As well as the fact that comedy and tragedy clearly serve diverse purposes, certain critics have also identified another key difference in the way the two genres can be considered. Slater argues that
“we must suspend, not our disbelief, but our anachronistic foreknowledge of the action of the plays in order to capture their original performative meaning. This is not the only possible critical approach to the plays – but it is the only approach that respects their integrity as performances in context”.
Tragedy allows the playwright to manipulate the myth as they choose, but still retain its essential characteristics, and Slater maintains that comedy has an even greater element of flexibility, as it does not require such ‘foreknowledge’. At line 100 of Birds, Tereus explicitly refers to his change of character from the tragedies of Sophocles. When Euelpides comments on the strangeness of his beak, he replies: “It’s how Sophocles distorts Tereus – that’s me – in his tragedies”. This demonstrates that in comedy, characters are permitted to return in other guises and be explicit about their ‘former life’. Metatheatre in this instance, then, acts as a form of clarification for the audience as to the character’s purpose or existence, and this flexibility is quite different to the tragic traditions. This is consolidated by the assertion that “Aristophanes is adept at exploiting the semantic slippage between…teaching and the dramatic poet’s role in constructing the performance”. It can perhaps be implied, then, that didacticism is facilitated more easily via metatheatre, and that a balance of these two elements must be ensured in order to achieve success.
One way to convey didactic intentions is via the literary device of allegory. In Peace, interest in the beetle is gradually built up, and suddenly the second slave imagines some supposedly clever man in the audience asking what a beetle has to do with the play. The man next to him allegorises the beetle as Cleon eating excrement in Hades, and this scene not only draws the attention of the audience to the fact that it is a play, but also draws attention to the idea that the author’s intentions may not be unilateral.
Satire is also a potential link to metatheatre. The Thesmophoriazusae positions Euripides not just as an author but as a spectator, who is drawn to the scene by means of Euripides’ highly successful Helen. As if this use of metatheatricality is not successful enough in itself, borrowing a device from Euripidean tragedy, Aristophanes then uses Mnesilochus to satirise the Helen, on the grounds that he already has the costume (Thes. 847-51). This multi-layered use of metatheatre is highly significant to the overall history of Old Comedy, as it can be seen to engender satire. Schmeling makes the same link to parody. Aristophanes also uses Old Comedy to critique literary fashion and its evolution. In Birds, for example, the poet misquotes Homer continually:
POET: [reciting] O Muse, in your songs sing the renown
of Cloudcuckooland—this happy town . . . (909ff.)
and Slater dubs his style Pindaric and old-fashioned [140]. By directly comparing poets, the competitive purpose is reintroduced, and the play’s metatheatrical elements are once again in motion.
Metatheatre also continues to serve an extremely significant purpose in the Thesmophoriazusae, where a rehearsal environment is created when preparing Mnesilochus to enter the female domain. His contemporaries show him how to talk and move and dress, just as in a theatrical rehearsal. The same effect is also achieved in Wasps, II.1122ff. The notion of disguise is of course intrinsic to the theatre, and the accentuation of this by means of metatheatre is significant to theatrical history as a whole – not just in terms of Old Comedy. It is particularly noteworthy in terms of cross-dressing, a trend picked up on in later theatrical history, especially by Shakespeare. In addition, Schmeling asserts that being conscious of oneself in the process of acting is an anti-aristotelian tendency. This easily leads to dramatic irony (eg. Wasps 53ff.), and the denouement is hotly anticipated as a result. By signifying a deviation from Aristotelian theatrical tradition, the significance of metatheatre grows ever further.
There is, throughout many of Aristophanes’ plays, a great honesty engendered by the use of metatheatre. In Peace 1022, “the avoidance of the actual sacrifice is turned into a joke: Trygaeus tells the slave to take the sheep inside and sacrifice it there, “in order to save the producer (choregos) the loss of a sheep” [Slater, 129]. The instance in Frogs where Charon enters, ‘propelling a small boat on wheels’, is not dissimilar to this. When distancing tactics such as these are used, they can contribute to the comedic value of the play – but distancing and closeness is an equally uneasy combination. By pointedly addressing and alluding to the audience (eg. 1ff. Frogs; 501 Wasps), the illusion is ruptured, and yet the audience are brought undeniably close to the action. The distancing tactic of metatheatre, when used in this way, creates a very different effect and is therefore indicative of its versatility.
Chorus as audience is another common approach employed by Aristophanes. In Frogs, the chorus are described as being “present, but…well apart from the action” (460), giving the voyeuristic impression of them as onlookers or an audience. Equally, in Wasps, Procleon performs for the chorus (618). The chorus and audience are also on a par in another way: both are complicit, even if at times impartial. Wasps, in particular, makes great use of dramatic irony at 53ff., as already mentioned, which by definition involves letting the audience have details of the situation on stage which other characters do not have. At c. line 217 of Wasps, Anticleon lets the audience know what he thinks of his contemporaries (“Then they must have got up late this morning…”). The use of metatheatre can therefore be viewed as a blurring between art and life, as Silk suggests:
“’Shall I tell them one of the usual jokes?’ says Xanthias to Dionysus at the start of Frogs. The point is not only that this sort of ‘breaking frame’ is in itself comic, but that the frame it breaks, being comic too, is already open – open to, and open like, the life outside it. All in all, we may say with Bergson: ‘the comic belongs neither altogether to art, nor altogether to life’”.
In several of his plays, Aristophanes does not only use established poets such as Euripides and Sophocles to interrupt the action, but also uses them to engineer other forms of metatheatre. This is particularly true of The Acharnians, Clouds, and Frogs. In the former, Euripides is, at his own request, wheeled out on a couch-trolley hybrid (408); the dialogue between Strepsiades and Pheidippides in Clouds discusses personal preferences of Simonides and Euripides (1353-76); and in Frogs the audience hears of a disagreement between Euripides and Aeschylus (830ff.). Schmeling describes the effect thus:
“The rupture of time, place and action, determined by the very form of metatheatre, is therefore an element of dramatic confrontation with the conventional”
It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the significance of metatheatre lies in its ability to breach the normal expectations and traditions of theatre. While it does not break away entirely from the Aristotelian precepts (particularly his Rhetoric 3.11), it does of course break dramatic unity, and Aristophanes particularly does this by showing us the tricks, and making us believe in the vision simultaneously.
This paper has attempted to examine in depth the definition of metatheatricality and its importance to Old Comedy, even though it is not regarded as surviving into New Comedy. New Comedy, however, should not be regarded as a directly diametrically opposing genre. Although its instances of metatheatricality seem diluted in relation to Old Comedy, they are certainly still there: for example, in Plautus’ Amphitryo (1ff.), Terence’s Eunuch (35ff), and Menander’s Samia (19-20, 325-6). They do, however, serve a distinctly different function to Old Comedy, where metatheatricality is more satirical. The tension between comedy and tragedy is resolved in New Comedy, which sees itself as the inheritor of tragedy rather than its opposition, treating it more reverentially.
Metatheatricality can be viewed differently in the theatre of different countries, but one aspect of metatheatre is, it seems, universally agreed upon: it subverts convention – and even though this is not so prevalent in New Comedy, it does not die completely, as demonstrated by the later traditions of Brecht and Artaud. While comedy diverges from tragedy, metatheatre acts as a bridge of sorts, and Abel’s attempt to resolve and suitably dichotomise comedy and tragedy goes partway to providing an appropriate conclusion:
“Tragedy gives by far the stronger sense of the reality of the world. Metatheatre gives by far the stronger sense that the world is a projection of human consciousness…Tragedy cannot operate without the assumption of an ultimate order. For metatheatre, order is something continually improvised by men…Tragedy transcends optimism and pessimism, taking us beyond both these attitudes. Metatheatre makes us forget the opposition between optimism and pessimism by forcing us to wonder.”
The significance of metatheatre is greatly multifaceted, but ultimately its qualities as a ‘bridge’ are what make it so successful: it bridges old and new theatre, comedy and tragedy, the audience and the actors, illusion and reality, and art and life.
Word count: 2203
Works consulted
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Bowie, A. M., Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy, Cambridge University Press, 1993
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Cartledge, P., Aristophanes and his theatre of the absurd, Bristol Classical Press, 1990
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Harriott, R. M., Aristophanes: Poet and Dramatist, London: Croom Helm, 1985
Works cited
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Lysistrata and other plays, tr. Sommerstein, A. H., Penguin, 2002 (revised)
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The Frogs and other plays, (tr. Barrett, D.), Penguin, 1964
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Abel, L., Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, Hill & Wang: New York, 1963
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Dover, K. J., Aristophanic Comedy, University of California Press, 1972
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Schmeling, M., Metathéâtre et intertexte: aspects du théâtre dans le théâtre, Archives de lettres modernes, 204, Paris, 1982
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Silk, M. S., Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, Oxford University Press, 2000
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Slater, N. W., Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002
- Wright, M., lecture: “Approaching New Comedy”, University of Exeter, 24/02/2006
Schmeling, M., Metathéâtre et intertexte: aspects du théâtre dans le théâtre, Archives de lettres modernes, 204, Paris, 1982, p. 5 (my translation)
Hornby 1986, 82, quoted in Slater, N. W., Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, p1
Dover, K. J., Aristophanic Comedy, University of California Press, 1972, p56
Aristophanes, Birds, accessed at on March 9th, 2006, tr. Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada.
Aristophanes, The Acharnians, from Lysistrata and other plays, tr. Sommerstein, A. H., Penguin, 2002 (revised). All lines and line numbers are quoted from this text or from The Frogs and other plays, (tr. Barrett, D., Penguin, 1964), unless otherwise stated.
Schmeling, ibid., 9: “le théâtre dans le théâtre est souvent lié à la parodie”
Schmeling, ibid., 81: “encore une fois le jeu dans le jeu donne la preuve de sa tendance anti-aristotélique. Les protagonistes ayant conscience de jouer, le développement linéaire de l’intrigue est voué a l’échec, et en outre le dénouement…est anticipé”
Bergson, in Sypher, Comedy, 148
Silk, M. S., Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, Oxford University Press, 2000, p91
As outlined in Matthew Wright’s lecture of 24.02.2006, University of Exeter.
Abel, L., Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, Hill & Wang: New York, 1963, p113