Kirjahaku

Aristophanes' engagement with tragedy is one of the most striking features of his comedies: Euripides appears repeatedly as a character in these plays, jokes about tragedy and tragic poets abound, and parodies of tragedy frequently underlie whole scenes and even the plots of these plays. Tragedy on the Comic Stage contextualizes this engagement with tragedy within Greek comedy as a genre by examining paratragedy in the fragments of Aristophanes' contemporaries and successors in the fifth and fourth centuries. Farmer organizes these fragments under two rubrics. First, he discusses fragments that show characters discussing tragedy, use tragic poets as characters, or make reference to the dramatic festivals; these fragments, Farmer argues, develop a "culture of tragedy" within Greek comedy, a consistent set of tropes and devices that depict tragedy as part of the world inhabited by the characters of these plays. Second, he assembles fragments that show tragic parody, imitations of tragedy that render tragic language humorous or ironic by juxtaposing it with the base characters and quotidian circumstances that make up Greek comedy. Tragedy on the Comic Stage then illustrates these features of fragmentary paratragedy within three intact Aristophanic comedies: Wasps, Women at the Thesmophoria, and Wealth. These new readings of Aristophanes' plays show the value of reading Aristophanes in conjunction with the comic fragments, and insist on the subtlety and complexity of Aristophanic paratragedy.

This is the first accessible volume exploring and analysing evidence for Greek Old Comedy through what remains only in the form of fragments of plays. Hundreds of comedies were written and performed in Athens during this period (roughly 486-386 BCE), but only eleven survive intact from this era; all eleven are by the same author, Aristophanes. We are fortunate, however, to possess a substantial trove of evidence about the many other plays written before and during Aristophanes’ career, in the form of what we call fragments: excerpts, summaries, and quotations preserved in later Greek authors, as well as scraps harvested from the Greek papyri of Egypt. These materials are difficult to read, but can wonderfully enrich our sense of what was possible on the Greek comic stage. This book introduces readers to the nature of comic fragments, equipping them with methodological and interpretive tools to engage with this challenging but exciting material. It then presents a survey of important fragments in two parts: in part one, it reconstructs a set of three plays where the surviving material is sufficient to give us a broad sense of the plays’ content and staging; in part two, it charts a path beyond play-reconstruction by grouping fragments around key themes to build up a picture of the world created by the shared labour of the lost poets of Greek comedy.