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Reviewed by:
  • Aristophanes: An Introduction
  • Charles Platter
James Robson . Aristophanes: An Introduction. London: Duckworth, 2009. Pp. xi + 244. $27.00.

Teachers looking for a general introduction to ancient Greek comedy are likely to reach for Kenneth Dover's venerable Aristophanic Comedy (University of California Press, 1972) or Douglas McDowell's Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays (Oxford University Press, 1995). James Robson's lively book gives them a new option, however, for it measures up well to its competitors, [End Page 242] and in many ways is superior to them. I would use it in a course on ancient comedy or on Aristophanes. Moreover, Robson's attention to dramatic issues and recent production history is an attractive feature for students of theater, although students will require supplemental bibliography in order to grasp sufficiently some of the issues raised.

Before discussing the content of the individual chapters, it is necessary to mention two issues that will affect the way this text is used. First, a standard feature of such volumes has been the presence of synopses of the plays of Aristophanes. In fact, for Dover and McDowell, such synopses constitute well over half of the respective books. By way of contrast, Robson completely rejects this type of presentation in favor of an exposition that concentrates on Aristophanic stagecraft and the arsenal of comic techniques he deploys in his work. Such an emphasis inevitably makes it necessary to draw examples from the plays and to contextualize the passages quoted, but the contextualizations fall far short of plot synopses. As a result, the reader who comes to this text in search of detailed summaries of individual works may well be disappointed by Robson's approach. I am not one of those readers, however, and I confess that as a teacher I am never quite sure what to do with the plot summaries in Dover and McDowell, and therefore am reluctant to assign them. In my experience they are too long for easy reference and insufficiently focused to serve as stimulating interpretations of the plays. Consequently, an introductory text that that uses examples from a broad range of plays to illustrate the dynamic features of Aristophanic comedy is one that my students and I could use with profit.

A second preliminary consideration concerns Robson's decision not to soft-peddle controversial topics but to bring readers to the point where they can "make up their own minds about the scholarly controversies that still rage about Aristophanic comedy" (ix). This is a laudable and ambitious intention, whether the points in question have to do with the festival context, staging, judgment, or the countless literary questions that have been the subject of scholarly research. To acquire such a competence, however, requires access to a broad range of primary evidence and informed opinions against which independent opinions could be formed. To be sure, Robson introduces the beginning reader of Aristophanes to a range of scholarly opinion on many topics, but overall the book does not offer enough bibliographic help to orient sufficiently the beginning reader. Particularly regrettable is the absence of any reference to Slater and Csapo, The Context of Greek Drama (University of Michigan Press, 1995), which provides English translations and commentary for most of the important texts relating to ancient theater. Students would also profit from Niall Slater's erudite and stage-savvy Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and A. M. Bowie's very suggestive Aristophanes: Myth, [End Page 243] Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Moreover, the editorial decisions—which can probably be laid at the door of Duckworth—to banish the footnotes to the end of the book and to offer a bibliography consisting only of books and articles mentioned multiple times (a convention that serves the interests of no one) has the effect of obscuring information in an environment that ostensibly seeks to make it more available. The result is that users of the book will need substantial bibliographical help if they are going to be able to make intelligent decisions about the complex questions raised by the evidence.

The book is divided into ten chapters, of which the first three discuss...

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