COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 41provides us with the set of comic stereotypes that have provided theblueprint for comic characterization from the renaissance to the present.New Comedy is derived from the work of the Greek dramatistMenander, whose plays, up until the discovery of papyrus fragments in1905, were known only through the adaptations and embellishments ofthe Roman comic authors Plautus and Terence. Considering theenormous impact Menander has had on comedy, very little is knownabout him. He was an Athenian, who according to one account, wrote108 plays, but had only modest success during his lifetime, and waseclipsed by other authors of New Comedy, of whom even less isknown. His standing was completely revised in later antiquity,however, and he was prized for the quality of his plots and theexcellence of his characters. Whereas Aristophanic Old Comedy dealtwith political institutions, public figures, and fantastical situations,Menandrine New Comedy was concerned with the intimate themes ofdomestic and private life. New Comedy dramatized the lives of citizensrather than gods and politicians and was interested in romance, sexualdesire, the circulation of money, and the imposition of patriarchal order.New Comedy was also the first to conclude with the promise of marriage.Concomitantly, its repertoire of stock characters emerges from thehousehold and orbits around this central domestic space. Menander,Plautus, and Terence populate their plays with variations on the samebasic character types: the profligate or impractical young man; thesenex, or parent; the matronly wife; the meretrix, or accomplishedcourtesan; the clever slave; the nervous parasite; the vulnerable maiden;and the miles gloriosus, or swaggering soldier. These characters reflectMenander’s absorption of the philosophy of Theophrastus (c. 370–c.288 BC), head of the Peripatetic School after Aristotle, and the authorof Characters, thirty sketches of human types embodying particularfaults and follies. Like stage comedy itself, these amount to possibly themost resilient character types in all Western fiction, with severalremaining, in the words of Northrop Frye, ‘practically unchanged fortwenty-five centuries’ (Frye, 1953:271).New Comedy is generally considered to be a more conservative formthan its Aristophanic predecessor, reflecting a change in the context ofGreek drama from the fourth to the third centuries BC. The shift inemphasis from the public arena to life indoors was probably a responseto Athens’s decreasing political importance, and the fact that itsleadership was largely supported by foreign powers, resulting in a lossof the political immediacy that motivated Aristophanes. Audiences mayhave also changed: as the subsidies which allowed people from all