The Dyskolos of Menander

The astonishing multiple roles played by three actors.

Distribution of Characters by 3 actors. - 1., 2., 3.
Possible permutations of 3 actors and 13-14 roles.

Prologue Pan = 1. Becomes Sostratos (or Chaireas)

Act One.
a. Chaireas, 2. Sostratos 1. Pyrrhias (running slave) 3.

b. Knemon 2. Sostratos 1. Girl(Myrrhine) 3.

c. Daos 2. Sostratos 1. Myrrhine 3.


Act Two.
a. Daos 3. Gorgias 2. Sostratos 1.

b. Sikon 3. Geta 2.


Act Three*
a. Knemon 1. Mother 3. Geta 2.

b. Knemon 1. Geta 2. Sikon 3.

C. Sikon 3. Sostratos 1. Simiche 2.

d. Knemon 1. Simiche 2. Geta 3.


Act Four
a. Simiche 2. Sikon 3. Sostratos 1.

b. Knemon 1. Sostratos 2. Gorgias 3.

c. Kallipides 1. Sostratos 2. Gorgias 3.


Act Five.
a. Sostratos 1. Kallipides 2. Gorgias 3.

b. Geta 1. Simiche 3. Sikon 2.

c. Knemon 3. Geta 1. Sikon 2.


The greatness of Menander.

1. His reputation in the ancient world.

2. His effect on later drama: the 5 act structure, the middle-class subject matter. This structure continues up to the present day.

3. The loss of the Chorus except for 'Interludes." This loss of the chorus of amateur young men also reduces the civic function of the comedy. The chorus now only entertains during an interlude from the comic plot: contrast the choruses in The Frogs.

4 His method: in Dyskolos 3 actors and 13 characters: Bringing into being a world of town and country, both genders, all age groups, all classes. An incredibly difficult art to bring off.

5, His method is comedy, not farce, so it must be, finally a contemplation of human life and its follies. "Life is a play of masks, of repeating character types, in generation after generation." Love replaces sex as a 'Romantic' theme of the New Comedy. Love is to do with the individual, sex with the whole community. A Comedy of Manners.

6. His formulaic plots and characters: this allows the three actors to slip into the quick-change roles. Suggest what a performance must have resembled - the preparations behind the scene. This structure then taken over by Commedia and by Moliere.

7. The authors and the actors of this 3-actor method would not have wanted it changed - for it demonstrated their extraordinary skill: try writing such a play and try acting it!

8. As we will see, the plot of the Dyskolos fits our Comedic code: the sexual plot of the lovers, Sostratos and Myrrhine: the festive social group of masters and servants on a picnic-sacrifice: the awkward individual who disrupts/endangers the festive group: Shylock, Malvolio, Tartuffe. He, too, will be punished and reintegrated.

9. The new realism: no fantastic landscape (Cloud-Cuckoo land or Hades) no fantastic characters (Pan exits from the play after delivering the Prologue: but his magic is subtly implied as bringing about the events, drawing the city folk into the country and to his cave between the two houses.

10. The problems are familiar and small: Knemon's disunited family living in discord. The poverty of Gorgias. His and Myrrhine's escape from this into love and property.
Comedy in the Hellenistic world after The Frogs.

1. The defeat of Athens and the loss of the polis as the center of democratic freedom. This occurs with the defeat of Athens by Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon. Alexander confirms the Athenian loss of power: Athens no longer the center of the universe.

2. With Alexander, Greece expands into an empire from Spain to India. It is ruled by kings and Ptolemys, dynasties who control human events. This leads to a certain 'fatalism' in Hellenistic
thinking: if one cannot control political life, then events are due to Fortune, Chance. There develops an ideal of Hellenic civilization, of Hellenization of the world, teaching the world to be Hellenic.

3. The old Athenian drama, both tragedy and Comedy, depended on being vital to the yearly life of one community, Athens, and its relations to the gods. This is the classic 'Hellenic' period in art. Then, it was believed, the performance of drama in the theater, for the festival of Dionysos, was vital to the life and well-being of the city: and the City, Athens, was the cultural center of the
world. (THE FROGS spells out the importance of tragedy for the polis

4. With the Hellenistic period, there emerged the great new cities, the megalopolis and its cosmopolitan humanity. Alexandria the largest city in the western world, far huger than Athens. Its inhabitants are drawn from all over the world. They belong to all races and religions. The main interest in culture shifts from drama to philosophy and science. Athens remains a center of
philosophy until the Christians close down the philosophic schools in the 4th. century A.D., together with ending the Olympic games. ( Hypatia of Alexandria and Bishop Cyril, who is a saint of the Church).

5. Such an audience would not be interested in the political life of Athens, nor its gods. We have the first international audience, as we have today in the international film industry. Drama is written to entertain and amuse an audience that the playwright has no contact with. So no more bringing the audience into the performance, as with Aristophanes.

6. The huge new theaters all over the Hellenistic world and the rise of a brilliant, touring, acting profession. They want material to take all round the Hellenistic empire. And they want it to be understood wherever they went.

7. Menander and his contemporaries provided just this. If we compare the Dyskolos to Aristophanes' The Frogs we can see the huge difference. The Frogs addresses a crisis in the Athenian community, at a specific time and place. It draws on all the levels of the city's imagination, from bawdy to mystical hymns praising the gods. It's solution to the problem of the play: to bring back Aeschylus to Athens to revive the city.
The Dyskolos, by contrast, deals with very general, universal themes of lovers and problems with classes that apply to any community. Furthermore, by Menander's time two things occurred in the theater:
(a) CENSORSHIP. The new kings would not permit any criticism or ridicule. And this Censorship was to govern the theater up to the present century. That meant Menander and his fellow dramatists had to event themes that would interest without offending or causing danger. This practically removed serious politics and religion from the theater. (It is the same situation in The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, or in Shakespearean comedy.

(b) Charging seat price so that only the middle classes could really afford to frequent the theatre. And these had a more 'refined' taste.

8. So this is commodity comedy, for a new, educated, consumer public with no particular roots. The play could be enjoyed anywhere where Greek is spoken and performed at any time of the year - not necessarily at the festival of Dionysos. As in later Italian commedia, the actors, wherever they lived, would recognize the comic types Menander had created and so could quickly adapt to the parts. The audience, too, would see new variations on familiar formulae.

9. It is not bad work, not at all. It has roles, parts that would bring out the best skills of the actors. It has a definite vision of life, which it organizes into a set of contrasts. The script is short, but it must have been expanded with a great deal of comic business, pantomime, etc., by the skilled comedians. (Commedia plots are similar and even much briefer). This is drama in the age of the acting professionals, not of the authors. This usually happens to all ages of drama.

10. Aristophanes had reminded us of Monty Python's loose, imaginative structure: Menander is much closer to situation comedy which also can be watched world-wide. (Monty Python at its best, requires more identification with a cultural tradition: of Christian stories, Grail legends, modern political theory, literary and intellectual tradition, and so on.)

11. The Dyskolos is a comedy of manners. The Variable or cultural code involves Athenian sacrificial practices, the habits of smart young men about town (Chairea), the social set of Sostratros' mother and father, versus the impoverished world of Gorgias and Myrrhine, the cheekiness of servants, the rather Athenian character type of misanthrope (Diogenes, Timon, Knemon).

There are moral distinctions made, as in the civilizing of Knemon, the distinction between Sostratos and Chaireas, the honorable friendship of both Gorgias and Sostratos, the fact that Knemon DOES have a legitimate gripe against smart society ladies like Sostratos's mother, who look for any excuse to get up a sacrifice - the only times the Greeks ate meat. Without the direct addressing of issues of Aristophanes comedy, ideals of conduct and a 'criticism of life' are being offered.

This is all built on the Constant Code plots of the lovers, over-coming the blocking agent (Knemon) or being brought together (Gorgias and Sostratos sister) together with the estate: AND
the discomfiture of the antisocial Knemon. The ending with wedding and feasting and the integration of the antisocial Knemon a typical constant code of comedy. The emphasis on Love and Eating and physical blows and disasters, reminds us that comedy deals with the Body

12. And the whole action is ‘directed’ by the god Pan, the god of the place, (The Cave) who draws all the strands of the action together like Prospero, in a plot that resembles much in The Tempest.
PAN is the god of the landscape, of the countryside. His presence is often felt when one is alone in a forest or wilderness, giving rise to the word 'panic'. (At the triumph of Christianity, under Constantine, sailors off the Greek coast heard the cry, "Great Pan is dead.") So all the action is being directed by a god, which assures us that it will all work out well.

13 It would be a fine challenge to acting students (just 3) to try to bring the world of the play to life.

C. COMIC PLOTTING
1. THE NEW COMEDY OF MENANDER now depends on serious comic plotting. Menander had been an admirer of the tragic dramatist, Euripides (Aristophanes 'enemy') and he brings to Comedy the same concern with PLOT that we find in TRAGEDY.

2. In Aristophanes’, plotting had been fairly casual: a journey, or quest, which is the excuse for a set of comic sketches or turns, a sudden intrusion of the Choruses of Frogs and Initiates, taking the story in totally new directions, the sudden abandonment of a main plot and turning to a new one. And at the same time the audience is being made aware of its civic-political duties, the decisions it must make in the assembly, and so on.

3. But in the Dyskolos, the PLOT of Sostratos' gaining the hand of Myrrhine, against the seeming blocking agent, Gorgias, her brother, is urged along until it co-incides with the parallel plot of the punishment (falling down the well) of Knemon, the misanthrope and his rescue by the new friends, Sostratos and Gorgias. Both events occur at the same time in the drama, in Act Four, and are tied up neatly in Act Five. At the end of Act IV., Knemon gives out his defense of his life-style and so proclaims the 'civilizing' ideal of the play.

And a third subplot - Gorgias' finally willing integration into the family of Sostratos - occurs at the moment of tying up loose ends (Act V.) to wind things up. This concludes with the forced integration of Knemon with the revelers. (Constant Code) Yet another plot is the rescue of Gorgias and his mother from poverty and from the long hostility with Knemon and isolation of 'Myrrhine'.

What Menander has established, here, is the structure of all later comedy at its most sophisticated. As we will see, there are strong similarities between Dyskolos and Tartuffe or The Misanthrope. It is a much more subtle and important innovation that it seems at first:

The wonder is that these three plots all proceed concurrently throughout the play by the continual mask and costume changes of the 3 actors. Menander's reputation for greatness depends, I think, on his being able to bring all this about without seeming to do so: we are not aware of the 'manipulations' that we get in e.g. Shakespeare and Moliere. It is almost Chekhovian, in which the major actions are taking place offstage while we watch the minor ones.

The characters emerge as distinct within their types. Sosastros is distinguished from Chairea, and when he undergoes hard work to gain Myrrhine, (like Ferdinand for Miranda) we know he is honorable; Gorgias emerges as a young man protecting his mother and sister from a potentially dangerous outside world, living in poverty, while dealing with his dreadful father, and who gradually becomes friends with the wealthy city boy, Sosastros, and helps him gain his sister. It is clearly established that Sosastros is a worthy young man, not spoiled by his riches, as Gorgias at first thinks, and so we see the operation of the Cultural Code over the basic Costant Code.

The comic servants come and go, as in Chekhov: to them the most important things in life are getting a cooking pot and leading the sheep to sacrifice. Knemon falls down a well: but all the time the god Pan is bringing about a larger outcome: the reconciliation of City and Country, of young and old, of male and female, so that the harmonious perpetuation of the human species can be assured. It is the primary function of Comedy itself.

So, while the big comic action is taking place behind the scenes, we concentrate on the small, seemingly irrelevant human comedy taking place onstage, as if Menander is saying that it is these small actions, and not e...g. the big noisy campaigns in the Hellenistic kingdoms, that make the world go round, that will still be going on centuries later, when most of the great leaders and rulers are forgotten.

This is not an art of brilliant demonstration and statement as with Aristophanes, but it makes its fine points really through implication: that this is all life is: the same human types re-appearing in age after age, caught up intensely in little actions - here, the main thing onstage seems to be to get a cooking pot from a fearfully bad-tempered old man while the lovers suffer and unite. It is a less active, but more philosophic art than Aristophanes.