This week it’s Menander’s Dyskolos, or The Grouch, or The Misanthrope (316 BCE), which may or may not have inspired the title of Molière’s great play, and nothing more than the title since the play was, like all of Menander’s plays, long lost. A fairly complete Dyskolos was the first of a series of extraordinary 20th century discoveries of Menander texts on Egyptian papyrus, some fragments even recovered from mummy casings. None of the bits we are reading, I don’t think.
Menander’s texts were lost, but his existence was well known. He was the favorite source of the Roman comic
playwrights, who freely plundered the works of Menander and the other writers
of New Comedy, adapting the century-old Greek play to the Roman audience and
Latin language. Some are pure
adaptation, some are combinations – plots from two Menander plays combined, some
merely borrow a comic premise. Menander
was everywhere in Latin comedy, or at least in Plautus and Terence, our surviving
representatives.
Plautus and Terence lead fairly directly to Renaissance
theater, commedia dell’arte, Elizabethan comedy, French farce, and the 20th
century sitcom. This is what I meant
when, last week, I claimed that Menander was more important as a generator of
texts than any of the greater Greek playwrights. Plautus and Terence get us to Shakespeare,
and Menander is their source.
If I have overindulged in literary history, it is because
reading Dyskolos, which I mentioned I had not read before, felt like an
exercise in theater history. Quite
interesting, but as comedies go not so much fun. Even the miserable title character is not so
much fun:
What a confounded wretch he is!
The sort of life he leads! A tried and true
example of an Attic farmer
in battle with the rocks that yield
only thyme and sage. He brings in pain
and reaps no good from it. (45)
I do like the little botanical detail. The great interest in Dyskolos is that
so many of the changes in comedy and theater are so clear. For example, the social register has changed
completely. Aristophanes had some choruses
of farmers, but this play is really about farmers, and their slaves,
with Athens kept at a distance. The
romantic lead even has to go work as a farmer to win the heroine (I have illustrated
the post with a pair of farmers and their wonderful pigs on a vase owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum).
The romantic lead – there is another innovation. We have just read an entire tradition of
theater where there was not, in comedy or tragedy, a single romance, as we call
it, a plot about a young man and woman in love and the obstacles – the grouchy
father, for example – preventing their happiness. How many thousands will follow. I am currently reading the last act of
Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville (1775), much more sophisticated but
at its core nothing more than the young couple in love, and the old man in the
way, and the schemes of both parties.
The misanthrope is inevitably defeated in a humiliation
scene (thousand more will follow), but it was interesting to hear his defend
himself:
If all others were like me,
there wouldn’t be any law-courts,
and no one would send anyone to jail.
There’d be no war – each man would hold
a moderate share and be content. (52)
Utopian misanthropy.
All quotations are from the Sheila d’Atri translation in the
1998 Menander, ed. David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie, University of
Pennsylvania Press.
I remember the next Menander, The Girl from Samos (315
BCE), as being quite a bit better than Dyskolos, although perhaps the
credit belongs to Eric G. Turner and his 1971 BBC Radio adaptation. More coherent and more zippy. We will see.
It’s the last play. Forty more
pages and we’re done.
I have finished now, and just want to say how interesting and absorbing this long read has been. I am so glad I have done it, and intend to do it all over again, in a year or so. Thanks for the ride. I think I'm hooked on Greek history, literature and culture now.
ReplyDeleteMe too, me too. Once I have finished Menander I will write a couple of follow-up posts, maybe a "what have I learned" piece or some kind of summary, and a "what will I do next piece." More Greek literature, for one thing.
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