The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics by Matthew Wright (review)

Matthew Wright’s (hereafter W) purpose in this book is to place the origins of “literariness” and of the literary critical tradition in the last third of the 5th century, further back than is traditional. He approaches this task in his first chapter by examining the problems of using comic evidence. Judicious criticism of the idea of Athens as a “performance culture” leads to the definition of various “target audiences” for Old Comedy, including an élite group of readers. The next section, on the interpretation of jokes, leans toward Pelling’s view that we must ask of them two questions: what knowledge was necessary for the original audience’s understanding, and what conditions were required for the scene to have been constructed thus? This leads on to the problem of the author: W notes that, since comedy is fundamentally “dialogic,” most of what is heard is attributable to characters, not the author himself. He insists, however, that even where the author appears to identify himself with a character and even in those parabases which purport to offer the author’s views directly, “we can never trust a single word that is said in a comedy” (14). W suggests we can protect ourselves best from misconception by using an “audience-centred approach,” rather than an author-centred one. He argues that comedy is not an analytical, but a “refractive” form, using concepts already known by the audience to make its humour. He concludes by examining how refraction operates, taking as examples the “social utility of literature” (used ironically, if not critically, by Aristophanes) and “the importance of being clever.”

Chapter 2 takes the discussion of Old Comedy’s “literariness” further via the question of how comic dramatists regarded prizes. Using Bourdieu as a theoretical prop, W reveals the presence of an “anti-prize” mentality (more usually associated with the fourth-century critics) alongside the expected desire to win. Evidence from parabases appears to open up a gap between popular audiences responsible (through their influence upon the judges) for awarding the prizes and a more discerning “target” audience who will properly appreciate the subtleties of the poet’s text. This insight paves the way for the remaining three chapters, in which W looks at the criteria that emerge from examination of Old Comedy for the evaluation of literature. In Chapter 3, he deals further with “novelty”: while parabases appear to claim it for the poet as a positive good, its negative treatment in the plays themselves—and especially a contrast between the claim to poetic innovation in the Clouds and the use in the play itself of motifs attacked there—rather suggests an ironic game. He argues that Lucian’s view of novelty as a sign of uninformed popular judgement rather than informed élite evaluation derives from Old Comedy. He ends the chapter by noting just how much material in Old Comedy is recycled and listing out the rehashes in Frogs (100–102). His fourth chapter examines the metaphorical language of criticism, noting the change from its early Greek poetic use as descriptive to an evaluative sense in Old Comedy. His categories (self-confessedly arbitrary) are: temperature; air, atmosphere and weather; craft and construction; bodily functions; art and life; drink; food. The final category is the only one that appears original to comedy. W’s conclusion is that these metaphors show a predominant interest in style and that “far from formulating a clear set of criteria for the judgment of literature, the comedians are . . . being deliberately obscure and hard to pin down” (139). In the final chapter, W discusses the comedian as reader, arguing that, among other things, the “huge and detailed knowledge of poetry which [the texts] display” (143) demonstrates that their writers paid the type of close attention to literary phenomena that could only have come from study of texts. To substantiate his claim, W deals with various types of quotation, with parody as...