9 - Dramatic fiction: New Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Our last play by a fifth-century dramatist is Aristophanes' Plutus from 388; Rhesus is probably a work of similar date. The next extant play is either Menander's Dyskolos of 316 or his Samia from at most five years earlier. And in the interval framed by these texts – a period longer than that spanned by our entire corpus of surviving tragedy – the form, content, and poetics of Attic comedy have been momentously transformed.
What has happened, in a nutshell, is that comedy has adopted the narrative conventions of tragedy. Literalistic unity of place, time, action; observance of real-world causality; naturalistic content and reporting of secondary action; retention of dramatic illusion – all these enjoy in New Comedy the status of narrative ground rules, assumptions the audience can take for granted in unplotting a story from its telling. And with these tragic conventions has come the whole specialised repertoire of tragic plot devices: intrigue, recognition, detection, rescue, cross-purposes, even (in Plautus, at least) revenge. Yet at the same time, and no less crucially, this reinvented comedy has retained and even reinforced two vital distinctions between Old Comedy and tragedy: it has wholly abandoned the Iliadic ‘minor’ narrative key and the use of myth, two tragic preserves on which Old Comedy occasionally poached.
This final escape of classical narrative from myth had been a long time coming.
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- The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative , pp. 188 - 221Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
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