Aristophanes by Lois Spatz (review)

Reviews 371 Lois Spatz. Aristophanes. Twayne World Authors Series. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1978. Pp. 166. $9.95. Most books about Aristophanes are what Aristophanes himself never was: dogmatic, ponderous, and dull. To the short list of honorable excep­ tions may now be added the present volume. It is a concise work, in deference to the concept of the series in which it appears, and one often senses that the author would have preferred to examine substantial issues at greater length. Nevertheless, it contrives to include not merely a syste­ matic examination of the comedies themselves, but also a good deal of background material on Aristophanes’ life and times, the organization of the Dionysiac festivals, and Greek theatre production. It is therefore ad­ mirably suitable for the beginning student, while still offering much of interest to the specialist. The approach to the plays is refreshingly undoctrinaire. While paying due respect to Comford and Whitman, and indeed at times strongly sup­ porting them, the author resists the temptation to confine the corpus within a critical strait-jacket. Her more sensible, and more pragmatic, view is that each play was composed in a different set of circumstances, with different ends in mind; that audience attitudes and expectations fluctuated widely, under the pressures of war and changing social cir­ cumstances; and that the playwright’s prime duty was to please. In this respect her approach to The Clouds—a play which has conspicuously resisted superimposed theories—is indicative and illuminating. She sweeps away the voluminous bric-à-brac of irrelevant scholarship, rejects any intended resemblance between the comic and the “real” Socrates, and bases her own analysis on internal comic values. The play’s dominant figure is seen simply as a caricature of ‘The Philosopher,” labeled So­ crates because that individual’s public eccentricities made him the most newsworthy of the breed, and the most obvious target for humor. Strepsiades , it is argued, is no less a caricature, and the play is not a satire of the Socratic method, or anybody’s method in particular, but of philosophy in general and the pitfalls to which its devotees are liable. The author suggests, convincingly, that Aristophanes, by the end, is even laughing at himself. This section concludes with valuable remarks about the play’s internal inconsistencies, which have been copiously misunderstood and sparked off lengthy disquisitions elsewhere. It might have gone still fur­ ther and stressed that the comic character called Socrates is himself inconsistent. The actor playing the role can be led to diametrically opposed interpretations, depending on which segment of the play he is working on; and it seems clear that, as regularly in Aristophanes, the character changes to suit the immediate joke, rather than the joke chang­ ing to suit the character. Analysis of other much-discussed plays shows the same clear-headed­ ness. Lysistrata, for example, is treated twice: once, briefly in the context of the earlier anti-war plays, and again at greater length in its own right. Its obscenity is neither minimized nor exaggerated, but placed firmly in its proper context, and, as with Thesmophoriazusae, due attention is paid to what Aristophanes could afford to write about, and what he could not, in the critical year of 411. Similarly, it is argued that The Frogs—in spite 372 Comparative Drama of its dogged reappearance in anthologies of criticism—is not really a play about poetry at all, but uses poetry as a metaphor for politics. If I might venture one criticism, it is that, on occasion, the work is not pragmatic enough. Aristophanes, after all— as Flickinger was fond of pointing out—was competing for a prize; and there is a limit to the amount of unpalatable truth that a playwright can offer his public while still hoping for approbation. Although the philosophy of the cloud chorus is, by definition, nebulous, perhaps their final return to orthodoxy is due to nothing less mundane than self-serving obeisance to conventional mor­ ality—like the obligatory praise of the institution of marriage which customarily, and unconvincingly, rounds off Restoration comedy. And do we need any deeper explanation for the volte-face of Demos at the end of The Knights...