly to Heaven? You feed a dung-beetle until it’s big enough to carry you. How do you become a bird? You chew the magic herb ‘wing-ort” and grow wings. How do you force the gods to do what you want? You build a wall between Heaven and Earth, block their sacrifices and starve them into submission.
     If surreal events and characters are treated in a “real” way, exactly the opposite happens to people and ideas from the real world of the audience. Aristophanes regularly takes real people (Euripides, Socrates, politicians such as Kleon and Pericles, generals such as Lamachos, even the priest of Dionysos who sat enthroned at each stage performance and the prostitutes who worked down the road from the theatre) and brings them into the action, under their own names. He regularly mentions ideas currently in the (real) air of Athens: political theories, snippets of gossip, the kind of stories which would make the news in today’s tabloids. He quotes from (real) Greek tragedy, poetry, oracles, hymns, proclamations and prayers, using the actual words. And whenever this happens, the people, stories and quotations fail absolutely to fit the fantasy reality which the hero’s surreal deed has created. Euripides and Socrates are fools, the politic[i]ans and generals are rogues, the ideas and quotations are ridiculous.
      Nowadays we are used to this in comedy, but not in comic plays. Stand-up comedians use the same techniques, and their acts depend on creating a surreal world in which anything at all is possible—except that respect should be shown to people and events dragged in from real life. Also like stand-up comedians, Aristophanes’ characters often break out of the created “reality” of the show, to talk directly about the conditions of the performance they are giving: the weather, the audience, the meanness of the management, their own physical health, the strangeness of other performers—tiny obsessions of the moment, belonging to the actor rather than to the character in the story but still mentioned by that character.
     In the midst of all such topical references, and among the jabs and jibes of satire, a modern comedian can still put across a sustained point of view about “real” events in general—and the same is true of Aristophanes. In particular, a consistent attitude towards war and politics runs through all his plays and gives his work its bite. This view is that, unlike great conflicts of the past and despite grand and noble achievements, the Peloponnesian War is a disaster. It is destroying the greatness of Athens, is against the interests and wishes of ordinary people, and is kept going only because generals and politicians are too incompetent or corrupt to end it.
     The fact that such ideas could be put across consistently for twenty years, in a city dominated by the war and ruled by the very politicians and generals Aristophanes mocks by name, shows not only courage on his part, but a remarkably tolerant state of mind in his audience and the city authorities. Perhaps the authorities regarded his plays as safety valves, allowing people to let off steam in a comparatively harmless way. Modern politicians tolerate even the most savage caricatures and cartoons of themselves—indeed, many collect them. There are many recorded instances of comic writers changing the way we look at the world, but few of them affecting the way things are actually run.
     At first hearing, it may sound as if “Old” comedy is complex and multi-faceted, too “packed” nowadays for easy understanding or enjoyment. The mixture is certainly rich. But Aristophanes is anything but difficult. His plots are clear, his jokes and routines are of inspired lunacy, and his characters are universally recognizable. His heroes are grown-up children, and what they say and do—in short, his comedy—is neither shameless nor vulgar (as is sometimes claimed) but blessed with glorious, life-enhancing innocence.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher from Kenneth McLeish’s introduction to the Nick Hern Books edition of Patric Dickinson’s translation of Lysistrata in the Drama Classics series.
Copyright © 1996 Nick Hern Books. www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Where to go:

About Ranjit Bolt, the adaptor, and Aristophanes, the playwright
The war between Sparta and Athens
Theatre and festivals in classical Athens
Lysistrata and Old Comedy
Women in Athens and Sparta
The "Happy Idea" of the Lysistrata

Lysistrata page
IU Theatre and Drama home page
Indiana University Bloomington home page