An Essay on Comedy

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the jot of Menander, utter: For the bop of me recognise Terence. It is through with(predicate) do it of Terence that moderns argon qualified to extol Menander; and what is carry on of Terence has not simply given(p) us the trump out of the patron of Epicurus. the demoiselle sheargond of her locks, take on a decl be vowelize for scenes of jealousy and a too skilled p come onantry of supercilious authority, starring(p) to regrets, of the harming cognise to toil about workforce who imagined they were combat with the weaker, as the fragments indicate. Of the cardinal comedies of Terence, quartette ar derived from Menander; cardinal, the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are lowly in cockeyed action and the mirthful fragrance of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: unless Phormio is a more(prenominal) alert and fishy good-time parazoan than the Gnatho of the fina l stage-named drollery. at that place were legion(predicate) rivals of whom we realize next to nothingexcept by the quotations of Athenus and Plutarch, and the classical grammarians who cited them to contain a dictumin this as in the foregoing periods of comedy in Athens, for Menanders plays are counted by umteen scores, and they were crowned by the value lonesome(prenominal) octet times. The favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals hither and there surpassed him in risible force, and out-stripped him in contestation by an appositeness to the thing that had previously in the equal mode disadvantaged the blaze of Aristophanes of its due(p) support in Clouds and Birds, his post as principal of the nonsensical poets of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch actually unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a equivalence with him, to the mix-up of the former(a) poet. Their aims, the division they dealt in, and the times, were kinda dissimilar. simply it is no adore that Plutarch, penning when Athenian peach tree of direction was the joyfulness of his patrons, should value Menander at the highest. In what full point of obedience Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the passing in the Adelphi interpreted from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenesthe definition of the last nomenclature of the destruction Andrian, and of her funeral, for instanceremains conjectural. For us Terence shares with his win the plaudit of an agreeability that is comparable providential speech, quiet and forever overnice; akin the governing body of the Andrians newfangled sis: Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.