The aim of the book is: ‘a study of Old Comedy’s parody and literary appropriation of the prestige genres of fifth-century performance culture – tragedy, satyr play and lyric – as a means of raising the public profile of the individual poet and the genre as a whole’ (1). Donald Sells is open from the start; this is not a comprehensive study of parody in Old Comedy, but rather the monograph focuses on parody and literary appropriation as a means to a particular end: the self-promotion of the dramatist and his dramatic genre.
The chapters offer fresh interpretations of several Aristophanic comedies, as well as employing evidence from pottery, satyr drama and a smattering of fragments, presented in the following structure: Chapter 1 explores Acharnians and Aristophanic ‘branding’; Chapter 2 considers how the visual evidence of pots ‘develops the visual and narrative terms of appropriation’ (18); Chapter 3 devotes attention to Peace and parasatyrism; chapters 4 and 6 offer rereadings of Peace and Thesmophoriazusae, respectively; Chapter 5 turns to parody in the lyrics of Frogs and Thesmophoriazusae, while incorporating familiar suspects from the comic fragments, including Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros and Pherecrates’ Cheiron. I found the application of marketing theory and Aristophanic ‘branding’ particularly stimulating to think with for reading Acharnians, while the attention given to Thesmophoriazusae throughout the book is notable.
It is encouraging to see Sells push the remit of parody beyond the textual to encompass visual evidence as a source of performance: ‘The strictly textual and linguistic focus of [others] … naturally excludes important evidence of parody in performance preserved in contemporary vase painting … parody in performance is a visual experience and had a distinctive impact on audiences’ (2). In doing so Sells follows a trend common to 21st-century scholarship on comedy, from Martin Revermann on performance (Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (Oxford 2006)) to Emmanuela Bakola on Cratinus (Cratinus and the Art of Comedy (Oxford 2010)) for incorporating visual evidence into the interpretation of Greek Comedy. This move towards performance when considering parody in drama is to be welcomed, although the methods used to analyse visual material and consider comic performance still originate from a literary-focused approach to the visual, which is used to make conjectures about performance.
Sells outlines his mode of analysis, noting that he draws on multiple theoretical models, because ‘no single theoretical model can address both the stylistic codes and the topical subtexts of parody and appropriation in Old Comedy’ (8). Sells is right that we currently lack this understanding. Indeed, the stimulating introduction to this book threw up questions about what we understand by parody, and why we do not engage with definitions more beyond the field of Classics. The subsequent edited volume in Bloomsbury’s Classical Studies series, Peter Swallow and Edith Hall’s Aristophanic Humour: Theory and Practice (London 2020), contributes to bridging this gap. Overall, given the tortuous and tricky history of classicists reading tragic parody, paratragedy and parody in drama, I for one would have benefited from a more wholesale approach to theorizing about parody, and how classicists can be part of the wider conversation on parody.
Despite the reference to ‘Old Comedy’ in the title, the chapters still give the limelight to familiar passages from Aristophanic Comedy that involve parody. This makes the book a useful resource for undergraduate students, and postgraduates as a way in to the topic, but it left me wanting more in its use of the rich legacy of fragmentary comedies we have to hand, including the under-valued fragments of Aristophanes.
I found this book in turn invigorating and it left me wishing for more. I and many will welcome the widening of approach to parody in drama so that it incorporates: (1) more visual evidence, (2) the performance context, (3) a focus on the audience and (4) the greater inclusion of fragmentary comic plays. In response to all these matters, the issues now become how we engage with this evidence, what methodologies we use and what weighting we apply to the different source sets based on their form (visual, textual or both) and limitations (the degree of fragmentation of an author). The chapter on pottery reveals the conjectural nature of such readings, whereas the analysis of comic fragments demands a different approach compared to the complete comic plays of Aristophanes.
I see this book, therefore, as an excellent stepping stone for us to approach these wider discipline-centred and methodological questions building on the work of Sells and seeking to join further debates within and beyond Classics concerning parody, performance and comedy in its many and varied forms.
