True comedy

From The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

"TRUE COMEDY," said Voltaire, "is the speaking picture of the Follies and Foibles of a Nation." He had Aristophanes in mind, and no better description could be given of the Old Comedy of Athens. To read Aristophanes is in some sort like reading an Athenian comic paper. All the life of Athens is there: the politics of the day and the politicians; the war party and the anti-war party; pacifism, votes for women, free trade, fiscal reform, complaining taxpayers, educational theories, the current religious and literary talk -- everything, in short, that interested the average citizen. All was food for his mockery. He was the speaking picture of the follies and foibles of his day.

The mirror he holds up to the age is a different one from that held up by Socrates. To turn to the Old Comedy from Plato is a singular experience. What has become of that company of courteous gentlemen with their pleasant ways and sensitive feelings and fastidious tastes? Not a trace of them is to be found in these boisterous plays, each coarser and more riotous than the last. To place them in the audience is much more difficult than to imagine Spenser or Sir Philip Sidney listening to Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, just to the degree that Elizabeth's court was on a lower level of civilization than the circle around Pericles, and Aristophanes capable of more kinds of vulgarity and indecency than Shakespeare ever dreamed of.

None the less there is a close relationship between the comedy of Athens and the comedy of sixteenth-century England. The Zeitgeist of those periods of splendor and magnificent vigor was in many points, the most important points, alike. The resemblance between Aristophanes and certain of the comedy parts of Shakespeare jumps to the eye. The spirit of their times is in them. There is the same tremendous energy and verve and vitality; the same swinging, swashbuckling spirit; the same exuberant, effervescing flow of language; the same rollicking, uproarious fun. Falstaff is a character out of Aristophanes raised to the nth power; Poins, Ancient Pistol, Mistress Quickly, might have come straight out of any of his plays.

The resemblance is not on the surface only. The two men were alike in the essential genius of their comedy. In those supreme ages of the drama, Elizabethan England and the Athens of Pericles, the step from the sublime to the ridiculous was easily taken. Uproarious comedy flourished side by side with gorgeous tragedy, and when one passed away the other passed away too. There is a connection between the sublime and the ridiculous. Aristophanes' comedy and, pre-eminently, Shakespeare's comedy, and theirs alone, has a kinship with tragedy. "The drama's laws the drama's patrons give." The audiences to whose capacity for heightened emotion Lear and the Oedipus Rex were addressed, were the same that delighted in Falstaff and in Aristophanes' maddest nonsense, and when an age succeeded in no wise less keen intellectually, but of thinner emotions, great comedy as well as great tragedy departed.

Greek drama had reached its summit and was nearing its decline when Aristophanes began to write. Of the Old Comedy, as it is called, we have little; none of the plays of Aristophanes' often successful rivals, and only eleven of the many he himself wrote; but the genre is clearly to be seen in those eleven. There were but three actors. A chorus divided the action by song and dance (there was no curtain) and often took part in the dialogue.

About halfway through, the plot, a very loose matter at best, came practically to an end, and the chorus made a long address to the audience, which aired the author's opinions and often had nothing to do with the play. After that would follow scenes more or less connected. A dull picture, this, of a brilliantly entertaining reality. Nobody and nothing escaped the ridicule of the Old Comedy. The gods came in for their share; so did the institutions dearest to the Athenians; so did the most popular and powerful individuals, often by name. The freedom of speech is staggering to our ideas.

Aristophanes' audiences set no limits at all. Were Plato's characters found among them, the meditative Phaedrus, the gentle-mannered Agathon, Socrates, the philosophic, himself? Beyond all question. They sat in the theatre for hours on end, applauding a kind of Billingsgate Falstaff at his worst never approached; listening to violent invectives against the men -- and the women -- of Athens as a drunken, greedy, venal, vicious lot; laughing at jokes that would have put Rabelais to the blush.

Such a theatre to our notions is not a place gentlemen of the Platonic stamp would frequent. A polite Moliere comedy would be the kind of thing best suited to them, or if they must have improprieties to divert them, they should be suggested, not shouted. But our Athenians were not French seventeenth-century nobles, nor yet of Schnitzler's twentieth-century Vienna; they were vigorous, hardy, hearty men; lovers of good talk but talk with a body to it, and lovers quite as much of physical prowess; hard-headed men, too, who could drink all night and discuss matters for clear heads only; realists as well, who were not given to drawing a veil before any of life's facts. The body was of tremendous importance, acknowledged to be so, quite as much as the mind and the spirit.

Such were Plato's gentlemen and such were Aristophanes' audiences. The comic theatre was a means of working off the exuberant energy of abounding vitality. There were no limitations to the subjects it could treat or the way of treating them. The result is that the distinctive quality of the Old Comedy cannot be illustrated by quotation. The most characteristic passages are unprintable. Something completely indecent is caricatured, wildly exaggerated, repeated in a dozen different ways, all fantastically absurd and all incredibly vulgar. The truth is that the jokes are often very funny. To read Aristophanes through at a sitting is to have Victorian guide posts laid low. He is so frank, so fearless, so completely without shame, one ends by feeling that indecency is just a part of life and a part with specially humorous possibilities. There is nothing of Peeping Tom anywhere, no sly whispering from behind a hand. The plainest and clearest words speak everything out unabashed. Life looks a coarse and vulgar thing, lived at the level of nature's primitive needs, but it never looks a foul and rotten thing. Degeneracy plays no part. It is the way of a virile world, of robust men who can roar with laughter at any kind of slapstick, decent or indecent, but chiefly the last.