Menander Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Menander

The comedy of fourth-century Athens, which inspired the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence and, through their own revival in the Renaissance, modern traditions of comedy from William Shakespeare and Molière to Georges Feydeau and George Bernard Shaw, has itself been conspicuously absent from critical consciousness -- and for good reason. Whereas Aristophanes continued to be read -- albeit with increasing difficulty -- from classical times to the present day, the so-called New Comedy of the next century gradually vanished from sight. Plutarch may have preferred Menander, greatest practitioner of the genre, to Aristophanes, but by the eighth century A.D. Menander was only a name and a set of disjointed verses that scholars would eventually find among the anthologists and grammarians of late antiquity. Thus, when modern theorists such as George Meredith and Northrop Frye wrote about New Comedy and Menander, they could really mean only Plautus and Terence, spiced with what little they had deduced (not always correctly) from the hodgepodge of Greek testimony.

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