Old Comedy and its Performative Rivals of the Fifth Century

This dissertation analyzes Old Comedy’s generic interaction with its primary performative rivals of the fifth century, tragedy and satyr play. While previous scholarship on this subject is concerned almost exclusively with paratragedy, I examine issues such as Old Comedy’s engagement with satyr play and the frequently unacknowledged evidence for generic interaction in the comic iconography of Attic and South Italian vase-painting. Chapter One analyzes the earliest known intergeneric, comic experiment for which any considerable evidence survives, Cratinus’ fragmentary (and parasatyric) Dionysalexandros. Chapter Two departs briefly from textual evidence and examines the visual record for strategies of intergeneric engagement in the comic iconography of Attic and South Italian vase-painting. Chapter Three signals the beginning of the study’s play-based core and examines the best surviving evidence for cross-generic play in three productions of the Aristophanic corpus. This chapter’s study of Peace (421 BCE) is followed by chapters on Thesmophoriazusae (411 BCE) and Frogs (405 BCE), respectively. My approach, which considers both verbal and visual evidence for comic appropriation, allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the parody of tragedy and satyr play by comic playwrights, whose aggressive adaptation of performative rivals can be seen as central to an ongoing project of defining comedy as an essential polis institution in the latter half of the fifth century.Ph