We are experiencing an explosion of interest in Greek satyr play, fuelled in part by G., who has published five key articles from 2000 to 2009, conveniently gathered in the present volume (with minor revisions in the notes). In a useful introduction, G. takes on board recent work, including R. Lämmle's Poetik des Satyrspiels (2013) and C.A. Shaw's Satyric Play: the Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Play (2014). As evidenced from the frequent citations in these volumes, G.'s insights have proven essential to our understanding of the genre.
G. demonstrates an enviable mastery of the tools suited to the task: philology and textual criticism (mandatory given the fragmentary evidence), performance theory, cultural studies, ‘sexology’ and psycho-analytic theory, anthropology, and theatre history (e.g. analogies between the function of satyr-plays and of US black-faced minstrelsy, pp. 97–101, 107). Drawing evidence from Euripides' Cyclops (complete) and Sophocles' Ichneutae (of which we have about half), and teasing out setting and plot from the titles and fragments of some 70 other satyr-plays, G. offers valuable suggestions on the nature and function of this peculiar genre.
Insisting on its fundamental difference from Greek comedy, G. notes the satyr-play's preference for myth-driven plots, heroic characters, tragic diction (‘squarely in the aural realm of tragedy’, p. 83), de-politicised pastoral settings and romantic outcomes (many end in marriage, p. 91). As an ‘integral component in the whole competition in tragôidia’ (p. 15), satyr-plays offer a ‘middle-brow’ response to tragedy (pp. 159–69). In the case of A. Oresteia, the satyr-play can even undermine the basis of the trilogy's plot, as in G.'s brilliantly inventive, but perhaps overly Stesichoros-influenced, reconstruction of Proteus (pp. 57–74).
In four of the five essays (the exception is his valuable reading of the Pronomos Vase), G. identifies various ‘subject-positions’ (a term often repeated) evoked by the satyrs which had an effect on ‘the psychic life of Athenian audiences’ (p. 79). In his view, many males would have identified with these half-man, half-goat daimones, ‘puerile-servile’ creatures who remain ‘accountable to nobody for their behavior’ (p. 44) and yet offered the audience a compelling ‘choral perspective’ (p. 15). Their collaboration with mythic heroes in a romantic plot delivers a restorative outcome that rescues satyr drama from the sober, morally inflected, polis-riddled and ‘aristocratizing’ (pp. 34, 95) tendencies of tragedy, an approach shared by Tony Harrison in his The Trackers of Oxyrynchus.
G. acknowledges the speculative nature of these suggestions. So he might excuse some of us for wondering if fifth-century Athenians had any such notion of identity-formation via adoptive subject-positions, and if so, how many would have identified with a group of morally and mentally infantilised adults, slaves to the desire for drink and sex, cowards in the extreme, with permanently erect penises (tiresome, painful?). Given that the satyrs' lust remains unachieved (ineffectual and therefore harmless, p. 88), perhaps audiences identified far more with the heroic/mythic characters who got the girl? Some even may have sided with the brutish, but sophisticated war-sceptic Cyclops of Euripides, an idea that G. firmly rejects (p. 81 n. 25). Whatever one's subject position, G.'s collection is most welcome.
