"TRUE COMEDY," said Voltaire, "is the speaking picture of the Follies and
Foibles of a Nation." He had Aristophanes in mind, and no better
description could be given of the Old Comedy of Athens. To read
Aristophanes is in some sort like reading an Athenian comic paper. All
the life of Athens is there: the politics of the day and the politicians;
the war party and the anti-war party; pacifism, votes for women, free
trade, fiscal reform, complaining taxpayers, educational theories, the
current religious and literary talk -- everything, in short, that
interested the average citizen. All was food for his mockery. He was the
speaking picture of the follies and foibles of his day.
The mirror he holds up to the age is a different one from that held up
by Socrates. To turn to the Old Comedy from Plato is a singular
experience. What has become of that company of courteous gentlemen with
their pleasant ways and sensitive feelings and fastidious tastes? Not a
trace of them is to be found in these boisterous plays, each coarser and
more riotous than the last. To place them in the audience is much more
difficult than to imagine Spenser or Sir Philip Sidney listening to
Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, just to the degree that Elizabeth's court was
on a lower level of civilization than the circle around Pericles, and
Aristophanes capable of more kinds of vulgarity and indecency than
Shakespeare ever dreamed of.
None the less there is a close relationship between the comedy of Athens
and the comedy of sixteenth-century England. The Zeitgeist of those
periods of splendor and magnificent vigor was in many points, the most
important points, alike. The resemblance between Aristophanes and certain
of the comedy parts of Shakespeare jumps to the eye. The spirit of their
times is in them. There is the same tremendous energy and verve and
vitality; the same swinging, swashbuckling spirit; the same exuberant,
effervescing flow of language; the same rollicking, uproarious fun.
Falstaff is a character out of Aristophanes raised to the nth power;
Poins, Ancient Pistol, Mistress Quickly, might have come straight out of
any of his plays.
The resemblance is not on the surface only. The two men were alike in
the essential genius of their comedy. In those supreme ages of the drama,
Elizabethan England and the Athens of Pericles, the step from the sublime
to the ridiculous was easily taken. Uproarious comedy flourished side by
side with gorgeous tragedy, and when one passed away the other passed
away too. There is a connection between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Aristophanes' comedy and, pre-eminently, Shakespeare's comedy, and theirs
alone, has a kinship with tragedy. "The drama's laws the drama's patrons
give." The audiences to whose capacity for heightened emotion Lear and
the Oedipus Rex were addressed, were the same that delighted in Falstaff
and in Aristophanes' maddest nonsense, and when an age succeeded in no
wise less keen intellectually, but of thinner emotions, great comedy as
well as great tragedy departed.
Greek drama had reached its summit and was nearing its decline when
Aristophanes began to write. Of the Old Comedy, as it is called, we have
little; none of the plays of Aristophanes' often successful rivals, and
only eleven of the many he himself wrote; but the genre is clearly to be
seen in those eleven. There were but three actors. A chorus divided the
action by song and dance (there was no curtain) and often took part in
the dialogue. About halfway through, the plot, a very loose matter at
best, came practically to an end, and the chorus made a long address to
the audience, which aired the author's opinions and often had nothing to
do with the play. After that would follow scenes more or less connected.
A dull picture, this, of a brilliantly entertaining reality. Nobody and
nothing escaped the ridicule of the Old Comedy. The gods came in for
their share; so did the institutions dearest to the Athenians; so did the
most popular and powerful individuals, often by name. The freedom of
speech is staggering to our ideas.
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Aristophanes' audiences set no limits at all. Were Plato's characters
found among them, the meditative PhÊdrus, the gentle-mannered Agathon,
Socrates, the philosophic, himself? Beyond all question. They sat in the
theatre for hours on end, applauding a kind of Billingsgate Falstaff at
his worst never approached; listening to violent invectives against the
men -- and the women -- of Athens as a drunken, greedy, venal, vicious
lot; laughing at jokes that would have put Rabelais to the blush.
Such a theatre to our notions is not a place gentlemen of the Platonic
stamp would frequent. A polite MoliËre comedy would be the kind of thing
best suited to them, or if they must have improprieties to divert them,
they should be suggested, not shouted. But our Athenians were not French
seventeenth-century nobles, nor yet of Schnitzler's twentieth-century
Vienna; they were vigorous, hardy, hearty men; lovers of good talk but
talk with a body to it, and lovers quite as much of physical prowess;
hard-headed men, too, who could drink all night and discuss matters for
clear heads only; realists as well, who were not given to drawing a veil
before any of life's facts. The body was of tremendous importance,
acknowledged to be so, quite as much as the mind and the spirit.
Such were Plato's gentlemen and such were Aristophanes' audiences. The
comic theatre was a means of working off the exuberant energy of
abounding vitality. There were no limitations to the subjects it could
treat or the way of treating them. The result is that the distinctive
quality of the Old Comedy cannot be illustrated by quotation. The most
characteristic passages are unprintable. Something completely indecent is
caricatured, wildly exaggerated, repeated in a dozen different ways, all
fantastically absurd and all incredibly vulgar. The truth is that the
jokes are often very funny. To read Aristophanes through at a sitting is
to have Victorian guide posts laid low. He is so frank, so fearless, so
completely without shame, one ends by feeling that indecency is just a
part of life and a part with specially humorous possibilities. There is
nothing of Peeping Tom anywhere, no sly whispering from behind a hand.
The plainest and clearest words speak everything out unabashed. Life
looks a coarse and vulgar thing, lived at the level of nature's primitive
needs, but it never looks a foul and rotten thing. Degeneracy plays no
part. It is the way of a virile world, of robust men who can roar with
laughter at any kind of slapstick, decent or indecent, but chiefly the
last.
Look upon this picture and on this. It is impossible for us to-day to
make a coherent whole out of Aristophanes' Athens and Plato's. But if
ever a day comes when our intelligentsia is made up of our star football
players we shall be on the way to understanding the Athenians -- as
Aristophanes saw them.