Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece

Venom in Verse

PRINCETON MODERN GREEK STUDIES

This series is sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund.

Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement by Loring M. Danforth

Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by Peter Bien

Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece by Jane K Cowan

Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses edited and translated by Edmund Keeley

Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis

A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town by Michael Herzfeld

Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture by Charles Stewart

The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Paschalis M. Kitromilides

C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; edited by George Savidis

The Fourth Dimension by Yannis Ritsos, Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley, translators

George Seferis: Collected Poems, Revised Edition translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine by Jill Dubisch

Cavafy’s Alexandria, Revised Edition by Edmund Keeley

The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation by Andrew Horton

The Muslin Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece by K E. Fleming

Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece by Gonda A. H. Van Steen

Venom in Verse

ARISTOPHANES IN

MODERN GREECE

Gonda A. H. Van Steen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van Steen, Gonda Aline Hector, 1964-

Venom in verse: Aristophanes in modern Greece / Gonda A.H. Van Steen

p. cm.—(Princeton modern Greek studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-00956-2 (alk. paper)

1. Aristophanes—Appreciation—Greece, Modern. 2. Aristophanes—Stage history—Greece, Modern. 3. Greek drama (Comedy)—Appreciation—Greece, Modern. 4. Greek drama (Comedy)—Presentation, Modern. 5. Theater—Greece, Modern—History. I. Title. II. Series.

PA3879.V34 2000

882'.01—dc21

99-039767

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund

http://pup.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-1-400-82375-8

R0

To Greg Terzian and Dimitri Gondicas

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix

Preface  xi

Acknowledgments  xix

Prologue  3

CHAPTER 1

Poisoned Gift from Antiquity: Aristophanes as Paravase of Koraes’ Nationalist Ideology  16

CHAPTER 2

Aristophanes in Modern Greek: A Demotic, Satirical, and Theatrical Paravase  43

CHAPTER 3

The Lysistrata Euphoria of 1900 to 1940: Sexual and Antifeminist Paravase  76

CHAPTER 4

Koun’s Birds of 1959: Paravase of Right-Wing Politics  124

CHAPTER 5

Framing, Clowning, and Cloning Aristophanes  190

Epilogue  224

Notes  231

Bibliography  259

Index  275

Illustrations

FIGURES

1.Phasoules takes Aristophanes up into the clouds (Clouds)

2.Cartoon of Tsatsos by Makres

3.Cartoon of Tsatsos by Phokion Demetriades

4.Caricature of Tsatsos by Geses

5.Drawing by Elly Solomonide-Balanou of the 1997 memorial production of Koun’s Birds

6.The Lysistrata of cartoonist Bost

TABLES

1.Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1951-74

2.Modern Greek Stage Productions of Aristophanes, 1975-98

Preface

People say that when the tyrant Dionysius wanted to familiarize himself with the political system of the Athenians, Plato sent him the work of the poet Aristophanes, ... advising him to study his plays to gain insight into the Athenian state.

—Aristophanes, Vita 42-45 K-A

ARISTOPHANES is vitally important reading for students of modern as well as ancient Greek politics. The playwright matters, not only as the sole preserved source of Attic comedy but also because his work and the history of its reception help us understand Greece today. I have written this study with Plato’s legendary recommendation in mind: if he had been around, he would have promoted Aristophanes once again. But since he is not, this book must make the introduction.

NOTHING TO DO WITH ARISTOPHANES?

Symptomatic misconceptions have spurred me to remedy scholarly disregard of Aristophanes’ reception in modern Greece. Many classicists seem to agree that Attic comedy never sustained a rich theatrical revival tradition in Europe. Misled by this Western-oriented consensus, they have also constructed the genre’s at best marginal existence in Greece. Gilbert Murray’s oft-quoted conclusion that Aristophanes died intestate is based solely on the experience and knowledge of translations, adaptations, and productions in mainstream English-speaking countries. The persistence of such inferences qua value judgments has inspired faulty or reductive statements even in recent works on ancient drama. Graham Ley, for instance, claimed in 1991: "With the exception of Lysistrata, and on occasions Frogs, and apart from regular productions by the Greek National Theatre, there have been relatively few performances of Aristophanes’ comedies, and few directly commissioned scripts."¹ Yet any investigation of the poet’s contemporary Greek tradition beyond the National Theater’s contradicts this assertion. Aristophanes is the country’s most popular and one of its most political playwrights, surpassing all other authors, ancient or modern, native or foreign. The large number of scripts directly commissioned from prominent Greek literati, eager to shine in a field as competitive as Attic comedy, is only a small indication of the poet’s enduring appeal. Perhaps more telling, recently as many as six to a dozen new comic revival productions (that is, excluding repeat performances) have been presented each year at the annual summer festivals of Athens and Epidaurus and in the provinces. These productions have covered Aristophanes’ entire corpus, and their styles, diversified by different personalities and drama schools, and even by singular performances, have ranged from philological and archaeological fidelity to extreme modernization.

Niall Slater showed signs of the common misunderstanding of Aristophanes’ reception in modern Greece. He maintained in 1993: Certainly the National Theatre of Greece has reclaimed its national heritage and has, for much of this century, been staging that heritage at Epidaurus and more recently in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens. Ignoring the achievements of the modernist Karolos Koun in reviving ancient drama since the early 1930s, he continued:

Yet even if there were not lingering questions about the influence of French staging and acting style on the history of the Greek National Theatre, we would still need to acknowledge that even in the days of easy air travel such performances are relatively inaccessible to us. When the Greek National Theatre tours, moreover, it is still a matter of putting square plays in round theatres, as Peter Brook has termed it. In other words, there has been no great, internally driven movement in the staging of classical drama as there has been for Shakespeare; such performances as we have seen are much more parasitic upon other developments in theatre.²

My analysis of the pioneering work of internationally renowned Greek stage producers, such as Koun, Alexes Solomos, and Spyros Euangelatos, refutes both this negativism and the unfair comparison with the Shakespearean tradition. To a varying extent, Aristophanic comedy has been the mainstay of these directors’ innovative work. Moreover, extraordinary productions, such as Koun’s Birds, have changed the course of Greek stage interpretation of contemporary and ancient drama, and even of revival theater abroad.

In examining Attic comedy’s modern readings, this book taps unusually rich sources of Greek literary and theatrical culture and makes them accessible for the first time in English. My strategy has been to leave the ground open for new interpretations of the ancient and the contemporary Aristophanes alike, unburdened by the baggage of standard philological scholarship or by arguments about controversial side issues.³ Instead of referring to the past or to secondary literature to validate a particular reading, I analyze the consequences of conscious artistic and directorial decisions and the ways in which these have affected later interpretations. I have discussed textual and historical details only when a modern reading called for them. This deliberately unencumbered approach does justice to the lay or pragmatic mind-set that Greek artists and consumers have brought to the comic revival stage. It also helps to re-create (and rehabilitate) both the personal and the collective experience of performance in a new classical moment, as it were. This freedom will in turn enable the reader to observe the scene and to reassess the ancient text as both a play-act and an act of communication.

OTHER PEOPLES’ ARISTOPHANES

The following comparative outline, for which I am deeply indebted to J. M. Walton, shows that the earliest modern Greek stage tradition of Attic comedy differed, both in quantity and in quality, from its initial reception elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.⁴ In Greece, the leap from a text-based to a performance-oriented Nachleben of Aristophanes took place in 1868, when the first popular adaptation and production of the Plutus established a permanent taste for contemporized satire. Both the early date and the results of this shift are impressive when compared with the corresponding initial developments in Western Europe or North America.

In Renaissance Italy, ancient Greek theater did not see a lasting stage revival of its own, but it inspired the conception of Italian opera. In seventeenth-century France, Greek tragedy was honored more than Greek comedy primarily for its influence on neoclassical drama—in particular on the plays of Racine, Corneille, and their followers. Heralding Weimar classicism, Goethe and Schiller brought ancient tragedy to the forefront of German theater. Apart from Goethe’s amateur production of Aristophanes’ Birds (1780), Attic comedy was overlooked in Germany until 1908, although more or less liberal translations were available. In 1908 the famous Austrian director Max Reinhardt put on the Lysistrata, in Berlin. Despite its immense success, it was not followed by any other significant pre-1950s attempt to reinterpret the Aristophanic repertoire, let alone to establish a tradition of comic revivals. The classical drama festival regularly held (since 1921) at the ancient Greek theater of Syracuse in Sicily featured a 1927 production of the Clouds, but its next Aristophanic comedy, a modern version of the Frogs, was not performed until 1976.

In Great Britain, an 1883 revival of the Birds at Cambridge claimed to be the first complete play production since Aristophanes’ death. This claim perhaps underestimated J. R. Planché’s free adaptation The Birds of Aristophanes, staged at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1846. It certainly ignored two Athenian productions of 1868, the Plutus and the Clouds. The Cambridge Greek plays included other early revivals of Attic comedy as well, namely the Wasps (1897, 1909), and the Birds again (1903).⁵ Only since 1954 has King’s College, London, presented annual productions of ancient tragedy and occasionally comedy. Nearly all British revivals were conceived in academic circles, and they never attained the broader outreach characteristic of even the earliest modern Greek stage interpretations. For many years professional British theater dared to invest only in the Lysistrata and the Birds, regarded as Aristophanes’ most universally popular plays. Terence Gray, for instance, produced the Lysistrata in an interesting 1931 double bill with Sophocles’ Antigone. As director of the Cambridge Festival Theatre he also staged two versions of the Birds (1928, 1933). Norman Marshall’s Gate Theatre presented an unexpurgated Lysistrata in 1935. But it took a Greek producer, Minos Volanakes, to introduce the larger British public to Aristophanes. His 1957 Lysistrata at the Royal Court won great success and soon moved to London’s West End.

The prevalence of Aristophanes’ most popular plays showed also in the North American stage reception, which also was driven by academia. The Greek Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, housed an early-twentieth-century revival of the Birds in the original language. The year 1930 saw the first American Lysistrata, a turning point in the United States’ popular acceptance of classical drama. The production of Norman Bel Geddes in Gilbert Seldes’s adaptation had been inspired by the touring 1923 Lysistrata of the Moscow Art Theater. Notwithstanding some negative reviews, the show ran for more than 250 performances. In the mid-1930s the Federal Theater Project, the artistic offspring of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), sponsored the creation of an all-black Lysistrata adapted by Theodore Brown. But its premiere at the University of Washington in Seattle was closed by the WPA for being too risque. The war years witnessed further attempts to revive the Lysistrata. Aristophanic comedies that are typically less popular with modern audiences than the Lysistrata and the Birds were first staged in the United States, as in most Western European countries, after 1950.⁶

RESEARCH AND PROGRAM NOTES

Aristophanes’ revival history in modern Greece has received very little attention thus far in local and foreign scholarship.⁷ Anything other than the parastasiographia (the simple listing of productions) of his comedies has remained nearly unexplored.⁸ Hardly any theoretical writings have been published by directors, and the quality of the rare exceptions leaves much to be desired: they are closer to personal memoirs than to critical essays. The same holds true of the scarce source material in the form of rehearsal notes, promptbooks, a mise-en-scène, or any other technical information about productions. Very few films, videos, and recordings are available (and those practically inaccessible) to re-create the original modern performances. The few historians attempting to broaden the monoculture of the local stage and its observers have published biased or incomplete accounts. For instance, the agenda of Giannes Sideres in The Ancient Theater on the Modern Greek Stage, 1817-1932 was to argue classical drama’s importance as the literary bedrock for much-needed Greek unity and continuity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This mental framework left little room for analyzing the Aristophanic productions of that time. Also contributing to the obvious lack of substantial regular sources is the common Greek preference for supposedly higher-quality theater bearing a foreign signature.⁹ Greek audiences themselves, considered more broadly, have left in writing very few personal impressions or critiques of actual stagings. Oral descriptions tend to vary greatly according to the speaker’s age, sex, education, and socioeconomic background. My own study therefore draws heavily on the more ephemeral materials to which contemporary Greece has inevitably restricted the student of revival and native drama: it relies not just on statistics and other historical documents but on newspaper articles, critiques, and playbills, as well as on interviews conducted with people active in theater, journalism, academia, and politics. To aid fixture scholarly analysis, I have inserted extensive translations of a few texts that are not readily available even in Greek.¹⁰ These will also allow the reader to follow my argument better and, perhaps, to experience some aspects of the playscripts as the original Greek audiences did.

Researchers of modern Greek stage productions necessarily start from secondary and often very subjective judgments of the quality of these interpretations. Most nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Greek theater critics offered only rudimentary performance criticism of the Aristophanic revivals they claimed to evaluate. Even the established critics of the pre-1970s generation tended to be inarticulate and unsophisticated on this topic. Greek critics have often limited themselves to analyzing comic performances philologically, narrating the contents of the original plays instead of discussing productions from a theatrical viewpoint. They essentially commented on the text as the basis of a performance but neglected the issues and tensions raised by the performance itself. Also, most Greek critics past and present have not been free from a certain degree of positive or negative prejudice. They have let themselves be tricked into either praising or loathing a given production, thereby pronouncing the verdict on its commercial success or failure. I have not followed (or tried to establish) an aesthetic canon for deciding whether to include certain interpretations and their relevant sources as parts of this study. On the contrary, I have omitted nearly all aesthetic judgments and facile labels, especially from my discussion of recent translations and stage productions.

The translations and performances discussed in chapters 2 and 3 are presented as historical events, but stagings of chapters 4 and 5 have been selected based on reception, a criterion I revisit in the epilogue. Most productions were launched via the official channels of the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals, and thus received enough public and critical attention to generate multiple—often discordant—opinions and reviews. Their exposure to much larger theatergoing audiences is particularly helpful for the researcher who aims to reconstruct the expectations raised by, and the responsibilities assigned to, Greek professionals staging Aristophanes today. In following these logistical criteria, which do not necessarily reflect the quality of performances, I do not intend to imply personal indifference to theatrical aesthetics or to the value of critical evaluation in the study of drama. My purpose has rather been to provide readers with the necessary data to help them form their own criteria by which to assess modern productions of both Aristophanes and classical tragedy staged in Greece or abroad. My aim is not to propose a readymade canon but to supply the background for the reader’s own informed judgments. Nor can this analysis substitute for reading the texts firsthand or seeing the plays in performance.

In a broad survey such as this, it would be both redundant and impracticable to discuss in detail all Aristophanic performances presented at the dramatic festivals. Therefore, at the risk of oversimplifying, I have chosen to highlight those productions that best sum up dominant practices in any given era, even if they are not the most prestigious ones. For further data on the spread of Aristophanic stagings since 1951, please refer to the charts in the epilogue. I completed this book in 1999, which allowed for the scope of nearly fifty years of comic revivals, and of a quarter century of artistic freedom following the 1974 abolition of the Greek military dictatorship. For more detailed theater-historical information and for more extensive bibliographical and other references, the reader may consult my doctoral dissertation.

No knowledge of either ancient or modern Greek is assumed in this book. All quotations from Greek sources have been translated. Most translations are my own; a few, as indicated, have been taken from the standard published translations. I have also translated or transliterated the original titles of modern Greek primary and secondary sources in order to facilitate a critical rereading of the given materials. On the vexed problem of transliterating from the Greek, I adhere to the main principles issued by the Library of Congress unless a Greek name has a well-established form of its own in English. For ancient Greek and Latin proper names, I adopt the conventional Latinized forms broadly used in the English language. Both systems work better together without diacritics in a book in which ancient and modern Greek names occur side by side.

Acknowledgments

The completion of this book provides a long-awaited opportunity to thank publicly the people on whose expertise, guidance, and support I have relied. I owe a tremendous debt to my long-term advisors, Dimitri Gondicas, Richard Martin, and Josiah Ober, who engaged this new material with great enthusiasm and interest. They have generously given of their time and energy to discuss practical and theoretical issues with me, and they have presented challenging fresh approaches to matters I had considered closed. I have learned much from them and count on their enduring friendship.

For welcome criticism and vivid discussion, I am also grateful to the faculty of the Classics Department and the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, and of the Classics Department at Cornell University and at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Alexander Nehamas, David Ricks, Helen Kolias, Jeffrey Rusten, David Konstan, Frank Romer, and Christopher Trinacty have provided me with valuable feedback and thoughtful comments on early, often rough versions of the manuscript. Their expert help resulted in many useful changes and new insights, which have greatly improved the finished product. Edmund Keeley, Froma Zeitlin, and Michael Herzfeld shared their critical acumen with me and have always expanded my horizons. I express special gratitude to Oliver Taplin and Stratos Constantinidis, the readers for Princeton University Press, for their incisive and helpful assessments of my work. Stratos has shown a responsiveness to all aspects of my topic that is more than noteworthy. To all these scholars, and to many others whose contribution is less easy to isolate and identify, my profound thanks. I am, of course, solely responsible for whatever deficiencies remain despite their best efforts.

I thank Elly Solomonide-Balanou for granting me permission to reprint her drawing of the 1997 memorial production of Koun’s Birds. I am also indebted to many Greek theater professionals for granting me interviews and access to new or obscure source materials. I owe a further note of gratitude to the librarians and staff members of numerous institutions, research libraries, and archives, for their prompt and unstinting assistance. Jochen Twele, Eleni Konstantaki, Ronnie Hanley, and Claire Myones were invaluable to me during my years at Princeton University.

At various stages in its development, this book was advanced by generous grants, for which I thank the following foundations: the Alexander Papamarkou Fund, the Center of International Studies and the Council on Regional Studies at Princeton University, the Gennadeion and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Dr. M. Aylwin Cotton Foundation, and the Provost’s Author Support Fund at the University of Arizona. I am indebted to the Modern Greek Studies Association and its committee of readers for the award of its inaugural Ph.D. Dissertation Prize, which I used to make the final revisions to this text. Here I single out, however, the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund and the Committee on Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, whose representatives work nothing short of magic.

Mary Murrell and Molan Chun Goldstein, my editors at Princeton University Press, have embraced this project with great enthusiasm and professionalism. They and their support staff edited the manuscript with skill and sensitivity. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of my copyeditors, Madeleine Adams and Alice Falk, in eradicating mistakes and inelegancies from my English.

A warm word of thanks goes to Richard Burgi, who first introduced me to modern Greek theater and who remains an unfailing source of information and kindness. Barry Goldfarb opened new windows in guiding me to graduate school in the United States. I mark my heartfelt appreciation also to Herman Van Looy and Ria Verstuyft in Belgium, where it all began. For the example of their treasured wisdom, their sound pedagogy, and their collegiality, I am very grateful. Particular thanks are due also to my cherished friends at the Athens Centre, Greece, for their affectionate and abundant hospitality over many years. Rosemary Donnelly, Griet Vankeerberghen, Kian Beyzavi, Shirley Stein, and Leigh Gibson deserve special thanks: their congeniality, good humor, and encouragement never fail to sustain me. My husband, Greg Terzian, has helped me draw the tables in the epilogue. Beyond practical support, however, he has given me his invaluable love, his constant thoughtfulness, and his willingness to listen, read, and respond, even when he was stationed in distant locations overseas. His own work and work ethic have always enlightened me. His and Dimitri Gondicas’ conviction that I could finish this book gave me the energy and the confidence to do just that. Their tactful patience and loyal trust are gifts they have freely given and continue to give me. My debt to both of them is immeasurable. Finally, a very special dank u to my sisters, Maria and Els, for what we shared at home and in college, and to my parents, for giving me all the opportunities they never had.

Venom in Verse

Prologue

WHEN THE LIGHTS DIM . . .

Aristophanes tumbles out of an ore cart and onto the stage. His white robe is dirty and disheveled. He is bald, really bald, the classicist in me notices before I even realize what is happening. And then Aristophanes starts venting: the workers drilling the new Athenian metro lines have hit his grave and disturbed his centuries-long rest. What do the Greeks want from him? What more can they take!? They’ve abused his plays so much and they continue to do so every summer, without ever paying him a single obol in copyright money. He’d be rich otherwise, as rich as some big shots out there. But now, no, now he is as broke and as disillusioned with Greek government as the average Giannes in the audience.

June 1997: Greeks gathered in the Athenian Delphinario applaud the opening scene with their favorite, Thanases Vengos, as Aristophanes. Grouchy though the ancient poet may be at first, he is ready to take on the cause of the long-suffering fellow Athenian again, in this musical comedy called The Enfeebled Greek (Ho Hellen Exasthenes). The revue freely reuses themes from five of Aristophanes’ works to complain about the austerity measures of Konstantinos Semites’ socialist government. The Greek audience instantly plays along with the reincarnated, warmblooded Aristophanes of the producers’ lively imagination: the poet becomes the cumulative personality of his corpus, quite literally. While I am recalling other theatrical ways in which Aristophanes has been brought back from the dead, the Greeks go for the meat in the message.

Leave it to a playwright who has been dead for more than two millennia to jolt Greece out of its political doldrums in the blink of a blackout. Koun’s 1959 Birds, which galvanized the local public and spawned years of controversy, and other revival productions tell the same unusual story of how intensely alive Aristophanes is in modern Greece. Old Comedy is no comedy of small talk; to the Greeks, it strikes home again and again with direct, unprocessed power.

WHY ARISTOPHANES?

Aristophanes provides a way to understand modern Greek society. Because his humor is so obviously vulgar and accessible, he brings ancient and contemporary Greece together instead of prying them apart: the noble but also elitist ancient civilization and the popular and down-to-earth modern one. The plays of a long-dead comic poet with strong opinions about state and citizenship, about language and literature, about women, party politics, and modernization help illuminate Greek culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century. On his living, interactive stage, policies and personalities have been debated and derided in ways that would have been unthinkable in more conventional public settings. Aristophanes provided an alternative democratic forum in his own time, and again today’s Greek comedy reaches beyond both mainstream and marginal artistic forms, raising uncanny issues in its probing way. As much as it is a fantasizing and utopian genre, Attic comedy has also been exploratory and problematizing: it sets forth as many provocations as ingenious solutions.

Aristophanes has been political in both text and modern Greek context: he is the remarkable index of the political venture of comedy because he blurs the boundaries between the fictional play, often made more satirical, and the country’s sociopolitical predicament.¹ Compared to other nationalities, the Greeks have consistently received their classical poet with a stronger sense of direct relevance, with a much greater volume of translations, adaptations, and productions, and with more heated disputes about intent and interpretation. Aristophanes has been the Greek touchstone of political and linguistic progressiveness, of gender transformation and social change, and of a modernist openness to things new, whether innovative or subversive. His morality has been vilified, his language and humor bowdlerized. He has borne the brunt of early-twentieth-century Greek feminist attack and he has been almost silenced by censorship and right-wing political reprisal. Yet, since Aristophanes established built-in name recognition, he has suffered equally from overexploitation, institutionalization, and lack of purpose.

The playwright’s texts have been invoked to support myriad causes and his name has been used and abused to sell a vast quantity of un-Aristophanic goods. But beyond the poet’s impressive record of hits, reprints, and ticket sales, he has been revived in the broadest sense. Every major interpretation of Aristophanes was an act of rewriting—rewrighting—and revision of the classical text in light of contemporary sociocultural anxieties. In the nineteenth century this anaviose (revival) was a slow but tenacious struggle that ran contrary to the desired grand rebirth of Hellenic nationhood, morality, and language. From 1900 on, however, Aristophanic performance, whether generated by linguistic infighting or—more surprisingly—by male transvestite pornography, persisted and became a fact of Greek life. Right-wing governments from the 1950s through the 1970s felt the modern Aristophanes’ presence with such discomfort that they banned his comedies.² The recent global culture of new oral, aural, and visual media has again adopted the classical poet to great effect, to decry matters as diverse as current Balkan friction or the exhaustion of the domestic popular tradition.

To argue that only in Greece did the regular reception history of a classic become, once again, a practice of engaged public performance, I have used sources and techniques that rarely figure in conventional treatments of Aristophanes, let alone in studies of Greek civilization and politics, whether ancient or contemporary. My conclusions cross boundaries between classical philology, actual performance, and critical theory, and they subvert a record of Attic comedy characterized by denial or distortion (see my preface). The claim that an ancient author provides insight into a modern society and vice versa might strike classicists and historians as bold, whereas Neohellenists might perceive the argument for Aristophanes’ broad presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece as exaggerated. Nonetheless, comic revivals in contemporary Greece have been as ubiquitous and politically motivated as were the original performances in antiquity. Aristophanes has proved an ideal mirror image of the official and unofficial discourses of his modern homeland, and he has opened the perfect site for cultural criticism across time and space. At once classical (because of the long philological tradition) and popular (because of his humor’s immediacy), the poet’s work has been a choice battleground in the interplay between old and new.

Book after book has interpreted Attic comedy within its ancient context, but none has focused on the meanings shared between adaptations of Aristophanes and modern Greek civilization. Also, more than any other sector of theater or performance criticism, criticism of revival comedy has remained complacently unmethodological. Therefore this study tells not one but two stories of reception: it is an account of Attic comedy’s reinvention, of its time and place in modern Greece, but it also presents a theoretically informed analysis of the genre’s reflection of the contemporary Greek mentality. This book is the first to define the relationship between Aristophanes’ plays and the tactics and antics of the culture that spawned the comic revival tradition.

ENTER THE AUDIENCE

This book tries to read not Aristophanes’ mind but the mentality of modern audiences, regardless of whether they were ever targeted by the playwright. The Greek civic mind-set that has responded to revival comedy of the past decades is far more important to me than the author’s historical intent. Directorial interference will also receive more attention in these pages than Aristophanes’ presumed literary and theatrical aims. In the modern Greek performance culture of Attic comedy, which often plays to the audience’s rule, viewers do not remain passive but become spect-actors. They act out the power of the public, in its double meaning of the large majority in society as in theater. Theirs is the mass rule of the theater state supported by the unruly, unpredictable Aristophanes. Nonetheless, this is a case of mostly constructive theatrocracy when measured against Plato’s definition (Laws 701a; cf. Republic 492b-c); the philosopher equated the rowdy stage public with the voting majority crowds of the open-air Athenian assembly, law courts, and army camps, which were never insulated from surrounding outdoor activity. Greek spect-actors form the critical civic gaze, an unstable given that extends beyond the one-way direction of viewers watching players. Comic performance and festival histrionics frequently move offstage. Critics, journalists, and politicians who are normally assigned seats in the audience—sometimes front-row display seats—often bring their own theatricality to the real-world spotlight. Both directions of the gaze are operative because revival comedy contains so many recognizable cultural ingredients and at the same time exposes the texture and dynamics of surrounding Greek life.

We’re not in any shape to be a harmonious thing, we’re just the audience, a veteran theatergoer once told me, alerting me to the changing identities of Greeks as postmodern subjects. Aristophanes’ revival engages its far from homogeneous public in a diverse dialectical experience. His eager attendants become partners in his unruliness because Attic comedy invites more than the usual dose of reaction, criticism, or friction. While the modern Aristophanes freely mixes strands of past and present, exalted myth and harsh reality, antiheroic selfishness and democratic community, he asks individuals, groups, or classes to make choices and to declare preferences, even if he is only seeking the affirmation of consumers’ hard-to-fake laughter. As revival comedy moves about the fertile grounds of stage dialectics, role-playing and exchanging, and self-referentiality, it asserts that the plays are never predetermined or closed; instead, they constitute collaborative projects, not final products, of performers, public, and participatory environment. Aristophanes’ verbal, paraverbal, and visual language through time offers its many recipients perks of richness and open-endedness: it posits again and again the poet’s centrality to multiple circuits of meaning.

The Greeks’ cultivation of different interpretations of Aristophanes challenges traditional modes of thinking about ancient text and performance. The classical plays, even individual scenes and lines, in modern Greek society have repeatedly acquired new meanings that were colored more often by the recipients’ cultural lenses than by the transmitted or received originals. This phenomenon helps dispel, from the very beginning, the notion that objective and timeless readings, independent of a wider context or receptive horizon, might be enshrined within the ancient texts themselves. Once the search for such positivistic, single, or fixed meanings has been abandoned, classicists may discover new approaches to long-standing philological and archaeological problems in the study of Attic comedy. A theater practice as enduring as the modern Greek revival stage can help scholars formulate new answers and adjust prevailing attitudes and assumptions about language, verbal and visual art, and the act of performance itself.

I have worked with the bare minimum of presumptions about the meaning of Aristophanes’ plays, and I have consciously distanced myself from hypotheses about (or criticisms of) the poet’s persona or his specific political intentions. The comic revival tradition is political only in the broad sense, in that it stages shifting ideological contrasts and contradictions.³ The meanings attributed by contemporaries are only tentatively objective, because they are the historicizing results or effects of modern conditions and preconditions, not products of the singular true reading of both the text and the narrow circumstantial context. In the ongoing process in which today’s recipients become part of tomorrow’s received, Aristophanes is not the unchanging carrier of either universal or uniquely Hellenic meaning, but he is a function, crucible, or expression of the mentality of Greek society in transformation.

WATCHING COMEDY AS CULTURE

Why is it that Greek theater directors vie to reinterpret Attic comedy? What explains Aristophanes’ popularity across broad social levels of the Greek population, past and present? What was the prehistory of this breakthrough, so unusual for a corpus of eleven ancient texts? Why did Greek politicians of the 1950s through mid-1970s feel threatened by the voice of a playwright dead for more than two thousand years? Why is it that only Greek theaters can hope to meet the formidable financial problems of staging classical comedy regularly? The Greek reception of Aristophanes differs from revival traditions elsewhere in that it has always been predicated on creative forces rather than on imitation. Attic comedy made contemporary has gauged and transgressed conventional cultural norms and expectations. Although these violations have usually been only temporary, given the limits of the performance act and site, together they constitute Aristophanes’ function of revisionist social drama (to borrow an anthropological concept), of comedy’s experimental politics and alternative culture.

Aristophanic performance has been a total cultural event, even in the exceptional case of players and viewers withdrawing into a retrogressive time capsule, as in the 1868 Clouds of director Rankaves (see chapter 2). It has been a privileged site where ideology happens, where boundaries between theatrical fiction and the real world vanish, where society presents and represents itself in a self-conscious, profoundly politicized practice. Sounding boards of cultural debate and negotiation, comic revivals have been