Daniel Anderson (Coventry University)
On the fifth-century Athenian comic stage, subtlety and innovation were terms of both praise and abuse. Aristophanes criticizes his rival Crates for ‘ultra-urbane plot conceits’ (Eq. 539 ἀστειοτάτας ἐπινοίας), and is himself derided by Cratinus as an ‘oversubtle’ heckler in the audience (fr. 342 ὑπολεπτολόγος). Elsewhere, Aristophanes complains that his Clouds failed precisely because its ‘great newness … of conception’ (Vesp. 1044 καινοτάτας . . . διανοίας), and that only true connoisseurs within the audience had appreciated its genius. If the precise degree to which innovation was acceptable might have been up for dispute, what all these Athenian playwrights seem to have agreed on was the comparable lack of invention among non-Athenian types of comedy. Aristophanes lists the use of ‘jokes stolen from Megara’ (Vesp. 57 μηδ’ αὖ γέλωτα Μεγαρόθεν κεκλεμμένον, cf. Ecphantides fr. 3) among the various stock routines he promises to avoid. Of course, he is not above the most extensive and elaborate caricatures of Megarian comedy, as in the market scene in Acharnians.
This contribution attempts to explain the pervasive concern with theatrical innovation among fifth and fourth-century playwrights in terms of rivalry between competing theatrical traditions at Athens, Sicily, Megara and elsewhere. This approach draws on insights from the recent volume by Csapo and Wilson (2020) showing that a number of theatrical traditions outside Athens were prominent, contemporaneous and came directly into contact through travelling playwrights. The rapid innovations in theatrical norms, such as the number of actors, stage technologies, or even plot structure, reflect competition not between individual playwrights so much as rival theatrical traditions. This notion is reinforced by the fact that contact between theatrical traditions appears to have led to a number of these innovations. Willi (2014), for example, has argued that developments in plot structure derive from contact between Aeschylus and Epicharmus. Other markers of such contact and appropriation abound: our only early instance of the ‘doctor with heavy accent’ whom Athenaeus indicates was typical of Doric comedy (Athen. 14.621d) is a fragment by the Athenian playwright Crates (fr. 46).
The fine-tuned rhetoric around innovation also makes good sense as a marker of cultural hegemony. In this way, the paper follows an important recent reading of the use of 'experimental' as a term in twentieth-century criticism by Cecire (2020). She shows that ‘experimental’ does not refer to objective features of a poetic work, but lies instead in a cultural alignment with developments in science and technology (Cecire 2020: 23); the term has in practice, moreover, been used for the maintenance of canonical, white authors in the face of a wave of feminist, LGBTQ, and anti-racist recovery projects beginning in the 1970s (2020: 29–39). To draw out the lessons for antiquity, the ‘great idea’ of so many comic protagonists would be a reflection of developments in astronomy, geography and philosophy; this alignment would, in turn, serve to distinguish Athenian playwrights from competing theatrical traditions in the context of widespread exchange of poetic and cultural materials.