Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy

leondumoulin.nl: Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (): Martin Revermann.
Table of contents

While he does not engage with every issue he raises in sufficient depth, Revermann provides a crucial advance on previous discussions the book comes thirty years after C. Chapter 2, "Performance Criticism: Point and Methods" 8—65 , addresses some important and underexplored methodological questions that often go unmentioned in such studies.


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After arguing that "no ancient statement known to [End Page ] me. Many of the issues raised non-competitive performances, pay for poets, the relative importance of dramatic festivals are equally important for the study of tragedy, and the book generally raises issues that students of tragic performance will need to consider.

A general vocabulary of theatre semiotics is introduced, helpfully, with specific examples examining how performance generally is framed. Revermann embarks on an ambitious project of replacing the "significant action" hypothesis which assumes that every significant action within a Greek play is indicated by the words a character says that has dominated discussions of ancient stagecraft. This is a very helpful discussion, and it is surely correct, culminating in a good articulation of Revermann's methodology 63— Again, the principal examples come from tragedy.

However, when Revermann invokes the question of on-stage frogs agreeing with my discussion, which in its way sought also to challenge the "significant action" hypothesis , I think he needlessly muddles the matter by imagining the possibility of subsequent, frogless performances, when, I would say, a great deal is lost as a result. For the value of this study lies not only in learning to recognize the value-laden components of the theatrical spectacle as conditioned by historical and cultural contexts.

Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy

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Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Revermann walks us through the sorts of things everyone wants to know but is sometimes afraid to ask: Revermann synthesizes well the copious recent scholarship on all these issues, and concludes with as much conviction as the evidence will allow that our texts--both comic and tragic, although Revermann discusses the two genres separately, sensitive to the different methodological problems they each present--are by and large "authentic" and "reflect an advanced stage of a play's evolution in which the experience of at least one production.

On the question of how generically typical of Old Comedy Aristophanes was, Revermann is similarly upbeat, concluding that his oeuvre, while distinctive in some respects for example, his integration of tragedy "at the lower levels of subplot and diction" p. The usual caveats are invoked a miniscule sample of textual evidence being certainly the most glaring and serious , but Revermann thinks we can speak meaningfully of "Aristophanes and his rivals" as a group.

The list of features that Revermann concludes were shared by all or most poets of Old Comedy at the "macro-level" is not especially surprising e. Chapter four, "Applying Performance Criticism," explores some these shared generic features in greater detail, beginning with a general discussion of the theatrical space of Old Comedy and followed by sections on gesture, arrivals and departures Revermann's updated version of what used to be called "exits and entrances" , the nature of Athenian audiences and their interaction with the performance.

This chapter is especially suffused with the disciplinary discourse of Theater Studies, with much talk of space and semantics, proxemics, chorality, Goffmanian framing, and so forth. I had mixed feelings about the results, however. To be sure, one could not ask for a more learned and thoroughly au courant scholarly treatment of these topics, and it is difficult not to be impressed by Revermann's command of methodological tools and models with which most classicists have only a passing acquaintance.

But when stripped of their updated, now more interdisciplinary, scholarly presentation, many of the conclusions sound quite familiar.

Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy

Do we really need Bakhtinian chronotopes, for example, to establish the significance of the fact that the Greek theater was an "open-air, daytime, environmental theatre with no artificial lighting" p. And is it not commonly accepted and often noted that Athenian drama "makes an enormous appeal to the imaginative power of its audience. Further, as a final example, I doubt that anyone would find the conclusion of Revermann's discussion of comic ugliness particularly surprising, that when poets of Old Comedy "deviate from the ubiquitous pattern of ugliness," such non-ugly characters take on considerable significance p.

The problem seems not so much the theoretical models themselves as the question of what they can tell us about Old Comedy which, in essence, has not already been articulated by means of more traditional approaches. To put this another way: If nothing else, this offers a shared theoretical framework and technical vocabulary, and a potential for productive comparative work.

I was often struck, however, by how many of Revermann's examples, adduced to illustrate various abstract points, seemed like the kind of things that commentators have been quietly discussing for years in the course of a dutiful exegesis of the Realien of the Athenian theater. Scholars have, for example, often puzzled over the orientation of choral entrances or exits, the topography of the theater of Dionysus and the cultural semantics of its monuments, or worried about such things as props, costumes and scenery.

There is much to admire in Revermann's totalizing endeavor, and this, I think, is where the main contribution of his study lies; I am often left wondering, however, whether performance studies has in any fundamental way changed the way we think about Old Comedy. I found myself asking this question especially in the final three chapters, each of which examines a single Aristophanic play--Clouds, Lysistrata, and Wealth--in the light of the theoretical and methodological foundations of the preceding chapters.

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For the most part, these chapters are structured around classic problems, familiar, again, from commentaries, experiences in the classroom or even from producing the plays for the stage. Chapter 5, on Clouds, for example, analyzes the opening scene of the play, set at dawn, in which Strepsiades lays out his financial problems, the staging of the phrontisterion, the appearance of Socrates, the nature of the chorus, the agon, and the famously problematic ending.

The chapter on Lysistrata Ch. These chapters represent a milestone, insofar as they are the first systematic study of these plays from the perspective of stagecraft and performance.

Comic Business - Martin Revermann - Oxford University Press

They are learned and judicious, and could only have been written in a post-Taplin era that has internalized the importance of conceptualizing Greek drama as poetry written first and foremost for performance. It's the payoff that wasn't always clear to me. A few examples are in order. Revermann is no doubt right to regard the initial appearance of Socrates in Clouds, suspended on high and pontificating about scientific matters, as one of the "most complex and interesting moments of Aristophanic theatricality" ; though his remarks at seem perhaps a little too zealous: Revermann's analysis of this famous scene highlights some of the frustrating aspects of applying performance studies to ancient texts, where our evidence is so limited: But just as often, our texts do not oblige us with concrete evidence about the sort of things we'd like to know about--costumes, props, gestures, etc.

In other words, while we hope that performance studies will enhance our understanding of a dramatic work, the reverse often turns out to be the case: This is why it often happens, I think, that a performance studies approach to Greek drama seems like it's corroborating what we've perhaps always suspected about a play from a textual encounter with it, rather than bringing something radically different to the table.