No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Phallocracy and Phallic Caricature: Re-Viewing the Iconography of Greek Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
The characteristic costume of Greek comic actors has been widely represented iconographically in statuettes and vase paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Theatre historians instantly recognize the grotesquely distorted expressions on the masks, the rotund shapes formed by ill-concealed padding, and, most distinctively, the comic phallus. A “dangling leather symbol… red at the tip, swollen,” the comic phallus, of course, represents male genitalia.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1993
References
1 Aristophanes, , Clouds, ll. 537–544Google Scholar, trans. Beare, W., “The Costume of the Actors in Aristophanic Comedy,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 4 (1954): 66.Google Scholar
2 Körte, A., “Archäologische Studien zur alten Komödie,” Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts 8 (1893): 61–93Google Scholar; Beare, “The Costume of the Actors in Aristophanic Comedy”; Webster, T. B. L., “The Costume of the Actors in Aristophanic Comedy,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 5 (1955): 94–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stone, Laura M., Costume in Aristophanic Comedy (New York Arno Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Pickard-Cambridge, Arthur, Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy, 2nd ed., rev. Webster, T. B. L. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)Google Scholar; Cornford, Francis Macdonald, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914; rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968).Google Scholar Standard textbook presentations of the subject include Brocken, Oscar, History of the Theatre, 6th ed. (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1991), 20–22, 29Google Scholar, and Gillespie, Patti P. and Cameron, Kenneth M., Western Theatre: Revolution and Revival (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 88–90, 100–103.Google Scholar
3 See, for example, Pickard-Cambridge, 132 ff.
4 Trans. Rogers, B. B., in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, ed. Hadas, Moses (New York: Bantam, 1962), 22.Google Scholar
5 See Aylen, Leo, The Greek Theater (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 42Google Scholar; and Pickard-Cambridge, 145.
6 Pickard-Cambridge, 144–52; and Sifakis, G. M., Parabasis and Animal Choruses (London: Athlone, 1971), 80.Google Scholar
7 Nicoll, Allardyce, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (1931, rpt. New York: Cooper Square, 1963), 31.Google Scholar
8 See, for example, Bieber, Margarete, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 38–39Google Scholar; and Nicoll, 20–25.
9 Körte, A. cited in Sifakis, 16.Google Scholar
10 See Bieber, 38–39; Nicoll, 21; and Trendall, A. D. and Webster, T. B. L., Illustrations of Greek Drama (New York: Phaidon, 1971), 19.Google Scholar
11 See Nicoll, 20–21, and Trendall and Webster, 19, for the development of this argument.
12 Aylen contends that the focus on wine and revelry has trivialized the reputation of Dionysus and argues for greater emphasis on the profound and dynamic powers inherent in the fertility and growth aspects attributed to this multi-faceted god (41–42).
13 Cornford, 111, traces this view to Chambers, E. K., The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903).Google Scholar
14 Cornford, 106.
15 The argument we summarize here is developed in Lerner, Gerda, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 39–44, 145–152.Google Scholar
16 Griot, J. E., Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Sage, Jack (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), 241.Google Scholar
17 Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Manheim, Ralph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955).Google Scholar
18 Neumann schematizes the construction he calls the Archetypal Feminine to delineate its many facets and their interrelationships. See The Great Mother, chart opposite p, 82.
19 See also Samuels, Andrew, Shorter, Bani, and Plaut, Fred, A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (London: Routledge, 1986), 32–33.Google Scholar
20 Keuls, Eva C., The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper, 1985), 2.Google Scholar
21 Aeschylus, , Eumenides in Aeschylus I: Oresteia, trans. Lattimore, Richmond (New York: Washington Square Press, 1953), ll. 658–660.Google Scholar
22 Zeitlin, Froma I., “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” in Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, eds. Peradotto, John and Sullivan, J. P. (Albany: SUNY, 1984), 160.Google Scholar
23 The Works of Aristotle, traits Smith, J. A. and Ross, W. D. (Oxford, 1912Google Scholar), De Generatione Animation, I, 20 (729a, 28–34), cited in Lerner, 206; see also Keuls, 144–147.
24 Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 71–72Google Scholar; see also Zinseriing, Verena, Women in Greece and Rome (New York: Abner Schram, 1972), 22–24.Google Scholar
25 Illustrations of floorplans of Athenian houses are reproduced in Keuls, 96 and 211.
26 See Stone, 99, for a description of the convention of men playing women's roles in Aristophanes’ plays. Sue-Ellen Case discusses the gender oppression inherent in this convention in “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts,” Theatre Journal 37 (1985), 317–28.
27 See Keuls, Fig. 328, “The cult of the domestic herm: a garlanded penis near a home altar.”
28 See Keuls, Fig. 65, “The phallus as a decorative element” and Fig. 78, “Naked and clothed girl dancing around phallus.”
29 Cornford, 114, suggests in his analysis of the phallic procession represented in Aristophanes' Acharnions, that the original hero of the ritual drama was an incarnation of Phales, the phallic god, in human form and, by extension, an incarnation of the phallus itself.
30 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 37Google Scholar; see also Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 131.Google Scholar
31 See, for example, Neumann, , Origins, 231.Google Scholar
32 Campbell, 37.
33 Aristotle's Poetics, trans. Butcher, S. H. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), Books II–V, 52–59.Google Scholar
34 For the philosophic notion of opposites defining each other, see Plato, Laws 7,816, quoted in Duckworth, George E., The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 306.Google Scholar
35 Stone, 99.
36 Ferris, Lesley, Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 21.Google Scholar
37 The debate is summarized in Stone, 73–75.
38 Beare, “The Costume of the Actors in Aristophanic Comedy”; Webster, “The Costume of the Actors in Aristophanic Comedy;” Beare, W., “Aristophanic Costume Again,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 7 (1957): 184–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Webster, T. B. L., “A Reply on Aristophanic Costume,” CQ n.s. 7 (1957): 185CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beare, W., “Aristophanic Costume: A Last Word,” CQ n.s. 9 (1959): 126–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39 Ibid., 96. This idea is borne out, says Stone, by the evidence of bronze and terracotta statuettes which can be linked more directly to Old Comedy. Surveying this iconography, Stone counts 22 phalluses of the hanging variety and 83 of the tied-up or coiled types.
40 See, for example, the illustrations in Bieber, 129–46.
41 Stone, 97.
42 We rely on Stone, 80, 102–05, in our analysis of the red tip and its possible meanings.
43 Stone, 104–05, observes that this is the case with the terra-cotta statuettes.
44 The Poet and the Women (Thesmophoriazousae) in The Frogs and Other Plays, trans. and introd. by David Barrett (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), 121, quoted in Ferris, 27.
45 Ferris, 27.
46 Trans. Webb, R. H. in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, 272.Google Scholar
47 Trans. Hadas, Moses in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, 179Google Scholar; interpretation of action from Aylen, 103.
48 Cornford, 112.
49 See also the late fifth-century South Italian vase depicting the thrashing of a slave, Bieber, Fig. 513, or Trendall and Webster, IV, 15.