Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon by Mario Telò (review)

The reception of Greek Comedy in antiquity is a thorny topic for literary historians. By the end of Aristophanes’s career (380s BCE), the genre was undergoing significant changes and within half a century would look drastically different in terms of its focus, tone, and form than the plays of Aristophanes’s early career. What is clear is that Aristophanes quickly became the figurehead of what came to be known as “Old Comedy,” yet this was not an entirely obvious choice. If the only information that we had to go on was the number of victories in dramatic competitions, we might expect one of Aristophanes’s main rivals, Cratinus or Eupolis, to emerge as the figurehead of Greek Old Comedy. Why Hellenistic and subsequent ancient scholars singled out Aristophanes as Old Comedy’s star is an important question if we are ever to make sense of the genre’s complicated reception by later authors, including Thomas More, Ben Jonson, and Molière.

Mario Telò contends that the answer to this question can be found in the famous failure of Clouds in 423 BCE. Despite being arguably one of Aristophanes’s most well-known plays today, the play came in third (last), losing to Cratinus’s Pytine (Wine Flask) and Amepsias’s Connus. This loss appears to have been particularly jarring for Aristophanes. In Wasps, performed in the following year, Aristophanes blames his audience for failing to recognize the service his comedy was doing for them, and he reiterates this charge in the surviving revised version of Clouds, which was composed most likely sometime between 419 and 417 BCE and was never staged. For Telò, Aristophanes’s defense of the original Clouds in these two plays is a form of “proto-canonical discourse”—that is to say, Telò regards Aristophanes’s desire to be afforded a place in the literary canon as directly contributing to the plots of these two plays and, more broadly, to how later Hellenistic scholars construed the comic canon (7). Telò’s contention that the narrative that Aristophanes provides about Clouds’ loss was an important factor in determining the interest of later critics and readers is not in and of itself a new observation, and Socrates’s prominence in Clouds also certainly contributed to the play’s popularity. Where Telò diverges from previous approaches is in his focus on Aristophanes’s use of bodily language and specifically the image of the cloak. Drawing on what he calls “the recent ‘affective turn’ in critical theory” (15), Telò reads such images as a kind of metaliterary discourse through which Aristophanes challenges the legitimacy of his rivals and promotes his own comic vision.

The book focuses exclusively on Aristophanes’s immediate response to the loss of Clouds, devoting three chapters to Wasps and a single chapter to the revised Clouds. In his discussion of the former play, Telò follows other scholars in adopting Aristophanes’s self-presentation in the parabasis of Wasps as a lens through which to read the conflict between Bdelycleon and his father, Philocleon, over the latter’s obsessive commitment to jury service. As Telò explores in his second chapter, Bdelycleon’s “filial caretaking” enacts Aristophanes’s position as the caretaker of the audience (27–28), a position that Aristophanes had initially established in Knights and which was presumably called into question by the loss of the original Clouds. Here, cloak imagery becomes a reflection of dramatic reception: the short and insufficient tribōn worn by Philocleon recalls the older Cratinean comic poetics that Aristophanes seeks to replace with his warm and enveloping chlaina. While there is a lot of nuanced reading going on in this chapter and the subsequent ones, one is left wondering about the degree to which this language would have in fact “affected” the audience. That is to say, would the ancient audience have picked up on Aristophanes’s clever use of cloak imagery and, as...