Aristophanes: Poet and Dramatist by Rosemary M. Harriott (review)

192Comparative Drama scheme" wherein "characters appear to overshoot themselves wildly, only to land exactly where the plot requires them" (pp. 175-76). In "Crowd and Public in Bartholomew Fair" (1979), crowd and public seem more closely related in the title than in the essay itself: the former term refers to the play's spectacle of "organized confusion" in which die personae "are not a community but a crowd" (p. 190), while public, coming much later in the essay, seems to refer to Jonson's attitudes towards the "popular stage," with its "sensationalism and aimless bustle" p. 201). In three more essays, Salingar turns from Jonson to other areas of Jacobean drama. In "'Wit' in Jacobean Comedy" (1984), the author, supporting Bradbrook's thesis minimizing the alleged satire in City comedy, charts the course of wit in such plays. He finds that the term could mean either "natural gifts" or "mere verbal display" (p. 141), then "living by one's wits" (p. 150) —the latter use not didactic but a mixture of farce and realism. In "The Changeling and the Drama of Domestic Life" (1979), Salingar points out how in 1619-20 English domestic tragedy exalted "the ideal of honour by submitting it to extravagant tests" (p. 225), then discusses The Changeling as a play that deviates from this norm. And in "The Revenger's Tragedy and the Morality tradition" (1938)—Salingar's earliest essay—he states that the play contains powerful poetry and that it owes much in its construction to the Moralities. DONALD K. ANDERSON, JR. University of Missouri-Columbia Rosemary M. Harriott. Aristophanes: Poet and Dramatist. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Pp. vii + 194. $22.50. This is an idiosyncratic book. Harriott's purpose is "to discover why this scene, this speech is included, why here and not elsewhere" (p. 1) in the plays of Aristophanes (not later than the Frogs, save for a brief excursion into the Ecclesiazousae, pp. 154-56). What kinds of reasons might serve to answer questions of this sort? One might appeal to formal conventions. Thus, of the opening monologue of the Acharnions in which Dicaeopolis presents his situation: "This process turns out to be a focusing priamel which emphasizes its final element" (p. 5), and the speech is compared with Dejanira's in Sophocles' Trachiniae (similarly, Peace, in the Peace, is compared with Sophocles' Antigone, p. 124; the Wasps will "follow the tragic pattern," p. 140; Philocleon is a "Euripidean Phaedra," p. 148; etc.). Here, the jargon is unexplained, as often, but even if we understand that a "priamel" is a list of things in ascending order of value, has Harriott done more than state the obvious? The reference to tragedy is supposed, I imagine, to indicate a continuity over the genres in narrative technique, but nothing further is made of this. Later, Harriott tells us that "just as Euripides' Trojan Women was to display the pity of war by showing the suffering undergone by individual members of Priam's family as well as by the mass Reviews193 of Trojan women, so Acharnions illustrates the joys experienced by the one man who dared to make peace" (p. 96). If there is some subtle point to this analogy, it eludes me, and the topic is dropped without elaboration. In certain lines in the Clouds, we leam, "only the name Megacles does not begin with a vowel" (p. 8); this could conceivably be interesting if we were told what it signifies, but we are not. Details like this wander in and out of focus, and try the attention of the reader. One may, perhaps more profitably, appeal to theme or meaning in evaluating the placement of scenes in a play. Harriott inquires into the dramatic function of the chorus of frogs in the play named for them: "In one sense, it is merely to accompany and embellish the crossing of the lake" (p. 15). This is not startling news. Then: "Dionysus is shown as an individual struggling against a group who are no less powerful for being invisible" (p. 16). Is this a relevant aspect of the confrontation (assuming the frogs really were invisible)? How so? Perhaps it is the disjointed style...