For this installment of my examinations of Greek comedies I will focus on one of the ancient Greek comedians whose entire corpus is very, very, VERY fragmentary, touching briefly on all of their known works. For background info on ancient Greek comedy plus my previous reviews click here: https://glitternight.com/ancient-greek-comedies/
ALCAEUS – This comic playwright came along for the tail end of Attic Old Comedy. Alcaeus’ career ranged from approximately 405 BC to the 380s BC and we have fragmentary remains of eight comedies from an unknown total body of work.
1. TRAGI-COMEDY – This play gave comedic treatment to the traditional rivalry between comedy and tragedy on the ancient Athenian stage. The comedy had fun with the inherent tensions between the two dramatic forms, including the fact that tragedy took pains to preserve the audience’s suspension of disbelief while comedy reveled in bursting the dramatic illusion via constant meta-theatrical breaking of the fourth wall.
Tragedy was the long-standing, prestigious and revered art form while comedy was the comparative newcomer and was still perceived as an upstart medium by the established writers of tragedy. One might also think of the Strauss opera Capriccio with its light-hearted rivalry between the music and the libretto in operas, with a writer of each claiming greater importance. Continue reading
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