The Laughing Animal: Comedy in Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance

Catalog description

What can comedy tell us about what it means to be human? From its beginnings in the theatrical festivals of fifth-century BC Athens, European comic drama has been inextricably entangled with the study of human nature, culture, and society. Dramatic comedy’s embrace of fiction and fantasy has made it a powerful tool for investigating the relationships between humans and animals; for imagining the Other, and the self; and for interrogating the organization and workings of human communities. At the same time, the genre’s apparent roots in fertility rites, and its evident association with traditional forms of ritual abuse have made it a productive site for philosophical speculation about the origins of human culture and the development of civilization. In this course, we will explore the development of these intersecting discourses in the dramatic and critical traditions of Greco-Roman antiquity and the European Renaissance. Questions we will want to consider include: what role does laughter play in classical and early modern theories about human psychology and human society? How were the comic speculations of pagan antiquity appropriated and transformed by Christian playwrights at the dawn of the age of colonization? What can this tradition tell us about comedy’s capacity for intellectual seriousness - and about the place of play in scholarly inquiry? And, more broadly, how can reading classical and early modern comic dramas enrich or complicate our understanding of modern comedy, in all its multifarious forms? We’ll look for answers in plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, Plautus, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and in theoretical texts by Aristotle, Horace, and Castiglione, among others.