Old Comedy vs. New Comedy Essay Example

Pages: 3 (1157 words) Published: February 15, 2011
Comedies were performed in the Great Dionysia just like tragedies; also comedies were entered in contests in other festival, known as the Lesser Dionysia, and it was celebrated in the winter. Comedies combined poetry with coarse language. For example they featured buffoonery, slapstick, obscenity, and horseplay. The comedy actors dressed in weird costumes that had paddled bellies or rumps for outrageous effects. “The comic playwrights made their own plots and they focused on important matters like: politics, philosophies, the new social class, and well-known personalities.” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg.70) The comic playwrights freedom could only exist in a democracy. Freedom was very limited for the comic playwrights. The comic playwrights showed good faith to their citizens. Aristophanes comedies are the main source for what is now known has the Old Comedy. “Old Comedy was comic Greek plays that had strong element of political criticism.” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg.70) Old Comedy was also, “the style of comedy established by Aristophanes in the fifth century, and was distinguished by a strong element of political and social satire.” (Roy T. Matthews’s Glossary G-10) Aristophanes made forty-four comedies in all; eleven of them still exist in today’s world. Like Euripides, Aristophanes wrote his plays for-torn Athens, and he also attacked the famous philosopher Socrates, Aristophanes thought of him as a hopeless dreamer. In the play Lysistrata, “Aristophanes exceeded the limitations of the comedic form and approached the timeless quality of tragedies.” (Roy T. Matthews’s pg.70) In a sexually and funny way, Lysistrata shows the laughter of the Peloponnesian War by, suggesting all of the wars. The play Lysistrata starts off with an Athenian women, who tries to convince the other women of Athens and Sparta to refrain from their husbands until the husbands sign a peace treaty. Filled with lots of sexually content, and outrageous illusion to...
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