Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes Brill’s Companions to Classical Reception Series Editor Kyriakos N. Demetriou VOLUME 8 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bccr Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristophanes Edited by Philip Walsh LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Shayna Pond ©2009 University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Walsh, Philip, 1977– editor. Title: Brill’s companion to the reception of Aristophanes / edited by Philip  Walsh. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Brill’s companions to  classical reception, ISSN 2213-1246 ; volume 8 | Includes bibliographical  references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016024324 (print) | LCCN 2016028005 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004270688 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004324657 (e-book) | ISBN  9789004324657 (E-book) Subjects: LCSH: Aristophanes—Criticism and interpretation. |  Aristophanes—Appreciation. Classification: LCC PA3879 .B85 2016 (print) | LCC PA3879 (ebook) | DDC  882/.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024324 Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2213-1426 isbn 978-90-04-27068-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32465-7 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vii Philip Walsh Notes on Contributors xiv PART 1 Aristophanes, Ancient and Modern: Debates, Education, and Juxtapositions 1 Aristophanes in Antiquity: Reputation and Reception 3 Niall W. Slater 2 Modern Theory and Aristophanes 22 Charles Platter 3 Aristophanes, Gender, and Sexuality 44 James Robson 4 Aristophanes, Education, and Performance in Modern Greece 67 Stavroula Kiritsi 5 Teaching Aristophanes in the American College Classroom 88 John Given and Ralph M. Rosen 6 The “English Aristophanes”: Fielding, Foote, and Debates over Literary Satire 109 Matthew J. Kinservik 7 Teknomajikality and the Humanimal in Aristophanes’ Wasps 129 Mark Payne 8 Branding Irony: Comedy and Crafting the Public Persona 148 Donna Zuckerberg vi contents PART 2 Outreach: Adaptations, Translations, Scholarship, and Performances 9 Aristophanes in Early-Modern Fragments: Le Loyer’s La Néphélococugie (1579) and Racine’s Les Plaideurs (1668) 175 Cécile Dudouyt 10 Aristophanes and the French Translations of Anne Dacier 195 Rosie Wyles 11 The Verbal and the Visual: Aristophanes’ Nineteenth-Century English Translators 217 Philip Walsh 12 Comedy and Tragedy in Agon(y): The 1902 Comedy Panathenaia of Andreas Nikolaras 240 Gonda Van Steen 13 J.T. Sheppard and the Cambridge Birds of 1903 and 1924 263 C.W. Marshall 14 Murray’s Aristophanes 284 Mike Lippman 15 “Attic Salt into an Undiluted Scots”: Aristophanes and the Modernism of Douglas Young 307 Gregory Baker 16 Classical Reception in Posters of Lysistrata: The Visual Debate Between Traditional and Feminist Imagery 331 Alexandre G. Mitchell 17 Afterword 369 David Konstan General Bibliography 377 Index Nominum et Rerum 427 Preface and Acknowledgements What were the origins of Old Attic Comedy? What was the nature of Aristo- phanic satire? What were Aristophanes’ political views? What influence did he (and other playwrights) have on contemporary Athenian life? How and in what contexts was comedy performed? Who comprised Aristophanes’ audi- ence? To what end did he employ obscenity and sexuality? Were his comic heroines taken seriously, or were they laughed at and written off? What did Dionysus have to do with it? These are only some of the interpretive questions that have been asked about the plays of Aristophanes and that have affected his reception since antiquity. All are posed in the past tense, but as this volume hopes to demon- strate, Aristophanic comedy remains in a vivid present tense. This is not to allege that the reception of Aristophanes has been historically consistent or aesthetically uncomplicated; his plays, after all, have not always been regarded as relevant or artistically significant. For instance, some, like Clouds and Wealth [Plutus], enjoyed immense popularity for centuries, while others, most nota- bly Lysistrata, were discounted, censored, maligned, and suppressed. Today, though, things are different; in fact, in typical Aristophanic fashion, they are topsy-turvy. Lysistrata is now the play most widely translated, adapted, read, taught, and discussed in the United States and elsewhere; for non-specialists it is Aristophanic comedy. This upswing in popularity runs counter to the play’s historically negative reception, but it is not completely unexpected if one understands that ambivalence has marked the reception of Aristophanes since the plays were first performed in Athens. In addition, conflicts, controversies, and disputes—at times social, political, aesthetic, ideological, and cultural— have commonly accompanied interest in his work. Many of the uneasy and tense relationships that Aristophanic comedy has had with a post-Aristophanic world are challenging to unpack, but the chap- ters in this volume endeavor to do just that. Conflicts emerge, for instance, when a translator seeks to render Aristophanes into a modern language. Controversies flare when a theater group adapts a comic play and must make production choices about dialogue, staging, props, costumes, lights, and music (among other things). Disputes often erupt when teaching Aristophanes in the classroom. Ambivalence also runs deep in the study of classical reception: many of us read and study the extant plays and fragments of Aristophanes in order to learn about ancient Athens and its culture. In that process, how- ever, we often learn a great deal about ourselves when evaluating Aristophanes viii preface and acknowledgements in the contemporary moment. What are our preferences for comedy, democ- racy, and the power of art? Do these preferences help to clarify why the plays Aristophanes are important at certain moments in history but not in others? When does Aristophanes become modern? This last question was posed to me during a question and answer session in 2008. It was an unpretentious query that anyone who had spent years work- ing with the comic plays should have been able to answer. In that moment, though, I stumbled, speculating half-heartedly about the late eighteenth century—as if one could put a time stamp on a question that is quite compli- cated and nuanced. Fortunately, I was not asked to elaborate, and only recently have I come to realize that “When does Aristophanes become modern?” is more of a riddle than a question. There is no linear or straightforward answer; the reception history of Aristophanes is at once vast and yet particular, global in scope but also confined in places to culturally specific contexts. Such is the field of classical reception studies; the research we follow is diverse and com- plicated, and our data always grows and shifts. Despite this untidiness, I would like to attempt a direct answer to this question, knowing full well the risks at hand: that Aristophanes becomes modern when he matters again—when his plays become more than inert records of the past, studied by philologists and antiquarians, and are explicitly intertwined with (and reflected in) con- temporary debates over satire, politics, poetry, history, gender, and sexuality. Aristophanic comedy becomes modern when translations, adaptations, and performances become joyous experiments in the vernacular, as when Anne Dacier translated Clouds and Plutus into French in 1684 or when Swinburne translated the parabasis of Birds in 1880. Aristophanes becomes modern when poets, critics, playwrights, historians, artists, and teachers actively reinterpret the comic plays for the here and now. The plays of Aristophanes have mat- tered, and they will continue to do so. This volume, the first wholly devoted to their reception, will examine critical moments where Aristophanes’ pres- ence has emerged in force in the post-Aristophanic world. It will explore how Aristophanes matters. Writing in 1837, Benjamin Dann Walsh (1808–69), a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, made the following observation in a preface to his verse translations of Acharnians, Knights, and Clouds: The Comedies of Aristophanes are the Pompeii of Athens. In them have been enshrined the records of the private and public life of the Athenians during the most brilliant period of the republic; and in them alone we must seek for that personal knowledge of the high and mighty geniuses preface and acknowledgements ix of those days, which cannot be hoped or desired from the grave writings of the tragedian, the philosopher, or the historian.1 Walsh’s praise of Aristophanes is elegant, full of romance, flourish, and senti- ment, but his comments also reveal several things significant to the reception of Aristophanes, both ancient and modern. Like Pompeii, parts and pieces of Aristophanic comedy have long been admired, discussed, adapted, and inter- preted. However, like the notorious relics of Pompeii, other parts and pieces have been hidden, deliberately kept secret or obscured because of their per- ceived licentiousness. If perhaps we consider the comedies of Aristophanes as “the Pompeii of Athens,” then studying their reception will seem a methodical stratigraphy of the ancient plays and the many layers of modern context. To investigate the dynamic, often volcanic, assimilation of Old Comedy into the ideals and ideas of later antiquity and the modern world is to chart the cultural fault lines along which the plays of Aristophanes have been plotted—to see where they themselves have prompted shifts and outright fractures in new contexts and strange worlds. Central to the long history of Greek drama at large, the study of the reception of Aristophanes can bring us not only to a better understanding of the ancient plays, but also a greater knowledge of their pliancy across time and space. Given that the plays of Aristophanes have circulated for nearly 2,500 years, it is impossible for one book to tell their story of reception in full. The goal of this volume is to provide a substantive account of the reception of Aristophanes from antiquity to the present and to point interested readers to the many monographs, edited collections, journal articles, dissertations, essays, and blogs that treat other aspects of his reception.2 Gaps inevitably remain, and I look forward to future scholarly work that pushes the boundaries of what we know about the reception of Aristophanes and that forges connections across temporal, linguistic, cultural, national, and disciplinary boundaries. 1  Walsh (1837) x. He planned to translate the other eight plays, but left England for the United States, where he became a farmer, businessman, and state entomologist for Illinois. See Venn and Venn (1954) 33; and Hall (2011) 25. 2  References to a wide range of studies on the reception of Aristophanes can be found in indi- vidual chapters and in the general bibliography. In addition, note the following work (not cited elsewhere, in chronological order): Hunter (2000), Prasch (2012), Nooter (2013), Mhire and Frost (2014), Pormann (2014), Sharland (2014), Baldwin (2015), Morales (2015), and Hall (2016). The collected essays in Olson (2014b) deserve especial notice. Van Zyl Smit (2016) appeared too late to be incorporated into this volume.