Menander and the Birth of Domestic Drama

Mitch Brown (Author)

9780299349608

Hardback, published 31 December 2024

216 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.454 kg

“This excellent book is packed with insights about what made Menander’s domestic drama so innovative. With detailed analysis of five plays, Brown shows how cleverly Menander combines what is visible with what is not, focusing attention on what occurs offstage in the characters’ private homes.” - Anne H. Groton, author of From Alpha to Omega: A Beginning Course in Classical Greek

“A well-argued, original discussion of the importance of offstage action in Menander’s plays. Detailed analysis and careful close readings show how Menander laid the foundations of later European drama with its ever-increasing focus on indoor, domestic action. An attentive and compelling contribution.” - William Furley, editor of Menander "Misoumenos" or "The Hated Man"

Although few of his plays exist in full today, the fourth-century BCE Greek dramatist Menander was known far and wide throughout antiquity. He was one of the first to locate his dramas in the common household, rather than the mythic world of gods and heroes, and is now recognized as one of the pioneering figures of ancient Greek “New Comedy.” 

The design of the Greek stage was such that the interiors of houses were almost never shown, which posed difficulties for a playwright interested in staging the domestic lives of ordinary people. Here, Mitch Brown dissects how Menander responded to this challenge. As Brown demonstrates, Menander successfully conjured offstage action and even characters in the audiences’ imaginations; these offstage universes, Brown argues, are fundamental to understanding Menander’s dramaturgy and its reception in later centuries. Menander’s offstage methods and the new type of play (domestic drama) that he inaugurated directly influenced Western theater into the early modern period—and the impact of his innovations can still be seen indirectly today.

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Isolated House
• Chapter 2: The Woman of the House
• Chapter 3: Women in the Shadows
• Chapter 4: Invisible Marriage in the Epitrepontes 
  
• Chapter 5: Fatherhood in Terence’
  s Self-Tormentor
• Conclusion: Menander and the Renaissance
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Index Locorum