Brill s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes

452 Pages·2016·9.403 MB·English, Greco antico

by  Philip Walsh (editor)

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes
Brill’s Companions to
Classical Reception
Series Editor
Kyriakos N. Demetriou
VOLUME 8
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bccr
Brill’s Companion to the
Reception of Aristophanes
Edited by
Philip Walsh
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Shayna Pond ©2009 University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Walsh, Philip, 1977– editor.
Title: Brill’s companion to the reception of Aristophanes / edited by Philip
 Walsh.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Brill’s companions to
 classical reception, ISSN 2213-1246 ; volume 8 | Includes bibliographical
 references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024324 (print) | LCCN 2016028005 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004270688 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004324657 (e-book) | ISBN
 9789004324657 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Aristophanes—Criticism and interpretation. |
 Aristophanes—Appreciation.
Classification: LCC PA3879 .B85 2016 (print) | LCC PA3879 (ebook) | DDC
 882/.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024324
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issn 2213-1426
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isbn 978-90-04-32465-7 (e-book)
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Philip Walsh
Notes on Contributors xiv
PART 1
Aristophanes, Ancient and Modern: Debates, Education,
and Juxtapositions
1 Aristophanes in Antiquity: Reputation and Reception 3
Niall W. Slater
2 Modern Theory and Aristophanes 22
Charles Platter
3 Aristophanes, Gender, and Sexuality 44
James Robson
4 Aristophanes, Education, and Performance in Modern Greece 67
Stavroula Kiritsi
5 Teaching Aristophanes in the American College Classroom 88
John Given and Ralph M. Rosen
6 The “English Aristophanes”: Fielding, Foote, and Debates over Literary
Satire 109
Matthew J. Kinservik
7 Teknomajikality and the Humanimal in Aristophanes’ Wasps 129
Mark Payne
8 Branding Irony: Comedy and Crafting the Public Persona 148
Donna Zuckerberg
vi contents
PART 2
Outreach: Adaptations, Translations, Scholarship,
and Performances
9 Aristophanes in Early-Modern Fragments: Le Loyer’s La
Néphélococugie (1579) and Racine’s Les Plaideurs (1668) 175
Cécile Dudouyt
10 Aristophanes and the French Translations of Anne Dacier 195
Rosie Wyles
11 The Verbal and the Visual: Aristophanes’ Nineteenth-Century English
Translators 217
Philip Walsh
12 Comedy and Tragedy in Agon(y): The 1902 Comedy Panathenaia of
Andreas Nikolaras 240
Gonda Van Steen
13 J.T. Sheppard and the Cambridge Birds of 1903 and 1924 263
C.W. Marshall
14 Murray’s Aristophanes 284
Mike Lippman
15 “Attic Salt into an Undiluted Scots”: Aristophanes and the Modernism
of Douglas Young 307
Gregory Baker
16 Classical Reception in Posters of Lysistrata: The Visual Debate
Between Traditional and Feminist Imagery 331
Alexandre G. Mitchell
17 Afterword 369
David Konstan
General Bibliography 377
Index Nominum et Rerum 427
Preface and Acknowledgements
What were the origins of Old Attic Comedy? What was the nature of Aristo-
phanic satire? What were Aristophanes’ political views? What influence did he
(and other playwrights) have on contemporary Athenian life? How and in
what contexts was comedy performed? Who comprised Aristophanes’ audi-
ence? To what end did he employ obscenity and sexuality? Were his comic
heroines taken seriously, or were they laughed at and written off? What did
Dionysus have to do with it?
These are only some of the interpretive questions that have been asked
about the plays of Aristophanes and that have affected his reception since
antiquity. All are posed in the past tense, but as this volume hopes to demon-
strate, Aristophanic comedy remains in a vivid present tense. This is not to
allege that the reception of Aristophanes has been historically consistent or
aesthetically uncomplicated; his plays, after all, have not always been regarded
as relevant or artistically significant. For instance, some, like Clouds and Wealth
[Plutus], enjoyed immense popularity for centuries, while others, most nota-
bly Lysistrata, were discounted, censored, maligned, and suppressed. Today,
though, things are different; in fact, in typical Aristophanic fashion, they are
topsy-turvy. Lysistrata is now the play most widely translated, adapted, read,
taught, and discussed in the United States and elsewhere; for non-specialists it
is Aristophanic comedy. This upswing in popularity runs counter to the play’s
historically negative reception, but it is not completely unexpected if one
understands that ambivalence has marked the reception of Aristophanes since
the plays were first performed in Athens. In addition, conflicts, controversies,
and disputes—at times social, political, aesthetic, ideological, and cultural—
have commonly accompanied interest in his work.
Many of the uneasy and tense relationships that Aristophanic comedy has
had with a post-Aristophanic world are challenging to unpack, but the chap-
ters in this volume endeavor to do just that. Conflicts emerge, for instance,
when a translator seeks to render Aristophanes into a modern language.
Controversies flare when a theater group adapts a comic play and must make
production choices about dialogue, staging, props, costumes, lights, and music
(among other things). Disputes often erupt when teaching Aristophanes in
the classroom. Ambivalence also runs deep in the study of classical reception:
many of us read and study the extant plays and fragments of Aristophanes
in order to learn about ancient Athens and its culture. In that process, how-
ever, we often learn a great deal about ourselves when evaluating Aristophanes
viii preface and acknowledgements
in the contemporary moment. What are our preferences for comedy, democ-
racy, and the power of art? Do these preferences help to clarify why the plays
Aristophanes are important at certain moments in history but not in others?
When does Aristophanes become modern?
This last question was posed to me during a question and answer session in
2008. It was an unpretentious query that anyone who had spent years work-
ing with the comic plays should have been able to answer. In that moment,
though, I stumbled, speculating half-heartedly about the late eighteenth
century—as if one could put a time stamp on a question that is quite compli-
cated and nuanced. Fortunately, I was not asked to elaborate, and only recently
have I come to realize that “When does Aristophanes become modern?” is
more of a riddle than a question. There is no linear or straightforward answer;
the reception history of Aristophanes is at once vast and yet particular, global
in scope but also confined in places to culturally specific contexts. Such is the
field of classical reception studies; the research we follow is diverse and com-
plicated, and our data always grows and shifts. Despite this untidiness, I would
like to attempt a direct answer to this question, knowing full well the risks
at hand: that Aristophanes becomes modern when he matters again—when
his plays become more than inert records of the past, studied by philologists
and antiquarians, and are explicitly intertwined with (and reflected in) con-
temporary debates over satire, politics, poetry, history, gender, and sexuality.
Aristophanic comedy becomes modern when translations, adaptations, and
performances become joyous experiments in the vernacular, as when Anne
Dacier translated Clouds and Plutus into French in 1684 or when Swinburne
translated the parabasis of Birds in 1880. Aristophanes becomes modern when
poets, critics, playwrights, historians, artists, and teachers actively reinterpret
the comic plays for the here and now. The plays of Aristophanes have mat-
tered, and they will continue to do so. This volume, the first wholly devoted
to their reception, will examine critical moments where Aristophanes’ pres-
ence has emerged in force in the post-Aristophanic world. It will explore how
Aristophanes matters.
Writing in 1837, Benjamin Dann Walsh (1808–69), a graduate of Trinity
College, Cambridge, made the following observation in a preface to his verse
translations of Acharnians, Knights, and Clouds:
The Comedies of Aristophanes are the Pompeii of Athens. In them have
been enshrined the records of the private and public life of the Athenians
during the most brilliant period of the republic; and in them alone we
must seek for that personal knowledge of the high and mighty geniuses
preface and acknowledgements ix
of those days, which cannot be hoped or desired from the grave writings
of the tragedian, the philosopher, or the historian.1
Walsh’s praise of Aristophanes is elegant, full of romance, flourish, and senti-
ment, but his comments also reveal several things significant to the reception
of Aristophanes, both ancient and modern. Like Pompeii, parts and pieces of
Aristophanic comedy have long been admired, discussed, adapted, and inter-
preted. However, like the notorious relics of Pompeii, other parts and pieces
have been hidden, deliberately kept secret or obscured because of their per-
ceived licentiousness. If perhaps we consider the comedies of Aristophanes as
“the Pompeii of Athens,” then studying their reception will seem a methodical
stratigraphy of the ancient plays and the many layers of modern context. To
investigate the dynamic, often volcanic, assimilation of Old Comedy into the
ideals and ideas of later antiquity and the modern world is to chart the cultural
fault lines along which the plays of Aristophanes have been plotted—to see
where they themselves have prompted shifts and outright fractures in new
contexts and strange worlds. Central to the long history of Greek drama at
large, the study of the reception of Aristophanes can bring us not only to a
better understanding of the ancient plays, but also a greater knowledge of their
pliancy across time and space.
Given that the plays of Aristophanes have circulated for nearly 2,500 years, it
is impossible for one book to tell their story of reception in full. The goal of this
volume is to provide a substantive account of the reception of Aristophanes
from antiquity to the present and to point interested readers to the many
monographs, edited collections, journal articles, dissertations, essays, and
blogs that treat other aspects of his reception.2 Gaps inevitably remain, and
I look forward to future scholarly work that pushes the boundaries of what we
know about the reception of Aristophanes and that forges connections across
temporal, linguistic, cultural, national, and disciplinary boundaries.
1  Walsh (1837) x. He planned to translate the other eight plays, but left England for the United
States, where he became a farmer, businessman, and state entomologist for Illinois. See Venn
and Venn (1954) 33; and Hall (2011) 25.
2  References to a wide range of studies on the reception of Aristophanes can be found in indi-
vidual chapters and in the general bibliography. In addition, note the following work (not
cited elsewhere, in chronological order): Hunter (2000), Prasch (2012), Nooter (2013), Mhire
and Frost (2014), Pormann (2014), Sharland (2014), Baldwin (2015), Morales (2015), and Hall
(2016). The collected essays in Olson (2014b) deserve especial notice. Van Zyl Smit (2016)
appeared too late to be incorporated into this volume.