Ancient Greek comedy
لقطه من المقال
لقطه من المقال
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic
forms in the theatre of classical Greece (others being tragedy and
the satyr play ).
Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three
periods , Old comedy , Middle comedy , and new comedy .
Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of
the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes , While Middle
Comedy is largely lost , i.e. preserved only in relatively
short fragments by authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis .
New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus
fragments of menander .
The philosopher Aristotle wrote in his poetics (c.335 BC) that
comedy is a representation of laughable people and involves some
kind of blunder or ugliness which does not cause pain or disaster .
C.A. Trypanis wrote that comedy is the last of the great species
of poetry Greece gave to the world .
The Alexandrine grammarians , and most likely Aristophanes of
Byzantium in particular , seem to have been the first to divide
Greek comedy into what became the canonical three periods : Old
comedy (?pXa?a archaia) , Middle Comedy (µ??? mese) and new Comedy (v?a nea).
These divisions appear to be largely arbitrary , and ancient comedy
almost certainly developed constantly over the years .
The most important Old comic dramatist is Aristophanes.
Born in 446 B.C. his works , with their pungent political satire and
abundance of sexual and scatological innuendo , effectively define
the genre today . Aristophanes lampooned the most important presonalities
and institutions of his day , as can be seen , for example , in his
buffoonish portrayal of socrates in the clouds and in his racy anti-war
farce Lysistrata .
He was one of large number of comic poets working in Athens in the
late 5th century , his most important contemporary rivals being Hermippus
and Eupolis .
The Old Comedy subsequently influenced later European writers such as
Rabelais , Cervantes , Swift , and Voltaire . In particular , they copied
the technique of disguising a political attack as buffoonery . The legacy of
Old Comedy can be seend today in political satiers such as Dr.Strangelove and
in the televised buffoonery of Monty Python and Saturday Night.
إرسال تعليق