Costume’s Comic and Intertextual Potential: The Case of Philocleon’s Cloak

Philocleon’s enforced costume change (Vesp. 1122–73) has rich potential as an exemplum through which to explore comic costume’s production of humor and its contribution to theatrical discourse. This discussion offers fresh observations about the humor generated from Philocleon’s costume change and identifies its “intertextual” relationship with Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Aristophanes’s Acharnians and Knights. The ‘cloak scene,’ it is argued, forms an integral part of the ongoing competition between the comic and tragic genre in Wasps. Moreover, this case study points to the on-going significance of costume in Aristophanes’s dialectic with tragedy and in his discourse on theatre in general.