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Updated: June 27, 2025
The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible laughter; but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit. Between these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart and mind in one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere's delicacy.
So, too, fancy Greeks and Romans may be ever preferable to the true Aristophanic or Juvenalian article, imaginary Cavaliers or Puritans not at all hard to swallow, but ideal sailors, why in the world must we bear them, when we can get the originals so cheaply? When the American "Beggar's Opera" was put upon the stage, "Mose" stepped forward, the very impersonation of the Bowery. If it was low, it was at least true, a social fact. But the stage sailor is not as near probability as even the stage ship or the theatrical ocean. He is a relic of the past, a monstrous compound out of the imperfect gleanings of the Wapping dramatists of the last century. Yet all those who deal with this character of the sailor begin upon the same false notion. In their eyes the seaman is a good-natured, unsophisticated, frank, easy-going creature, perfectly reckless of money, very fond of his calling, unhappy on shore, manly, noble-hearted, generous to a degree inconceivable to landsmen. He is a child who needs to be put in leading-strings the moment he comes over the side, lest he give way to an unconquerable propensity of his to fry gold watches and devour bank-notes,
"It seems, my dear," said I, "that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all." "What is Nephelococcygia?" asked Carlotta. I relented. "It's a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city," said I. Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love.
This is the supreme merit of Don Quixote, of Scapin, of Gulliver, of Robinson Crusoe. And this quality of immortal truth and wit we find in Rebecca and Rowena, in the Rose and the Ring, in Little Billee, in Codlingsby, and Yellowplush. The burlesques have that Aristophanic touch of beauty, pathos, and wisdom mingled with the wildest pantomime.
No wonder, then, that with such an experience a bookish Confederate should turn to the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian war with sympathetic interest. The Athenians, it is true, were not blockaded as we were, and the Athenian beaux and belles were not reduced to the straits that every Confederate man, assuredly every Confederate woman, can remember.
The actors, on the whole, were not afraid of pleading their cause from the stage, and of retorting on the attacks of their assailants by lashing them with the whip of caricature, and it seems that those of The Curtain had gone a little too far in their Aristophanic parodies of their worthy fellow-citizens and chief magistrate; for in May, 1601, the justices of the peace for the county of Middlesex received the following admonition from the privy council: "We doo understand that certaine players that used to recyte their playes at the Curtaine in Moorefeilds, do represent upon the stage in their interludes the persons of some gent of good desert and quality that are yet alive under obscure manner, but yet in such sorte that all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby.
Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines himself to "quiet conversation." The language of Plautus abounds in burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek.
Diderot was just as sensible of the originality and Aristophanic gaiety of Collé's brilliant play, Truth in Wine, though Collé detested the philosophic school from Voltaire downwards, and left behind him a bitterly contemptuous account of The Natural Son. Of all comic writers, however, the author of the Andria and the Heautontimorumenos was Diderot's favourite.
In the slight Aristophanic drama of 'Swellfoot', which was sent home, published, and at once suppressed, he represents the men of England as starving pigs content to lap up such diluted hog's-wash as their tyrant, the priests, and the soldiers will allow them.
Peace was restored, and they would have reached Salisbury if they had not had some more beer. It unloosed the soldier's fancies, and again he spoke of old Em'ly, and recited the poem, with Aristophanic variations. "Jolly day," repeated Stephen, with a straightening of the eyebrows and a quick glance at the other's body. He then warned him against the variations.
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