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SPECTATOR POLITICS: METATHEATER AND PERFORMANCE IN ARISTOPHANES. By NIALL W. SLATER. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. Pp. x, 363.
IN THIS THOUGHTFUL and delightful study of Aristophanic metatheatre, Niall Slater is concerned with far more than the open breaks in the illusion where a character or the chorus addresses the audience directly (e.g., at Wasps 54: "well now, let me explain the plot to the spectators"), or the parabases proper of the plays of the 42Os, or even the arresting identification of Dikaiopolis with Aristophanes at Acharnions 377-382. Slater constructs an intriguing and attractive scheme in which comedy's frequent self-references are bound up with a larger view of the didactic role of drama within Athenian society. He regards Aristophanes' "message'' in the. early plays as Kleon-based "critiques of the demagogue's performative style of leadership in the various venues of the democracy," and as more varied in the later plays, including "an alternative political order" and "the direct relations between political and artistic order" (40).
What Slater does is bring together "the various venues of the democracy," where one person will address, attempt to persuade, or influence an "audience" of others-this he sees as "performing" or adopting roles. These would include the law-courts (Athenian juries were large panels open to mass and popular appeal), the assembly, and the Athenian people as a whole. His point is that a comic poet (or his director) literally "taught" the actors and chorus their roles and their performance of his comedy, an individual before a group, and that his comedy, when produced before the large audience of the theatron, continued that teaching on a larger political level. A reasonable proportion of the audience would have served in a dramatic or dithyrambic chorus, and would naturally respond to this segue of roles....