ancientgreekpubtalk:thoodleoo:did aristophanes just break the 4th wall all the way back in the 5th c

ancientgreekpubtalk:thoodleoo:did aristophanes just break the 4th wall all the way back in the 5th century bceAristophanes doesn’t break the fourth wall. The fourth wall was reduced to dust at the very beginning of Old Comedy. Aristophanes jumps gleefully over the remains, sometimes rebuilds it just to smash it all over again, or rebuilds it *around the audience*. By which I mean that the audience becomes a character in the play. It’s particularly striking in The Frogs, the play this quote comes from, because The Frogs is a play about a playwrighting contest and like all Ancient Greek plays, it was performed, well, during a playwrighting contest. So basically Aristophanes takes the real situation he’s performing in - an audience and a jury that’s going to choose the best playwright at the end of the festival  - and makes it part of his fictional story about choosing the best playwright. There is a real implication in this play that good theatre can *save* the city, so Aristophanes directly implicates the city (the audience, which is representative of the citizens) in its own salvation. It’s complex and fascinating. Especially since he’s also always trading insults with the spectators and implicating that they’re useless and wouldn’t know good poetry if it kicked them in the proktos. Xanthias’ line, that you quoted, is the very first line of the play. For the very first line on, Aristophanes tells his audience: this is a play about theatre, and what makes good theatre, and YOU, dear Athenian man sitting there, have a role to play in that. I am going to demonstrate to you that me, Aristophanes, I can do better than the old cliché jokes my rivals put on. (It’s a contest, remember?) I can make you think about the very nature of theatre, and comedy.In general, as I said, Old Comedy doesn’t have a fourth wall. Some think that, in our very oldest surviving play, Aristophanes’ Acharnians, the main character Dikaiopolis actually got up from the audience benches to walk down onto the stage and start berating the city about its stance on war. In other plays, character will pick a well-known figure on the benches and start mocking him for a quick gag. In The Knights, a play about politician Cleon, one of the characters warns the audience just before the Cleon-analogue comes onstage: ‘Don’t worry, the mask isn’t a good likeness. We didn’t want to scare you to death!’It is alleged that during the first performance of The Clouds, Socrates, sitting in the audience, got up and waved so the public could judge the likeness of his caricature on stage. Anyway. Sorry to ruin your quick post with long rambling comments. I did write about 800 pages about The Frogs a couple years ago and it’s not quite out of my system yet. At least if this PhD can’t land me a job in academia, it can help me make posts on tumblr :) -- source link

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