From Rags to Drag

This chapter proposes that for some twenty years, Aristophanes and Euripides were engaging in a cross-generic dialogue about the appropriate use and effectiveness of dramatic costuming, which concerned the costume choices of dressing a royal in rags and dressing a male character in women’s clothes. It argues that Aristophanes’s Acharnians caricatured Euripides’s tendency to stage heroes in rags and that some years later, Euripides’s Helen reacted by depicting Menelaus as Aristophanes’s caricature of a Euripidean hero in rags. The chapter then suggests that the following year, Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria mocked Euripides by dressing him, his Kinsman, and his fellow tragedian Agathon in women’s clothes and that Euripides’s Bacchae responded by making Pentheus participate in the same kind of cross-dressing scene that Aristophanes used in Women at the Thesmophoria. The chapter analyzes these reappropriations as a type of literary rivalry aimed at achieving poetic supremacy.

Understanding Paracomedy

This chapter uses genre theory to contextualize paracomedy among other forms of generic interaction in Greek drama. It proposes a methodology for determining occurrences of paracomedy: detecting distinctive correspondences between tragic and comic elements, establishing the priority of the comic element, and ascertaining the motivation for and the effects of the paracomedy. It also provides an overview of how the three major Greek tragedians differ in their use of paracomedy: Aeschylus uses it to great effect in the Oresteia, Sophocles avoids it almost entirely, and Euripides embraces it frequently. The chapter suggests that paracomedy and paratragedy can be used within the context of literary rivalry between tragedians and comedians, and it compares the competitive relationship between Euripides and Aristophanes to that between Aristophanes and fellow comedian Cratinus.

Introduction

This introductory chapter presents the reader with the concept of paracomedy, which is tragedy’s appropriation of comedy, and distinguishes it from paratragedy, which is comedy’s appropriation of tragedy. After showing that most previous scholars have tended to ignore paracomedy, to treat it only as a hypothetical possibility, or to reject it as being impossible, the introduction suggests that one motivation behind this treatment was a scholarly attempt to preserve the decorum of tragedy. This introductory chapter shows how the book fills this gap in scholarship, and it concludes by summarizing the content and contributions of the rest of the chapters.

Paracomedy and Relative Chronology

This chapter presents paracomedy as a tool that can help establish a relative chronology between plays in cases where we can detect an allusive relationship between a tragedy and a comedy but we do not know which play was performed first. Using examples from Sophocles’s Chryses, Euripides’s Cyclops, Euripides’s Heracles, and Euripides’s Ion, it lays out different interpretations for the possible chronologies in an attempt to unpack their implications and to clarify their underlying scholarly assumptions. The chapter analyzes Euripides’s Antiope as a corrective response to Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria that reverses Aristophanes’s critique that intellectual musicians are useless by making Amphion an intellectual musician who is politically efficacious. The chapter also proposes a new way to interpret the metrical evidence for dating Antiope and suggests that Euripides may have used old-fashioned metrics as an archaizing throwback to support the musical and political goals of his play.

Early Paracomedy

This chapter investigates what appear to be the three earliest extant examples of paracomedy: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’s Alcestis, and Euripides’s Heracles. Aeschylus’s Oresteia uses paracomedy to confer a sense of ugliness upon the Furies and a sense of transgressive sexuality upon Clytemnestra, which characterizes them as threats to a democratic worldview. Euripides’s Alcestis symbolizes the close relationship between comedy and satyr drama by paracomically staging a drunken, gluttonous version of Heracles, who exemplified the license of both genres. Euripides’s Heracles co-opts aspects of Aristophanes’s Wasps to instill a sense of unsettling horror in Heracles’s madness scene and later on alludes to comic episodes from Heracles’s past to show what he must overcome before regaining his heroic status. This chapter suggests that even in these early examples, tragedians used paracomedy both positively and negatively to delimit tragedy’s relationship with comedy.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book by examining paracomedy in relation to other theatrical and literary theories, such as the concept of intertheatricality, the notion of the haunted stage, and Bakhtinian views of the carnivalesque. Drawing comparisons to early modern and modern theater, it emphasizes that paracomedy is both a familiar concept, since it operates through the theatrical memory of the audience (as does paratragedy), and a strikingly rare one, since it manifests an unexpected directionality—a high theatrical genre co-opting features from a low one. It also provides a catalogue, categorized by type, of the examples of paracomedy analyzed in the book.

The Aftermath of Paracomedy

This chapter explores three cases where authors engage with paracomedy after the fifth century BCE. It proposes that the anonymous fourth-century BCE tragedy Rhesus employs paracomedy and that it does so either because the author was indiscriminately copying from fifth-century drama or because he wanted to imitate Euripides’s penchant for paracomedy. It investigates the highly fragmentary evidence for Rhinthon’s third-century BCE hilarotragedies, normally thought to be theatrical farces, and posits that Rhinthon was utilizing a more explicit type of paracomedy than in the fifth century. It also provides an explanation for the surprising assertion from the second-century CE scholar Pollux that Euripides and Sophocles frequently employed a comic parabasis. The chapter argues that these cases of reception highlight paracomedy’s importance in antiquity and indicate that paracomedy was a noted hallmark of Euripidean stagecraft that had an indelible effect on the genre of tragedy.

Paracomedy and the Structure of Euripides’s Helen

This chapter analyzes Euripides’s Helen in terms of paracomedy and suggests that the structure of the play should be interpreted as staging a metaliterary conflict between tragedy and comedy. This conflict is expressed in the play through the characters of Helen, who represents tragedy, and Menelaus, who represents comedy. Euripides distinguishes the two characters by constantly characterizing Helen as tragic (through tragic themes, tragic beauty, and tragic piety) and Menelaus as paracomic (through comic jokes, comic alazoneia (“boastfulness”), comic ugliness, comic violence, and comic “knocking at the door” scenes). When Helen is finally established as superior to Menelaus, tragedy is established as superior to comedy. This chapter suggests that the structure, characterization, performance, and tone of the play are motivated by Euripides’s goals to assert dominance over comedy.

Euripides’s Orestes

This chapter analyzes Euripides’s Orestes as a corrective paracomic response to the parodies and poetic criticisms from Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria. It suggests that Euripides reappropriates salient features from Aristophanes’s parodies of Euripides’s Helen, Palamedes, Andromeda, and Telephus in an attempt to show how Aristophanes’s views on tragic stagecraft are reductive. Various aspects of the plot, stagecraft, character, and symbolism of Orestes are interpreted as paracomic responses, including an escape plot with a large number of sword-bearing men, a metaphor in which Pylades is Orestes’s “oar blade,” a joke about the Gorgon’s head, and a threat to incinerate a hostage. Additionally, Euripides paracomically targets Aristophanes’s Peace and Clouds at key points at the beginning and end of the play. The chapter argues that Euripides employs paracomedy the way Aristophanes employs paratragedy—to establish his own genre’s primacy through a series of pointed contrasts with the other genre.