Making the Aristophanic Audience

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Making the Aristophanic Audience Niall W. Slater Aristophanic comedy is rich in address to its audience and comments on the audience's behavior. It must be said at once, however, that this is not dispassionate reporting: Aristophanes' purpose in commenting on his audience is nearly always to redirect its attention or to shape or reshape the behavior of that audience. A study of the full extent of Aristophanes' attempts to shape the response of his audience is beyond the scope of discussion here, where the focus is primarily on his strategies for controlling and directing the attention and response of his audience in general. Let me also make one methodological assumption explicit at this point. When the characters or chorus in Aristophanes remark on audience behavior, these comments must have some basis in reality in order either to be humorous or to influence that behavior: if things are not quite as Aristophanes describes them, they nonetheless must be close enough to reality for the audience to understand and react to them. The most basic problem of audience response in the theater is to make sure there is a response. Let me therefore begin simply with the problem of attention and attention span in the theater. There is still dispute as to whether the program of the City Dionysia was shortened during the war years from five to three comedies. I believe (against Wolfgang Luppe) that it was, which helps explain the comedy of a passage in Birds.1 In the play's parabasis, the chorus issues an invitation to the spectators to join their new bird city. If they join the city of birds, the audience is told, they will acquire wings, which will allow them to escape human limitations. In a superb parody of the common tragic choral theme of "I wish I were a bird and could fly away from here," the chorus enumerates the advantages of wings. One is, they would allow the spectators to fly away from the boring performances of tragedy! [End Page 351] . (Birds 785–89) There's nothing better or more pleasant than to grow wings. Now, if one of you spectators had wings, when he was hungry he could escape the tragic performances, fly off home, have lunch, and then when he was full, fly back here again to us. Another advantage would be to slip away for a quick sexual encounter: . (793–96) And if any of you happens to be carrying on an affair with a married woman, and he sees the lady's husband in the Boule's seats, he again could have flown away from you with his wings, then after screwing her flown from her place back here again. These jokes work best, I submit, if Birds comes on in the afternoon, for they suggest a certain waning of audience interest and distraction by hunger as the morning's tragic tetralogy marched on. The solution? Skip the boring tragedy bits, head home for lunch, but do come back for "us," that is, the comedy at the end of the day's program.2 Aristophanes is of course far too sensible to suggest directly that the spectators might be bored by the comedies on offer. He does allude to the problem of attention span in another way. Ecclesiazusae was probably produced in 393 B.C., well after the end of the war, when the [End Page 352] Dionysia certainly offered a full five comedies. At the end of the play, the chorus says it has a small request: . (1154–62) I want to make a small request of the judges: that the clever ones, remembering the clever stuff in this play, vote for me; those having a good laugh, vote for me because of the laughs; in fact, I want just about everybody to vote for me; and don't let the lot be any fault for us, that we drew the first position, but you must remember all these things. Don't transgress your oath, but always judge the choruses fairly, and don't imitate those low–class trollops, who always only remember their most recent customers. We shall come back to this passage when we consider...