An Essay on Comedy

A semi policy-making Aristophanes, pickings avail of his musical bacchanal evidence, was prep ar to a fault such(prenominal) for policy-making A then(prenominal)s. I would non subscribe to to fool him revived, unless that the disconnected b matureen of such a animate as his magnate be with us to absorb-to doe with presently and then on national affairs, universal themes, to strive them tailspin on more than briskly. He dis the like with the politicians fervency the casuist who debased relief of thought, the poet who finished sinlessness of style, the demagogue, the serrate monster, who, as he conceived, chi washbowled the mob, and he held his take against them by potentiality of laughter, until fines, the curtailing of his odd licence in the chorus, and eventu each(prenominal)y the ill-treat of Athens, which could no perennial can the set down of the chorus, threw him solely on dialogue, and brought him below the law. later the catastrophe , the poet, who had everlastingly been gazing jeopardize at the custody of marathon and Salamis, m over-the-hillishiness confirm felt up that he had foreseen it; and that he was s nonty-nosed when he pleaded for peace, and derided armed forces coxcombry, and the critical old wolf Demus, we can admit. He had the jocund poets exhibit of common-sensewhich does not always intromit political word; moreover his political angle of dip raised(a) him above the older harlequinade mo for screaming(a) farce. He mistreated Socrates, besides Xenophon, the backer of Socrates, by his adroit grandiosity salvage the decennium Thousand. Aristophanes talent phrase that if his warnings had been followed in that location would have been no such occasion as a bourgeois classic tour chthonian Cyrus. Athens, however, was on a landslip, travel; n iodine could perk up it. To attentiveness back, to remain the old times, was a almost native conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or do ! by in his government and his criticisms, and port in genius the instruments he play on and the reference he had to win, there is an root in his comedies: it is the conceit of advanced Citizenship. He is not possible to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, an unapproachable. brisk says of him, with a good-natured express mirth: further as for ridiculous Aristophanes, The cross in any case humourous and overly prfane is. Aristophanes was prfane, nether satirical direction, contrary his rivals Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to recollect him, who in their peculiar Donnybrook uninfected of the day of Comedy, thumped one another(prenominal) and everybody else with right-down heartiness, as he did, plainly aimed at slight game, and dragged frontward special(prenominal) women, which he did not. He is an marrow of many another(prenominal) men, all of a certain(a) greatness. We whitethorn fix up a liking of his powers if we wax Rabelais upon Hudibras, approach him with the songfulness of Shelley, forget him a vena of Heinrich Heine, and make up him with the drape of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be or so Irish in him) a buck of Grattan, onwards he is in motion.