Satyric Play is the first book to offer an integrated analysis of Greek comedy and satyr drama. Using a literary-historical approach, Carl A. Shaw argues that comedy and satyr plays influenced each other in nearly all stages of their development. Although satyr drama was written by tragedians and employed a number of formal tragic elements, the humorous chorus of half-man, half-horse satyrs encouraged sustained interaction between poets of comedy and satyr play. From sixth-century proto-drama, through classical productions staged at the Athenian City Dionysia, to bookish Alexandrian plays of the third-century, the remains of comic and satyric performances reveal a range of literary, aesthetic, historical, religious, and geographical connections. Shaw analyzes the details of this interplay diachronically, looking at a wide range of literary and material evidence. He shows that ancient critics and poets allude to comic-satyric associations in surprising ways, vases depict fascinating performative connections, and the plays themselves share titles, plots, modes of humor, and occasionally even a chorus of satyrs. Satyric Play uncovers and examines the complex, shifting relationship between comedy and satyr drama, offering insight into the development of these genres and the Greek theatrical experience as a whole.

Since it was written by tragedians and employed a number of formal tragic elements, satyr drama is typically categorized as a sub-genre of Greek tragedy. This categorization, however, gives an incomplete picture of the complicated relationship of the satyr play to other genres of drama in ancient Greece. For example, the humorous chorus of half-man, half-horse satyrs suggests sustained interaction between poets of comedy and satyr play. In Satyric Play, Carl Shaw notes the complex, shifting relationship between comedy and satyr drama, from sixth-century BCE proto-drama to classical productions staged at the Athenian City Dionysia and bookish Alexandrian plays of the third century BCE, and argues that comedy and satyr plays influenced each other in nearly all stages of their development. This is the first book to offer a complete, integrated analysis of Greek comedy and satyr drama, analyzing the details of the many literary, aesthetic, historical, religious, and geographical connections to satyr drama. Ancient critics and poets allude to comic-satyric associations in surprising ways, vases indicate a common connection to komos (revelry) song, and the plays themselves often share titles, plots, modes of humor, and even on occasion choruses of satyrs. Shaw's insight into this evidence reveals the relationship between satyr drama and Greek comedy to be much more intimately connected than we had known and, in fact, much closer than that between satyr drama and tragedy. Satyric Play brings new light to satyr drama as a complex, artful, inventive, and even cleverly paradoxical genre.

With a new introduction and some revisions, these essays on Classical Greek satyr plays, originally published in various venues between 2002 and 2010, suggest new critical approaches to this important dramatic genre and identify previously neglected dimensions and dynamics within their original Athenian context. Griffith shows that satyr plays, alongside the ludicrous and irresponsible, but harmless, antics of their chorus, presented their audiences with culturally sophisticated narratives of romance, escapist adventure, and musical-choreographic exuberance, amounting to a zparallel universey to that of the accompanying tragedies in the City Dionysia festival. The class oppositions between heroic/divine characters and the rest (choruses, messengers, servants, etc.) that are so integral to Athenian tragedy are shown to be present also, in exaggerated form, in satyr drama, with the satyr chorus occupying a role that also inevitably recalled for the Athenian audiences their own (often foreign-born) slaves. Meanwhile the familiar main characters of tragedy (Heracles, Danae and Perseus, Hermes and Apollo, Achilles, Odysseus, etc.) are re-deployed in an engaging milieu of erotic encounters, miraculous discoveries, guaranteed happy endings, marriages, and painless release from suffering for all, both for the well-behaved heroes and also for the low-life, playful satyrs (the slaves of Dionysus). In their fusion of adventure and romance, fantasy and naïvete, Aphrodite and Dionysus, Athenian satyr plays thus anticipate in many respects, Griffith suggests, the later developments of Greek pastoral and prose romance.

The origins of satyr drama, and particularly the reliability of the account in Aristotle, remains contested, and several of this volume’s contributions try to make sense of the early relationship of satyr drama to dithyramb and attempt to place satyr drama in the pre-Classical performance space and traditions. What is not contested is the relationship of satyr drama to tragedy as a required cap to the Attic trilogy. Here, however, how Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (to whom one complete play and the preponderance of the surviving fragments belong) envisioned the relationship of satyr drama to tragedy in plot, structure, setting, stage action and language is a complex subject tackled by several contributors. The playful satyr chorus and the drunken senility of Silenos have always suggested some links to comedy and later to Atellan farce and phlyax. Those links are best examined through language, passages in later Greek and Roman writers, and in art. The purpose of this volume is probe as many themes and connections of satyr drama with other literary genres, as well as other art forms, putting satyr drama on stage from the sixth century BC through the second century AD. The editors and contributors suggest solutions to some of the controversies, but the volume shows as much that the field of study is vibrant and deserves fuller attention.

The esteem in which satyr drama was held in antiquity still arouses curiosity and controversy. Twelve new papers, generated in North America by a distinguished cast of scholars, explore questions central to the genre. How did satyr drama relate to comedy and tragedy; how closely was it tied to its tragic trilogy? How did the Athenians react to pro-satyric drama, such as the Alcestis? How far did satyr plays reflect contemporary political life? Fresh conclusions are adduced from the fragments, particularly those of Aeschylus, and there is special study of Euripides' Cyclops, not least for its possible reflection of the fifth-century sophists.

Each number includes "Reviews and book notices."

Brill's Companion to Sophocles offers 32 specially commissioned essays from leading international scholars which give critical examinations of the progress and direction of numerous wide-ranging debates about various aspects of Sophoclean drama. Each chapter offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research in a particular subject area, as well as covering a wide variety of thematic angles. Recent advances in scholarship have raised new questions about Sophocles and Greek tragedy, and have overturned some long-standing assumptions. Besides presenting a comprehensive and authoritative guide to understanding Sophocles, this companion provides scholars and students with compelling fresh perspectives upon a broad range of issues in the field of Sophoclean studies.