A Dialogue of Drag Between Aristophanes and Euripides

Tom Hawkins (Ohio State University)

Aristophanes must have driven his tragic counterparts wild.  From Acharnians to Frogs we see him tweaking Tragedy’s nose by burlesquing storylines and lampooning tragedians.  While Comedy easily incorporated references of all sorts to the tragic stage, the opposite is difficult to imagine.  How could a tragedian get back at a comic author?  While scholars have long discussed Comedy’s parodying of Tragedy, I believe we can hear a two-way dialogue between these closely related genres.  I suggest that Euripides, in response to the parodic and cross-dressed images of him in Acharnians and Thesmophoriazousae, retaliated with a form of paratragedy in Bacchae.  Aristophanes then capped back by incorporating and reworking certain themes from this play in his Frogs.  Produced a short time after Euripides’ death, Frogs is the last word in a cross-generic conversation between the two dramatists that centers around portrayals of Euripides and Dionysus and characters dressed in drag.  My reading here is not meant to be totalizing (like Sidwell’s ventriloquial model of comic composition).  Rather, I seek to open a space for Tragedy to respond to Comedy’s teasing that has rarely been acknowledged or explored (though see S.D. Olson 2000 on the idea of cross-generic poetic rivalry).

Succinctly put, the Thesmophoriazousae (411), shows Euripides dressing his father-in-law in drag and sending him into a hostile all-female ritual space.  By the end, after failing to resolve matters through tragic disguises, Euripides must dress himself as a bawd and save the day in a ridiculously comic manner.  In Bacchae (written pre-405, produced 405), we again see one character dress another in drag and send him into a hostile all-female ritual space, with the comic Euripides replaced by a ruthlessly powerful Dionysus.  The dressing scenes in these two plays exhibit similar concern for the details of feminine style (hemline, hair, etc.)  As in Bacchae, Frogs (405) begins with Dionysus on a trip, but he is now a parody of a tragic god.  This bathetic response to Bacchae’s Dionysus ends with the one gag that could be pulled on a deceased rival poet – he leaves Euripides in Hades.

This agonistic dialogue between Aristophanes and Euripides played out on the level of visual impressions and narrative trajectories, and we undoubtedly have missed much of the conversation because of our limited evidence.  Their one-upmanship represents a single ingredient, together with the myriad other concerns – literary, personal, political, etc., in the complex and irreducible cocktail of inspiration that dramatists mixed as they composed their plays.