In 1836, the German poet, essayist and admirer of Greek literature Heinrich Heine called the comedies of Aristophanes ‘scherzende Tragödien’, ‘joking tragedies’, a remarkable phrase borrowed from a handbook on Greek poetry published in the same decade (in his essay Die romantische Schule [2.2]). Heine's words could have served as an epigraph to N.’s book. It is, as N. proclaims at the outset, an investigation of two separate things that are neither truly separate nor should be treated separately: comedy and tragedy, as they developed and flourished partially simultaneously during the fifth century b.c. in Classical Athens. N. states her main thesis clearly: her book is ‘a comparativist work’ of a ‘peculiar kind’, as she will investigate how comedy and tragedy ‘tend to address the same questions, use the same oppositions, and evince the same cultural concerns’ (p. 1). N.’s book is a highly welcome, perhaps even necessary, contribution to scholarship on fifth-century theatre because it is, as N. rightly remarks, the first book-length study that not only asks how tragedy and comedy each treated issues relevant to fifth-century Athens but also poses the question of how both genres might have reacted to each other's treatment of those themes. It should be noted, however, that N.’s study is not a book about comedy and tragedy. It is a study that aims to explore the meaning of comic plays by comparing them to certain tragedies, without trying to offer thorough new readings of the tragic plays that are considered (cf. pp. 15–16).
The study is divided into an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion; synopses of the plays treated in the book, obviously aimed at the non-specialist, precede the bibliography and the index. The main body of N.’s book is preceded by two preliminary chapters: Chapter 1, ‘Comedy and Tragedy in Athens’, first traces the development of both genres and their conceptual differences and then sketches their differences as regards the use of masks, costumes and props, the tasks of the chorus and the language employed. It also notes (pp. 64–71) the partial dissolution of the comedy–tragedy opposition in some of Euripides’ plays. Chapter 2, ‘Satyr Drama and the Cyclops: Where Tragedy and Comedy Meet’, interprets the existence of the satyr plays that concluded the tragic trilogies as ‘a model’ for the opposition of the genres (p. 83) and stresses the function of these plays (as far as can be judged in view of the scrappy evidence) in balancing the tragic mood and offering a less bounded counterpoint to tragedy's necessity-dominated world view. Euripides’ experiments and crossing of genres are noted again.
The main part of the study begins with Chapter 3, ‘The Acharnians and the Paradox of the City’, juxtaposing the Acharnians with the Oresteia and Euripides’ Bacchae. N., who somehow holds a middle ground in relation to the still debated question of comedy's and tragedy's political character (pp. 107–10), first presents the Oresteia and the Bacchae as exhibiting extreme views on the nature of the polis while at the same time insisting on a ‘superhuman’ necessity of the city's existence. In Acharnians, however, so N. argues, Aristophanes stresses the opposite view, above all by showcasing Dicaeopolis’ capability to reconceptualise and redefine the city of Athens itself. Behind all that lies, as N. concludes (pp. 139–40), Aristophanes’ own conviction that the democratic city is a purely human construct that nevertheless had to be dealt with as if it was the only conceivable way of being.
Chapter 4, ‘The Wasps: Comic Heroes/Tragic Heroes’, contrasts Aristophanes’ and tragedy's presentation of their protagonists’ characters. Whereas, despite all variation, tragedy's approach to characterisation focuses on consistency and psychological accentuation (exemplified by N. in the figures of Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Medea), comedy allowed for a much greater flexibility and looseness in the depiction of its protagonists, which for N. is another manifestation of one of her book's main theses as stated at the outset: ‘comedy tends to celebrate freedom, in all its many contradictions, while tragedy explores how the human is bound by necessity’ (p. 1).
A comparison of the Knights and the Oedipus Tyrannus, based on the way that both plays use oracles to get the plot going, is at the heart of Chapter 5, ‘Oedipus Tyrannos and the Knights: Oracles, Divine and Human’. Here, N. rightly stresses that Aristophanes presents the oracles as a means of human, not divine, control. But although she makes the comparison with Thucydides’ presentation of the importance of oracles in Athens (pp. 189–90), further remarks about the overtly political character of Aristophanes’ critique of the obviously demagogic business of gaining popular favour by resorting to oracles, as depicted in the Knights, could have added another layer to the discussion. After an analysis of the various ‘hidden’ meanings and identities in Knights, the chapter ends with a discussion of comedy and carnival, suggesting that comedy was not – as is often supposed – meant as an inversion of the ordinary, every-day world, but aimed instead at inverting its opposing genre, tragedy.
The oldest of all surviving tragedies, Aeschylus’ Persians, is comedy's counterpoint in Chapter 6, ‘Persians, Peace, and Birds: God and Man in Wartime’. Although all extant comedies of Aristophanes before Ecclesiazusae are wartime plays, this chapter is the first time that the backdrop of war becomes an important factor. However, it is not the plays’ relationship to specific acts of warfare that is central here but the playwrights’ attitudes towards the issue of human (or divine) agency as it becomes manifest during times of fighting and expansionistic ambition. Again, freedom and responsibility show up as central aspects of N.’s interpretation of comedy, as the Peace especially shows signs of Aristophanes’ concern for the purely human responsibility not only to gain but also truly to enact peace.
Of all the chapters, Chapter 7, ‘Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs: Aristophanes on Tragedy and Comedy’, is the one that most directly engages with the question of what the texts themselves – in this case Thesmophoriazousae and Frogs and their reflections on the purposes of tragedy – can tell us about the relationship between the genres: instead of placing the one hierarchically above the other, Aristophanes, so N. argues, pleads for a joined, ‘symbiotic’ relationship. Neither comedy nor tragedy could exist without each other, and neither could the polis itself (M.C. Farmer, Tragedy on the Comic Stage [2016], a study on ‘paratragedy’ in Aristophanic comedy, obviously appeared too late to be taken into consideration).
The conclusion, ‘The Dionysia's Many Voices’, finally highlights the ‘polyphonic’ character of Greek drama within the institutional framework of the City Dionysia. Audiences were not meant, N. argues, to experience two mutually exclusive but two symbiotic interpretations of the world around them. Neither tragedy nor comedy was judged ‘right’ in their take on contemporary concerns, but both voices had to be heard. What they thereby achieved was ‘a deeper awareness of the tensions inherent in life within the polis’ (p. 290).
N.’s study offers a fresh and mostly convincing look at the way Athens thought about itself, its concerns and problems. Its main strength lies not in the individual readings of the comic plays (although many convincing interpretations are hidden there) but in the juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy that manages to put both genres’ attitudes into sharper relief. As a minor reservation it should be noted that, while most of the comparisons made between individual plays seem quite fitting, the pairing of Persians with Peace and Birds as wartime plays is least effective; perhaps another, later tragedy focusing on war would have made for a better comparison. This, however, does not detract from the overall quality and usefulness of the study.
