Dionysus and Xanthias: The First Double Act

**Philip Rowe** (0:09)
Welcome to The History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 115, Dionysus and Xanthias, The First Double Act.
Maybe I should have numbered this episode 15a, because as a little extra before we get into the Shakespeare timeline that I promised you last time, I'm heading back into ancient Greek theatre to have a look at The Frogs by Aristophanes. I'm prompted to do this because recently I saw a production of The Frogs which was presented by the physical comedy troupe Spymonkey. More of them later, but just to say for the moment that the play was performed as a three-hander and was heavily adapted, as they put it, with massive apologies to Aristophanes. Actually, I don't think they had too much to apologize for.
When I wrote the episode on Aristophanes way back in season one, and can you believe it, that's three and a half years ago, I wrote about his life and three of his plays, The Clouds, The Wasps and of course, Lysistrata. I don't remember why I decided not to cover The Frogs at the time. Probably I thought that three plays as a sample of the work was enough. But it does seem to be a particularly strange decision, as I can remember being intrigued by the addition of the play that sat in a bookshelf in my childhood home. This was the Gilbert Murray verse translation, a volume with a striking green cover and a white line drawing of two rather sullen-looking frogs sitting in the rushes. On the bookshelf, it was paired with The Birds in a similar cover. Another Aristophanes play I didn't cover as I hit the later episodes in Season 1 So seeing the play now seemed like all the excuse I needed to go back to it.
As it's been a while, let me give you a quick recap on Aristophanes and his work. In fact, the biography of Aristophanes will be very quick, as we know virtually nothing about his life. Much of what we do think we know comes from the self-referencing passages in his plays. We can say that he was born about 446 BCE and died about 386 BCE. We don't know anything about his parentage, except that his father was called Philippus and the family resided in an area in the heart of Athens which included the site of the Acropolis. He wrote plays in a genre that was already well established by the time The Frogs was first performed. In fact, he came towards the end of the period that produced what we now call Old Comedy. It was only about 50 years after his death that the nature of comedy changed with a generational change in tastes and became the now virtually unknown, apart from fragments, middle comedy. Aristophanes and his predecessors wrote comic satire that was concerned with the actions of the gods on the fate of man and with how man failed to govern himself. Old Comedy always took a critical stance and lacked the focus on the domestic, that the later middle and the then new comedy presented, the latter being represented by the surviving works of Menander.
Old Comedy is first identified about 500 BCE and survived for about 150 years. The earliest references to comic plays are to a poet Caesarian of Magaris who is credited with taking local rustic comedy, which we assume included jesting, singing, dancing and comic storytelling, and turning it into a form that somewhat followed the existing theatrical traditions of tragedy, formalising action and introducing the use of the chorus into comic plays.
Only slightly later we know of Epichramus of Kos. Again, only fragments of his work survive, but he is mentioned by Aristotle in The Poetics as the inventor of comic plots, and by Plato and Socrates and many others. Socrates styled Epichramus as the king of comedy, and in so doing he put him alongside Homer who he called the king of tragedy. The fragments we have suggest he wrote between 30 and 50 comedies, which covered both comic takes on heroic figures and comedy based around the habits and beliefs of rural societies. Plato also wrote comedy, although none survive, and some of the ancient commentary suggests that in some cases he relied heavily on the earlier works by Epichramus.
The first recorded recipients of laurels at the Dionysia Festival for Comedy are Chionides and Magnus in 487 BCE and 472 BCE respectively, but little else is known about these poets or their works. A third great of the old comedy genre was Eupolus. Sources differ on the exact dates, but his first play is recorded as being produced in about 430 BCE, so very contemporary with the emergence of Aristophanes. It's likely that his first productions were at the Linnaea Festival, where it seems the entry criteria allowed novice playwrights to hone their craft before granting entry to the Dionysia, which was always the premier competition. Eleven of forty known plays that Aristophanes is credited with survive in complete or almost complete forms, and they are the only complete examples that we have of this old comedy genre. It seems that he started writing and wanting to produce plays at a very young age, but he was too young to be allowed to produce at a festival, so an arrangement was made for the plays to be directed and produced by a friend or colleague called Callistratus. Similar arrangements were also made for his next two plays, with either Callistratus or another dramatist called Philonides directing. It was an arrangement that was also repeated with some of the later plays. We know it was the norm for playwrights to produce and direct their own plays, and sometimes perform in them, so this does seem to be a particular preference of Aristophanes, and a conscious decision to have an alternative director. However, it does add a complication when we're looking for biographical details. Anything that we take from the plays that we know were directed by others could refer to them and not to Aristophanes at all. Following The Banqueters, that first play, and a couple of other very early plays, three victories at the Linnaea Festival are recorded, and The Frogs had a unique distinction of being repeated at a later festival. Usually, plays were only performed for the competition and not repeated. His oldest son, Arros, was also a comic poet and probably involved with the production of his father's plays, particularly two that were produced posthumously. Two other sons were possibly also playwrights and were victorious at later Linnaea festivals.