One good playwright brings forth another

After reading through Norma Miller's collection of Menander's plays I feel like I need to brush up my Shakespeare.

Both of these authors' plays are still relevant, in spite of time. But both also have elements that seem odd or even uncomfortable to us.

Shakespeare has his tween-age weddings and near cast-wide die offs. Menander has a whole other culture's references (are cooks still stereotyped as thieves?), and quite a bit of casual rape.

That is, rapes are central to quite a few of his plots, and more often than not the raped woman ends up  marrying her rapist. But she does so silently - neither she nor the society within the plays comment. If anything, this scenario is practicallly presented as the norm. It's as if it were an ordinary way for people to wind up married. That makes it especially disconcerting.

That's what makes me curious about Shakespeare's plays. They were written hundreds rather than thousands of years ago, but Elizabethan culture is quite different from our own. Surely, Shakespeare's plays have something of their own that makes us truly uncomfortable.

As per this specific collection of Menander's works, it was definitely made with specialists in mind. Miller constantly references scholarly works, and subjects the odd part or two of a play to a general cultural/histotical analysis. She clearly put this collection together for those who already know Menander, but if you just want to read his plays then using this book is a fine way to do so.

Taking it to the streets

I know that ancient Greece regarded the home as private space and the marketplace, the street, as public space. I know that these divides were fairly strict. I also know that along with the house being regarded as their realm, popular thinking dictated that children and women were best neither seen nor heard.

Despite all of this, it still seems weird to me that the settings for all of Menander's plays seem to be streets. Specifically, they're mostly streets just out front of two central characters' houses. Ancient Greek theatre was minimalist (as far as I know), but even so it's downright distracting that simply a street in front of peoples' houses could be the setting for so many plays.

Yet, considering the content of these plays, I find myself less and less surprised. Public spaces are spaces in which news trades hands and people from different houses interact and conflict. Those are the essential elements of all of Menander's plays. Thus, Menander's setting his plays on streets makes sense. Not to mention the importance of misunderstanding to most of the comedy of his works and how much of that can be had when news and gossip trade hands.

Nonetheless, I'm left amazed that someone who reused an aspect of successful plays was able to remain popular. Nowadays, if we find a lack of imagination in an author's works we call him/her out on it, myself included.

When pacing and plotting were pushed

It seems that the Greeks of the Hellenistic period had tastes quite apart from ours. Almost all of the Menander that I've read so far has involved children thought lost who later have their identities revealed. If it works, it works, right?

From what I've gleaned in the notes to his plays, his audience had no problem with such repetitive use of a device. Instead, they were more interested in what he had to say about human nature and life and how his plotting and pacing went. So he could just focus on changing things up in those regards and still win accolades.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for most modern sequels and remakes (and even a handful of loosely original features) where old ideas are reused. Ideas are retreaded and the majority of big productions are cast in the same mould when it comes to pace and plot.

Of course, the Greeks regarded their drama with an eye towards a more or less agreed upon ideal. Modern audiences aren't so united when it comes to standards. No doubt that's just Hollywood's game: cast a light net so widely that those who are wary of it can avoid it while those who don't care and those who are looking for the same old fix get caught.

A culture of a different kind

Menander's The Arbitration is the work of a stronger playwright. This impression is left by the play's nested plots.

On top of the general plot about another classic mix up involving a father, a son, and a baby of "mysterious" origins, the play also involves a sub-plot wherein the shepherd who found this baby and the servant of its unwitting father seek an arbitrator to settle the matter of who owns the trinkets found with the baby.

What's troubling about this play though, is it's casual treatment of rape. The baby at the plot's center is the result of the main character's raping his wife four months before they're married. As to why he doesn't remember this incident, it's revealed that he had done it while drunkenly barging into a women's festival. Given this context (and what Marrou mentioned about the mixing of the sexes at festivals), I can understand how such a rape could be a plot device.

But, the coolness with which the characters treat the rape sets a strange scene for a comedy. The play's jokes aren't that dark, though. Generally speaking, they're more like verbal slapstick.

It may be that the bits missing from the play contextualized its plot's rape to some extent. As it is, though, and as a modern reader, a rape is out of place in a comedy. Unless Menander pioneered dark comedy.

A marked improvement

A brief introductory note mentions that The Girl from Samos is the work of a more experienced and mature Menander. This turns out to be more than just blather.

For starters, most of the women in this  play are named. Though only the title character has any lines among them. Plus, in a curious reversal, tthe only wife in the play is never seen.

Though this play is more fragmented than Old Cantankerous, the story holds together nicely. The comedy inherent in the play's central misunderstanding holds up pretty well, too. Not to mention the fourth wall-breaking jokes and effective use of addresses to the audience. Such addresses must have been the norm, or the mark of a particular character type, though, since they do happen rather frequently.

Menander's made quite a jump, but how did he manage between these plays? Perhaps we'll find out in The Arbitration.

The entertainment cycle

Menander's Old Cantankerous (aka The Misanthrope)'s a tidy little play. Curiously, I think it would play well today, with just a few modifications. Why? Because like the recent hit comedy Bridesmaids it depicts women getting as debauched as men stereotypically do. Entertainment really does run in cycles.

At the same time, though, the two women who are the foci of the two male leads' affection are never named. They're just referred to as "the girl" or "the sister" or "the daughter." Such disregard of women is par for the course in much of the Ancient world, sure, but it still strikes me as really odd. Married women (who are also mothers) have names, though. So perhaps when Menander was writing it was a convention that women needed to have a social place/function to be considered worthy of a name.

Nonetheless, Old Cantankerous delivers a few laughs and is a pretty quick read since it's quite short at some 27 pages. I'll have to see what The Girl from Samos holds before I really figure out this Menander fellow, though.

Meandering into Menander

Norma Miller really loves her some Menander. Yes, I've started into her collection of plays and fragments by Menander (which I'll title Menander: Plays and Fragments for convenience sake).

A little outside of my usual practice, I decided to read the introduction to this collection. It's quite animated for something about ancient history. Moreso, it's something that's working in tandem with A History of Education in Antiquity. Menander's era (341/2-291 B.C.) is just a slice of what Marrou has written of, but the trends that he tracks are visible in Miller's history, too. Most notably that the middle class and its immersion in Greek literature made for a shift in the nature of Greek comedy.

While Menander was writing, comedy was no longer as broad as it was in Aristophanes and its focus had moved from general situations to more private affairs. These two changes reflect an increasingly middle class audience, a group concerned with and aware of their social lives and literature.

All of this context for what's coming next is great. Actually, I'm rather glad that I read this introduction since it'll bring what's left of Menander's work into a sharper focus.