Alexis: The Fragments; A Commentary by W. Geoffrey Arnott (review)

594Comparative Drama drama in general, and the Stuart masque in particular, the volume's silence in this area is remarkable. But it is symptomatic of a wider failure to engage with contemporary scholarship. Matters of longstanding and keen debate between critics and academics are hastily circumnavigated , even where they are germane—even fundamental—to the subject of the book. What were the effects upon playing styles of the use of boy actors in women's roles on the Elizabethan stage, for example ? The matter is left unresolved: some scholars (who may be called the illusionists) believe that the boys acted naturally and realistically, and were convincing in their parts; others (the formalists ) think that the non-realistic mode of the Elizabethan stage permitted a detached, stylized, even burlesque style of acting. (91) Such a conclusion will satisfy neither the student in need of clear guidance nor the specialist aware of the issues involved and expecting a detailed engagement with them. Clearly to halt the narrative in order to chart and refight every scholarly squabble would place an unbearable strain upon the reader and should not be the aim of a general survey like this volume. But, as Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack's recent one-volume survey English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1996) shows, a history of the theater can be politically engaged (and engagingly polemical) without losing its capacity to inform and entertain the general reader. The sub-title to this volume, A History ofDrama and Performance, suggested that Styan might find his distinctive angle on the material in a focus on the plays as performed rather than as textual survivals. But in practice the analysis of performance was largely restricted to descriptions of the configurations of the original acting space and suggestions about likely styles of playing. There was room for a volume which drew substantially upon the evidence of recent performance history (in the manner of Shepherd and Womack's study or Peter J. Smith's Social Shakespeare [1995]) to offer a genuinely illuminating dialogue between page and stage, but the passing allusions to modern revivals here are too brief to do more than illustrate the plays' continued playability. GREG WALKER University of Leicester W. Geoffrey Arnott. Alexis: The Fragments; A Commentary. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxi + 886. $175.00. The Greek comic poet Alexis appears to have lived for a century or thereabouts, from the 370s to the 270s B.C., and an entry in a Byzantine dictionary records that he composed 245 comedies. The figure is probably no exaggeration: titles of 137 different plays are preserved in Reviews595 ancient sources, and in addition to the 260-odd fragments assignable to these comedies, there are seventy-five or so more that cannot be attributed to an identifiable work. Even over so long a life span, it is unlikely that Alexis wrote exclusively for production at the two major comic festivals in Athens. Amott suggests (15) that some of his plays may have been staged in rural Attica, but it is plausible that he composed at least occasionally for the professional traveling troupes, like the so-called "Artists of Dionysus," that brought Athenian comedy to theaters throughout the Greek-speaking world in the fourth and third centuries B. C. (see Niall Slater, "The Fabrication of Comic Illusion," in Beyond Aristophanes: Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy, ed. G. Dobrov [1995], 29-45). The active career of Alexis spanned the eras of Middle Comedy and New Comedy, as they were dubbed by Hellenistic scholars. Old Comedy is represented for us by the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes: the plots are based on extravagant schemes concocted by wily and irrepressible heroes and heroines such as Lysistrata, who inaugurates an international women's sex strike in order to end the war between Athens and Sparta. New Comedy, which we know chiefly through the plays of Menander and the Latin adaptations of Plautus and Terence, dealt mainly with middle-class domestic life and above all the complications resulting from adolescent infatuations. About the nature of Middle Comedy we are largely dependent on conjecture based on numerous but meager fragments, but it seems...