Reviewed by:

• Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon by Mario Telò
• Anna Peterson (bio)

The reception of Greek Comedy in antiquity is a thorny topic for literary historians. By the end of Aristophanes’s career (380s BCE), the genre was undergoing significant changes and within half a century would look drastically different in terms of its focus, tone, and form than the plays of Aristophanes’s early career. What is clear is that Aristophanes quickly became the figurehead of what came to be known as “Old Comedy,” yet this was not an entirely obvious choice. If the only information that we had to go on was the number of victories in dramatic competitions, we might expect one of Aristophanes’s main rivals, Cratinus or Eupolis, to emerge as the figurehead of Greek Old Comedy. Why Hellenistic and subsequent ancient scholars singled out Aristophanes as Old Comedy’s star is an important question if we are ever to make sense of the genre’s complicated reception by later authors, including Thomas More, Ben Jonson, and Molière.

Mario Telò contends that the answer to this question can be found in the famous failure of Clouds in 423 BCE. Despite being arguably one of Aristophanes’s most well-known plays today, the play came in third (last), losing to Cratinus’s Pytine (Wine Flask) and Amepsias’s Connus. This loss appears to have been particularly jarring for Aristophanes. In Wasps, performed in the following year, Aristophanes blames his audience for failing to recognize the service his [End Page 158] comedy was doing for them, and he reiterates this charge in the surviving revised version of Clouds, which was composed most likely sometime between 419 and 417 BCE and was never staged. For Telò, Aristophanes’s defense of the original Clouds in these two plays is a form of “proto-canonical discourse”—that is to say, Telò regards Aristophanes’s desire to be afforded a place in the literary canon as directly contributing to the plots of these two plays and, more broadly, to how later Hellenistic scholars construed the comic canon (7). Telò’s contention that the narrative that Aristophanes provides about Clouds’ loss was an important factor in determining the interest of later critics and readers is not in and of itself a new observation, and Socrates’s prominence in Clouds also certainly contributed to the play’s popularity. Where Telò diverges from previous approaches is in his focus on Aristophanes’s use of bodily language and specifically the image of the cloak. Drawing on what he calls “the recent ‘affective turn’ in critical theory” (15), Telò reads such images as a kind of metaliterary discourse through which Aristophanes challenges the legitimacy of his rivals and promotes his own comic vision.

The book focuses exclusively on Aristophanes’s immediate response to the loss of Clouds, devoting three chapters to Wasps and a single chapter to the revised Clouds. In his discussion of the former play, Telò follows other scholars in adopting Aristophanes’s self-presentation in the parabasis of Wasps as a lens through which to read the conflict between Bdelycleon and his father, Philocleon, over the latter’s obsessive commitment to jury service. As Telò explores in his second chapter, Bdelycleon’s “filial caretaking” enacts Aristophanes’s position as the caretaker of the audience (27–28), a position that Aristophanes had initially established in Knights and which was presumably called into question by the loss of the original Clouds. Here, cloak imagery becomes a reflection of dramatic reception: the short and insufficient tribōn worn by Philocleon recalls the older Cratinean comic poetics that Aristophanes seeks to replace with his warm and enveloping chlaina. While there is a lot of nuanced reading going on in this chapter and the subsequent ones, one is left wondering about the degree to which this language would have in fact “affected” the audience. That is to say, would the ancient audience have picked up on Aristophanes’s clever use of cloak imagery and, as...

审核人：

• 马里奥·特洛（Ariophanes）和喜剧披风：情感，美学和佳能
• 安娜·彼得森（生物）

古代希腊喜剧的接受对于文学史学家来说是一个棘手的话题。到了Aristophanes的职业生涯结束（公元前380年代），这种类型已经发生了重大变化，并且在半个世纪之内，其风格，风格和形式都与Aristophanes的早期职业戏剧大为不同。显而易见，Aristophanes迅速成为后来被称为“老喜剧”的人物，但这并不是一个完全显而易见的选择。如果我们唯一需要提供的信息是戏剧性比赛的胜利数，那么我们可能会期望Aristophanes的主要竞争对手之一Cratinus或Eupolis成为希腊老喜剧的代言人。

马里奥·特洛（MarioTelò）争辩说，这个问题的答案可以在公元前423年著名的云团失败中找到。尽管可以说是当今阿里斯托芬斯最著名的戏剧之一，但该剧名列第三（倒数第二），输给了克雷蒂纳斯（Cratinus）的《Pytine》（葡萄酒瓶）和安培西亚的《康努斯》（Connus）。这种损失对于阿里斯托芬人来说似乎特别令人不快。在来年演出的《黄蜂》中，亚里斯多芬妮斯指责听众未能认识到他的[End Page 158]喜剧为他们所做的服务，他在幸存的修订版《云》中重申了这一指控。，很可能是在公元前419年到417年之间组成的，从未演出过。对于Telò而言，Aristophanes在这两部戏中对原始云的辩护是一种“原始规范的话语”的形式-也就是说，Telò认为Aristophanes希望在文学经典中获得一席之地直接促成了这两个故事的情节两部剧本，以及更广泛的讲，是希腊希腊学者如何解释喜剧佳能（7）。Telò认为Aristophanes提供的关于Clouds的损失的叙述是确定后来的评论家和读者的兴趣的重要因素，这本身并不是一个新的观察结果，Socrates在Clouds中的突出地位当然也为该剧的流行做出了贡献。Telò与以前的方法的不同之处在于他专注于Aristophanes对肢体语言的使用，尤其是对斗篷的形象的使用。特洛利用他所谓的“最近的批判理论中的'情感转向'”（15），将这些图像读为一种元文学话语，通过这种话，阿里斯托芬斯挑战了他的竞争对手的合法性并促进了他自己的喜剧视野。

该书专门讨论了Aristophanes对云的损失的立即反应，其中三章专门针对黄蜂，一章专门针对修订后的Clouds。在对前戏的讨论中，Telò跟随其他学者，采用了亚里斯多芬在黄蜂丛中的自我表现作为镜头，以此来解读Bdelycleon和他的父亲Philocleon之间的冲突，后者是后者对陪审团的执着追求。正如Telò在第二章中所探讨的那样，Bdelycleon的“孝顺照顾”确立了Aristophanes作为观众看守的地位（27-28岁），这是Aristophanes最初在骑士团中确立的地位。大概是由于原始云的丢失而引起了质疑。在这里，斗篷的图像成为戏剧性接待的反映：Philocleon所穿的短而不足的Tribōn让人想起了Aristophanes试图用其温暖而笼络的chlaina代替的更古老的Cratinean漫画诗学。尽管本章及后续章节进行了大量细致入微的阅读，但人们仍对这种语言实际上会“影响”受众的程度感到疑惑。就是说，古代的听众会不会因为Aristophanes对斗篷图像的巧妙使用而受到青睐？