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xxxiv General Introduction
II. Comedy
THE origins and early history of this form of dramatic art are at least
as obscure as those of tragedy, and here too the procedure will be to
begin with an examination of the documents which we possess and
then to deduce what we can concerning their lost antecedents. The
prospects of such a study seem at first sight to be very good indeed,
for there are many things in the extant comedies of the fifth century
that look exceptionally archaic, explicable only as survivals of some
elaborate and primitive ritual which should be easy to reconstruct. A
closer acquaintance, however, reveals that the problem admits of no
very facile or satisfactory solution.
In a number of its broadest aspects the comedy of the fifth century
resembles tragedy. It was performed at festivals of Dionysus under the
aegis of the Athenian state. Its expenses were met in the same manner
as those of tragedy and the rivalry of the poets competing for the
prizes was just as keen. It was performed in the same theatre before
the same type of audience, by a chorus of about the same size 1 and
by an equally limited number of actors. Its structure shows many of the
characteristic features of the mature tragic drama, such as prologue,
parodos, and exodos, and the main body of both types of play consists
of a series of relatively short scenes separated by choral interludes. The
prologues of fifth-century comedy are not usually composed with much
care or skill, and the situation is often explained to the spectators by
one of the actors in a long and undramatic speech reminiscent of the
Euripidean prologue, but we nowhere find a comic prologue consisting
entirely of such a speech. The comic parodos is much more complicated
and dramatic than the one usually found in the tragic play, and it contains
peculiarities of form that are unknown in tragedy, but these may
be more conveniently treated later on. The special interest of the comic
exodos derives not from its form, which is quite free, but from its contents,
and it too may best be considered in another connection. It is
in the choral interludes between scenes that the unique features of the
form and the structure of comedy are most evident. Whereas in tragedy
these performances of the Chorus, for all their differences in contents
and in metre, almost invariably have the standardized form of the
stasimon, in comedy they exhibit astonishing variety and frequent specialization.
We shall turn our attention first to the most curious and
most highly specialized of these interludes, the parabasis. 2
1 The actual number was twenty-four.
2 The extant parabases are: Ach. 626-718, Kn. 498-610, Clouds 510-626, Wasps
1009-1121, Peace 729-817, Birds 676-800, Thesm. 785-845, Frogs 674-737.