In The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General exclaims in his famous patter-song that ‘I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies, / I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes’. For most Victorians, however, Aristophanes likely rang only a dim bell. Even the elite contemporary public schoolboy or Oxbridge graduate may have gained only a glancing acquaintance with Aristophanes, depending upon what institutions they attended. Unlike other classical authors, whose works were authorized by lengthy time and use, not to mention moral probity, Aristophanes languished for a long time in the outer orbit of British classical reception.
For the naturally prim Victorians, Aristophanes proved a difficult classical author to admit to their literary canon. On the one hand, his plays represented a vital source of information on fifth-century Athenian society, which meant that they could not be entirely ignored. But, on the other, the offensiveness of Aristophanes’ satire made his works difficult to integrate alongside other works of the classical literary pantheon. As a result, his plays were often presented to the public in expurgated versions. In addition, Aristophanes suffered from two further challenges: the arcane nature of much of the Greek language he used and the difficulty of fully translating his humour.
Because of these factors, in The Victorians and ancient Greece (1980), Richard Jenkyns claimed that ‘of all the great Greek writers, Aristophanes had the least influence [o]n the [nineteenth] century’.[1] While this opinion may have stood mostly unchallenged for the past four decades, Peter Swallow’s Aristophanes in Britain presents an admirable rejoinder to such a view. In his survey, Swallow shows how the plays of Aristophanes escaped from an exile of unpopularity in early-modern and eighteenth-century Britain to emerge as important touchstones of socio-political worth during the nineteenth century. In all, his study presents a long-overdue corrective to the view that Aristophanes had little influence on Regency, Victorian and Edwardian culture.
Part of Oxford University Press’s long-running Classical Presences series, Peter Swallow’s Aristophanes in Britain presents a multi-faceted examination of the reception of Aristophanes’ works during the ‘long’ nineteenth century. The book covers the hundred years from the 1820s to the end of the Great War (and slightly beyond), but Swallow focuses most of his attention upon Victorian receptions. The book is divided into nine full-length chapters, which cover various strands of Aristophanic reception in a mostly-chronological manner. The text is accompanied by thirty black-and-white illustrations and photographs.
Chapter 1 presents a clear and focused introduction to the book’s structure, themes and argument. Swallow begins with a set of definitions that demarcate the scope of his study, followed by a literature review of relevant works related to the nineteenth-century reception of Aristophanes. The rest of the chapter is given over to establishing the background of contemporary Aristophanic reception, including sections on British imperialism, Aristophanes’ early-modern reception, the nineteenth-century political context, theatre reform, British historiography of ancient Greece, and German classical scholarship.
Chapter 2, ‘Out of exile’, examines the influential translations of Aristophanes by Thomas Mitchell and John Hookham Frere. Swallow shows how their vision of Aristophanes’ plays was coloured by their own high-Tory political views. Mitchell’s two-volume translation was published in 1820-2, followed by critical editions of the plays in the 1830s. Frere produced his translations during the same period of the 1820s and 1830s, but published them all together only in 1839. Swallow notes the slight differences between the two scholars’ approaches to Aristophanes, but emphasizes the reactionary attitudes shared by each, as well as the censorious attitude they adopted to the sometimes crass humour of the plays.
Chapter 3, ‘Swine before pearls’, investigates Percy Byshhe Shelley’s satirical play, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820). Swallow identifies Swellfoot as a unique liberal, even radical, reinterpretation of Aristophanes at a time when his reception was dominated by conservative approaches. Lampooning the recently-enthroned king, George IV, and the ‘Queen Caroline Affair’, Swellfoot employs the framework of classical tragedy. But its biting satire derives from the plays of Aristophanes in its use of personal caricature and sexual innuendo, not to mention the deployment of an on-stage chorus. Yet Swallow demonstrates that Shelley’s unpublished play is actually an intertextual affair, combining classical reception with other elements derived from the British literary canon.
In chapter 4, ‘Aristophanes burlesqued’, the focus turns to Victorian popular theatre and an 1846 burlesque of Aristophanes’ Birds by J.R. Planché. After providing a potted history of the theatrical genre of burlesque, Swallow engages with Planché’s Birds as the only recorded Aristophanic burlesque in contemporary theatre. He argues that the play represented a compromise between the populism of burlesque and the high-mindedness of classical culture. Drawing parallels between the conventions of Old Comedy and Victorian burlesque, Planché is shown by Swallow to have created a reverent tribute to its ancient counterpart. But, while it was predicated upon fidelity to the original, it was also imbued with much contemporary middle-class morality.
Chapter 5, ‘W.S. Gilbert, the English Aristophanes’, examines the claim that the great Victorian librettist was Aristophanic in the forms of satirical humour he deployed in his works. Swallow begins by outlining Gilbert’s (admittedly tenuous) interest in the Greco-Roman world before discussing Thespis (1871), the only one of his theatrical works to be set in antiquity. This is followed by successive examinations of his plays The Happy Land (1873), Utopia Limited (1893) and Princess Ida (1884). Throughout, Swallow argues that the topsy-turvy absurdity that marks W.S. Gilbert’s works draws inspiration not only from Victorian burlesque, but also from Greek Old Comedy.
In chapter 6, ‘The glory and the shame’, Swallow turns to late-Victorian Aesthetic receptions of Aristophanes, especially poetic evaluations of his plays. The first section examines John Addington Symonds’ reflections on the subject in his Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), which highlighted the beauty of Old Comedy’s language and verse. Next, Swallow surveys two free translations-cum-reinterpretations of Aristophanes, Oscar Wilde’s Clouds (1875) and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Birds (1880). Then he examines two other contemporary Aristophanic contemplations, George Meredith’s essay ‘On comedy and the uses of the comic spirit’ (1877) and Robert Browning’s poem Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). Finally, the chapter concludes with a look at Aubrey Beardsley’s infamous illustrations for Lysistrata.
Chapter 7, ‘Aristophanes in the Phrontisterion’, investigates public-school and Oxbridge performances of Aristophanes, which represented ‘[b]y far the widest reception of Aristophanes […] during the Victorian period’ (p, 166). Swallow identifies a two-way dynamic in these performances, divided between their belonging to the comic burlesque tradition and seeking a more authentic, archaeological approach. The author begins by contextualizing the history of Aristophanic theatrical production in Britain before the nineteenth century. The majority of the chapter, however, is given over to lengthy examinations of the performance history of Old Comedy in Victorian public schools and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Chapter 8, ‘Women’s Aristophanes’, provides a vital counterweight to the male-dominated forms of reception covered in the rest of the study. In it, Swallow considers the importance of Aristophanic (and mock-Aristophanic) works performed by women during the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. He highlights and investigates a number of these over the course of the chapter, including Birds (1899), The Bees (1904), Lysistrata (1910) and How the Vote was Won (1909). Old Comedy is shown to have been used in all of these as a radical vehicle of protest, especially regarding the contemporary quest for gender equality and female suffrage.
Chapter 9, ‘Towards a modern Aristophanes’, examines the beginnings of later twentieth-century reception of Old Comedy. Most of this final chapter is devoted to exploring the scholarship of the classicist Gilbert Murray, who had a career-long interest in Aristophanes, starting in the 1890s. Swallow focuses upon a number of Murray’s contributions, including his 1902 translation of The Frogs, his involvement in the 1914 Oxford Greek play, and his lecture ‘Aristophanes and the war party’ (1918). The chapter concludes with an examination of the Aristophanic debts in George Bernard Shaw’s satirical play, Major Barbara (1905).
As the co-editor of a previous collection of essays on humour in Aristophanes, Swallow is well placed for the task of elucidating his reception during the long nineteenth century.[2] Throughout the study, the author’s style is fluent and accessible, and the book’s argument clear and reasonable. Undoubtedly, the book will find a ready market among students and scholars of Victorian classical reception, as well as of Aristophanic translation and performance history. There are also few works covering the reception of individual classical authors during the nineteenth century, so Swallow’s contribution to the field deserves to be warmly welcomed.
As Swallow argues, school and university receptions of Old Comedy represent the most influential form covered in his study. This is due not only to the extensive performance practice pursued in each institutional context, but also to the influential positions in British government and society later occupied by many of the students involved in productions. The author suggests that sources on these performances in British public schools are limited. But—apart from the use of The Alleynian from Dulwich College—he employs only contemporary newspaper reports and does not seem to have consulted the extensive records available in public-school archives. These have been catalogued and preserved in most of the large independent schools, so it is to be lamented that Swallow did not draw on their resources. School magazines, in particular, would have represented a valuable set of sources on the subject, since their articles were primarily written by schoolboys themselves.
Despite the evidence marshalled by the author, I was also not convinced that Aristophanes had a guiding influence on W.S. Gilbert. Indeed, Swallow admits that ‘Gilbert never wrote an adaptation of Aristophanes and barely mentions Greek Old Comedy in his works’, that ‘few of Gilbert’s poems and plays refer to the ancient world’, and that ‘there is no concrete evidence that Gilbert had a particular love for the classical world’.[3] The table of classical references in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas provided also substantiates little, owing to the handful of references involved. Yet, elsewhere, Swallow suggests that Aristophanes had no clear influence on the comic novels of P.G. Wodehouse, which surely overlooks the master-servant relationship between Dionysus and Xanthias in The Frogs, along with a number of other connections.[4]
Swallow mentions in passing a number of times the censorship undergone by the Aristophanic corpus throughout the nineteenth century. But I would have liked to have learned more about these forms of expurgation in detail. In particular, it would be interesting to discover what influence such bowdlerization had on translations of Old Comedy in popularly available libraries of classical works aimed at a middle-class readership, such as Bohn’s Classical Library or Blackwood’s Ancient Classics for English Readers. The entire survey maintains an elite, metropolitan concentration on London, Oxford and Cambridge (including the chapter on women’s receptions), so it would have been valuable to extend this focus to provincial and middle-class interpretations of Aristophanes.
Apart from these minor criticisms, Aristophanes in Britain is a work that is authoritatively researched and full of compelling detail. Swallow suggests that his study represents merely a first step in a topic that deserves much deeper scholarly investigation. But this is to overlook the giant leap forward that his monograph achieves in forging a fresh sub-field in modern Aristophanic reception. The often-discordant nature of Aristophanes’ satire made it harsh on nineteenth-century ears. Swallow’s book demonstrates, however, how his works could be transposed into different keys throughout the century for purposes cultural and political. Despite attempts at censorship and manipulation, Aristophanes emerges in Peter Swallow’s book as a figure whose savage wit remained as barbed and penetrating in nineteenth-century Britain as it had in fifth-century Athens. As Aristophanes put it in his play Peace, ‘[y]ou will never make the crab walk straight’.[5]
Notes
[1] Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and ancient Greece (1980), 79.
[2] Peter Swallow and Edith Hall, eds., Aristophanic Humour: Theory and Practice (2020).
[3] Peter Swallow, Aristophanes in Britain, 90, 91 and 94.
[4] See Stewart Ferris, ‘Jeeves and Wooster: style, origin and influences’; Ph.D thesis; University of Surrey (2020), 294-6.
[5] Aristophanes, Peace, line 1083.