Old Comedy vs New Comedy

Comedies were performed in the Great Dionysia just like tragedies; also comedies were entered in contests in other festival, known as the Lesser Dionysia, and it was celebrated in the winter. Comedies combined poetry with coarse language. For example they featured buffoonery, slapstick, obscenity, and horseplay. The comedy actors dressed in weird costumes that had paddled bellies or rumps for outrageous effects.

“The comic playwrights made their own plots and they focused on important matters like: politics, philosophies, the new social class, and well-known personalities. (Roy T. Matthews’s pg. 70)The comic playwrights freedom could only exist in a democracy.

Freedom was very limited for the comic playwrights. The comic playwrights showed good faith to their citizens. Aristophanes comedies are the main source for what is now known has the Old Comedy. “Old Comedy was comic Greek plays that had strong element of political criticism. ” (Roy T.

Matthews’s pg. 70) Old Comedy was also, “the style of comedy established by Aristophanes in the fifth century, and was distinguished by a strong element of political and social satire. (Roy T. Matthews’s Glossary G-10)Aristophanes made forty-four comedies in all; eleven of them still exist in today’s world. Like Euripides, Aristophanes wrote his plays for-torn Athens, and he also attacked the famous philosopher Socrates, Aristophanes thought of him as a hopeless dreamer. In the play Lysistrata, “Aristophanes exceeded the limitations of the comedic form and approached the timeless quality of tragedies.

” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg. 70) In a sexually and funny way, Lysistrata shows the laughter of the Peloponnesian War by, suggesting all of the wars.The play Lysistrata starts off with an Athenian women, who tries to convince the other women of Athens and Sparta to refrain from their husbands until the husbands sign a peace treaty. Filled with lots of sexually content, and outrageous illusion to the tragic dramas, the play ends with remainders that the Greeks of their common ancestors, the victory over the Persians, their respect for the same gods.

The play was first premiered in 411 BCE, seven years before the Spartan won the Peloponnesian War.The play was criticized on but it failed to throw out the Athens’s tumbling rush to disaster. After the Peloponnesian War and the democracy being restored in 403 BCE, freedom of speech was disallowed in Athens. But comedies still trustee on the burlesque and slapstick, but their political edge was gone. The wonderful and creative Greek age theater was now down with.

In the Hellenistic period, Greek comedy began to look like modern productions. The weird padding that was worn by the actors made them look like the costumes were real.The masks were remade to be look like the characters were portrayed; the actors assumed that they had a dominant status over the chorus. Comedy became a form of good and popular amusement, and the Hellenistic playwrights came up with a new genre called New Comedy. Its goal was to appeal to the pleasure of the audiences who were coming to the theaters.

Dodging politics and casual gestures that were bad, the New Comedy presented funny scenes from the middle class life. Plays were mostly comic romances, and the endings were as predicted happy and the plays reflected the range of the Hellenistic style.The characters were knew the types drawn from the rich people of the Hellenistic community: “the courtesan, the grumpy old man, the slave, and the fawning parasite. ” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg.

97) New Comedy stayed faithfully with the middle class; however, the traditional social order was always came up top in the end. An example is, “a favorite plot device of New comedy hinged on discovering that a seemingly lowborn character was actually from a respected and often wealthy family. ” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg.

97) Both ancient and modern critics always considered that Menander was the author of New Comedy.Menander written more than a hundred plays for Dionysia festival Athens, he won first prize for comedy eight times. He is recognized with accomplishing the comedy of manners. It is a funny play that pays its attention on the way people talk in the community. The comedies of manners remind everyone of the Hellenistic focusing on normal scenes from everyday life. One of Menander’s works was The Woman from Samos.

This type of comedy worries the character of an orphaned baby and features a stock of characters: “a courtesan, a young lover, an old lover, a funny neighbor, and two funny slaves. (Roy T. Matthews’s pg. 98) He first presenting a household in which his dad supposed that he and his son are addressing the same lady, when it is actually the son being occupied with the girl next door.Obviously the play has a happy ending, with all of the characters brought together, the son gets married to his true love, and the dad and the women married in a happy ceremony. Western comedy would be incredible if it wasn’t for Menander.

Menander style of plays was token into Roman comedy, which was assed the spirit of his own work into the dramas of the Italian Renaissance and from there in went into the comedy of Shakespeare and Moliere. Two Alexandrian writers stood out and they were, Theocritus and Apollonius. Theocritus formed a new poetic figure called the pastoral. Pastoral poetry illustrated the life of a shepherd and a farmer. He drew his pictures from the memory, when he was back in the rural area of Sicily.

Theocritus wrote what he called idylls, which meant, “little picture” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg. 98) in Greek.It gave small pictures, or vignettes, of the Hellenistic life.

Some of his poems reveled much about the daily life of “affairs, the most frequent problem of all generations were love, family, religion, and wealth. He made particularly concerning pictures of a woman’s love for a man. ” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg. 99) Apollonius’s most well known work is the verse romance called The Argonautica; it is a tale about Jason and the argonauts’ and their journey for the golden fleece. “The story has rich fantasy, adventure, battles, and love.

” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg. 8) Jason’s lover is Medea she is in a lot of ways the most convincing character in the story, and the Apollonius sets her mind off against Jason. Old Comedy and New Comedy were very similar and very different from each other.

They had both had very good plays that had happy endings. But the difference was that Old Comedy had lots of sexually plays and New Comedy did not. New Comedy had romance plays. The characters were also different. Old Comedy had actors who would wear weird costumes while New Comedy had characters like farmers and shepherds.