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With a new introduction and some revisions, these essays on Classical Greek satyr plays, originally published in various venues between 2002 and 2010, suggest new critical approaches to this important dramatic genre and identify previously neglected dimensions and dynamics within their original Athenian context. Griffith shows that satyr plays, alongside the ludicrous and irresponsible, but harmless, antics of their chorus, presented their audiences with culturally sophisticated narratives of romance, escapist adventure, and musical-choreographic exuberance, amounting to a zparallel universey to that of the accompanying tragedies in the City Dionysia festival. The class oppositions between heroic/divine characters and the rest (choruses, messengers, servants, etc.) that are so integral to Athenian tragedy are shown to be present also, in exaggerated form, in satyr drama, with the satyr chorus occupying a role that also inevitably recalled for the Athenian audiences their own (often foreign-born) slaves. Meanwhile the familiar main characters of tragedy (Heracles, Danae and Perseus, Hermes and Apollo, Achilles, Odysseus, etc.) are re-deployed in an engaging milieu of erotic encounters, miraculous discoveries, guaranteed happy endings, marriages, and painless release from suffering for all, both for the well-behaved heroes and also for the low-life, playful satyrs (the slaves of Dionysus). In their fusion of adventure and romance, fantasy and naïvete, Aphrodite and Dionysus, Athenian satyr plays thus anticipate in many respects, Griffith suggests, the later developments of Greek pastoral and prose romance.
Since it was written by tragedians and employed a number of formal tragic elements, satyr drama is typically categorized as a sub-genre of Greek tragedy. This categorization, however, gives an incomplete picture of the complicated relationship of the satyr play to other genres of drama in ancient Greece. For example, the humorous chorus of half-man, half-horse satyrs suggests sustained interaction between poets of comedy and satyr play. In Satyric Play, Carl Shaw notes the complex, shifting relationship between comedy and satyr drama, from sixth-century BCE proto-drama to classical productions staged at the Athenian City Dionysia and bookish Alexandrian plays of the third century BCE, and argues that comedy and satyr plays influenced each other in nearly all stages of their development. This is the first book to offer a complete, integrated analysis of Greek comedy and satyr drama, analyzing the details of the many literary, aesthetic, historical, religious, and geographical connections to satyr drama. Ancient critics and poets allude to comic-satyric associations in surprising ways, vases indicate a common connection to komos (revelry) song, and the plays themselves often share titles, plots, modes of humor, and even on occasion choruses of satyrs. Shaw's insight into this evidence reveals the relationship between satyr drama and Greek comedy to be much more intimately connected than we had known and, in fact, much closer than that between satyr drama and tragedy. Satyric Play brings new light to satyr drama as a complex, artful, inventive, and even cleverly paradoxical genre.
The esteem in which satyr drama was held in antiquity still arouses curiosity and controversy. Twelve new papers, generated in North America by a distinguished cast of scholars, explore questions central to the genre. How did satyr drama relate to comedy and tragedy; how closely was it tied to its tragic trilogy? How did the Athenians react to pro-satyric drama, such as the Alcestis? How far did satyr plays reflect contemporary political life? Fresh conclusions are adduced from the fragments, particularly those of Aeschylus, and there is special study of Euripides' Cyclops, not least for its possible reflection of the fifth-century sophists.
The surviving works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have been familiar to readers and theatregoers for centuries; but these works are far outnumbered by their lost plays. Between them these authors wrote around two hundred tragedies, the fragmentary remains of which are utterly fascinating. In this, the second volume of a major new survey of the tragic genre, Matthew Wright offers an authoritative critical guide to the lost plays of the three best-known tragedians. (The other Greek tragedians and their work are discussed in Volume 1: Neglected Authors.) What can we learn about the lost plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides from fragments and other types of evidence? How can we develop strategies or methodologies for 'reading' lost plays? Why were certain plays preserved and transmitted while others disappeared from view? Would we have a different impression of the work of these classic authors – or of Greek tragedy as a whole – if a different selection of plays had survived? This book answers such questions through a detailed study of the fragments in their historical and literary context. Making use of recent scholarly developments and new editions of the fragments, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy makes these works fully accessible for the first time.
The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.
This volume provides the most important texts of satyric drama, with facing-page translation, substantial introduction and detailed commentary. It includes not only the major papyri, but very many shorter fragments of importance, both on papyrus and in quotation, from the 5th to the 3rd Centuries; there are also one or two texts whose interest lies in their problematic ascription to the genre at all. The intention is to illustrate it as fully as practicable.
'The more we learn about the original production of tragedies and comedies in Athens the more it seems wrong even to call them plays in the modern sense of the word, ' write the editors in this collection of critically diverse innovative essays aimed at restoring the social context of ancient Greek drama.
The Pronomos Vase is the single most important piece of pictorial evidence for ancient theatre to have survived from ancient Greece. It depicts an entire theatrical chorus and cast along with the celebrated musician Pronomos, in the presence of their patron god, Dionysos. In this collection of essays, illustrated with nearly 60 drawings and photographs, leading specialists from a variety of disciplines tackle the critical questions posed by this complex hub of evidence. Thediscussion covers a wide range of perspectives and issues, including the artist's oeuvre; the pottery market; the relation of this piece to other artistic, and especially celebratory, artefacts; the political and cultural contexts of the world that it was produced in; the identification of figures portrayedon it: and the significance of the Pronomos Vase as theatrical evidence. The volume offers not only the most recent scholarship on the vase but also some ground-breaking interpretations of it.