Paedeia Through Laughter: Jonson’s Aristophanic Appeal to Human Intelligence by Aliki Lafkidou Dick (review)

360 Comparative Drama was admired by the American, English, and European intellectuals who knew him. Professor Doulis—himself a published creative writer—has written a most enjoyable and useful book, which is an important addition to the Twayne World Authors Series and a substantial contribution to modem Greek literary scholarship in either Greek or English. M. BYRON RAIZIS Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Aliki Lafkidou Dick. Paedeia Through Laughter: Jonson’s Aristophanic Appeal to Human Intelligence. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1974. Pp. xiv + 141. As far as we know, Ben Jonson was first publicly compared to Aristophanes in 1602, when he was still occupied with writing comical satires; but the comparison had been apt even before that, and it con­ tinued to be more or less apt throughout the rest of his career. After the publication of Whalley’s edition of the plays in 1756, which reprinted in its notes John Upton’s observations about Jonson’s indebtedness to Aristophanes, few serious readers could have been unaware of the special dimension that distinguished Jonson’s comedy from that of his contemporaries. Moreover, in this century we have had half a dozen useful articles on the subject and, before Professor Dick’s study appeared, one full-length treatment of the matter in Coburn Gum’s The Aristo­ phanic Comedies of Ben Jonson (The Hague, 1969). The details of Jonson’s borrowing from this source are thus fairly well known. What Professor Dick has attempted to do in the present study is to establish more precisely the nature of the relationship that produced that indebtedness. In general, she maintains that what attracted Jonson to Aristophanes was a set of assumptions that the Greek author made about man’s nature, his penchant for error and his capacity for improve­ ment. She notes Aristophanes’s belief that reason could save man the extravagances that folly and self-deception usually bring him to, and she suggests that he wrote his satirical plays to show his fellows what degradation they were capable of and how by the exercise of reason they might rise above it. These views, according to Professor Dick, were views that Jonson found congenial and, as his work attests, useful. He differed from Aristophanes principally in that he never presented the positive side of the argument, never showed how man by using reason can rise from the mire and attain to his proper godlike stature, but concentrated instead on the spectacle of human degredation “in order to show how imperative is the necessity for change.” Professor Dick demonstrates her thesis by examining four of Jonson’s plays: Volpone and The Alchemist, which she compares respectively with The Knights and The Clouds, Every Man Out of His Humor, and Bar­ tholomew Fair. Jonson, she suggests, saw in Aristophanes’s plays a world divided into two groups of characters: the eirons, self-depreciators or clever dissemblers, and alazons, the liars, cheats, humbugs, rascals, Reviews 361 and quacks. It was the function of the eirons to expose, castigate, and if necesary drive out the alazons. Hence the eirons, at least in Aristo­ phanes, sometimes served as the mouthpiece for the dramatist, and it was these who enabled comedy to perform its educational function, which for both Aristophanes and Jonson was the most important function of all. Although she recognizes that Jonson himself never used these two terms, Professor Dick believes that he consciously made use of the dichotomy in human society that they represent and frequently employed two similar groups in his work, most notably in Volpone. There char­ acteristically he also did something different. Having clearly made Vol­ pone and Mosca serve as eirons in opposition to such alazons as Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, he made them alazons as well, so that the play, but for the presence of Celia and Bonario, would be a play with all alazons in it and only counterfeit eirons. This helps to explain, she thinks, why Volpone ends as it does—with valleys of depravity aplenty but virtually no peaks of goodness in it. Yet the total view of the world that we get from such a presentation is not entirely negative, according to Professor Dick; degenerate as the world...