The Third Genre: Satyr Play in Antiquity

I came to the CHS with grand ambitions of completing the manuscript for The Third Genre: Satyr Play in Antiquity. My original goal had been to get beyond traditional accounts of satyr play by combining a revisionist study of its postclassical history with an exploration of satyr play’s reception in ancient criticism as well as in modern literature from Germany, France, and Britain. However, the lively intellectual culture at the CHS and in DC, the regular exchange of new work and ideas through seminars and events, the convivial conversations with new friends – these all provided the impetus and inspiration to rethink my original plans, just as the fellowship itself gave me the opportunity to see some of those changes through.

Satyr play is little known today compared to its more famous and influential dramatic siblings, tragedy and comedy. Apart from Euripides’ Cyclops, only fragments remain. Yet, as the British playwright Tony Harrison puts it, without satyr plays “we are lacking important clues to the wholeness of the Greek imagination” (Harrison 2004, p. 7). To scholars, satyr play is familiar as the fourth part of the classical tragic tetralogy. But, to the extent that satyr play is present at all in popular imagination, it is usually seen as a genre that mixed elements of tragedy and comedy.

This popular notion has exerted a strong pull on scholars. On standard accounts, satyr play thrived for barely a century before the tension between its humorous nature and the seriousness of tragedy led to decline. Key moments in the story are Euripides’ experiment with a satyr-less production (the “pro-satyric” Alcestis of 438 BC) and the eventual removal of satyr play from tragic productions by the mid-fourth century BC (IG II² 2320). Recent work on satyr play (e.g. Laemmle 2013; Shaw 2014) has brought new and important insights, but it reproduces the basic features of this decline narrative: it is concerned principally with classical satyr play; it appeals to the putative origins of drama to understand classical norms; it defines satyr play in terms of either tragedy or comedy.

However, satyr play was written and performed well into the Imperial era – for as long as tragedy and comedy – and was a perennial presence in ancient criticism as a third genre distinct from tragedy and comedy. The Third Genre now attempts to do justice to “the wholeness of the Greek imagination” by attending to the neglected story of satyr play’s postclassical fortunes. I look afresh at the full range of evidence for satyr play from throughout antiquity to reframe our understanding of classical satyr play and to reconstruct the history of satyr play after its alleged demise in the fourth century BC.

The focus of my work at the CHS (and the subject of the seminar paper I gave while there) was the first half of the revised book project, three chapters that revise the narrative of satyr play’s decline.

Chapter 1 begins by asking what the original Greek word for “satyr play” was. Although the terms satyroi and satyrikon drama are well attested after the fifth century BC to mean “satyr play”, there is little evidence for them in the earliest phase of drama in Athens. The reason for this, I argue, is that a firm boundary between tragedy and satyr play was not yet felt since both were performed under the single category of tragoidoi. The terminology is mirrored by the iconography: images of satyr play outnumber those of tragedy, which I take to reflect the way the iconography of satyr play signified the tragic production as a whole.

If satyr play was not already conceptually distinct from tragedy, we must ask how they came to be differentiated. Chapter 2, therefore, recasts the story of satyr play’s demise as part of the gradual emergence of separate concepts of tragoidia, satyroi/satyrikon drama, and komoidia. I situate key moments in the decline narrative in the broader context of the proliferation of dramatic festivals and the early stages in the professionalization of the theatre. Paradoxically, although satyr play was ultimately separated permanently from tragedy, those same developments made satyr play available conceptually as a unique type of drama that would persist for centuries.

In Chapter 3 I examine references to satyr play in classical drama in light of these developments. I demonstrate how, in the fifth century BC, satyr play continued to be treated as an extension of tragic production, despite having been differentiated from tragedy and comedy. In Aristophanes’ comedies the engagement with satyr play is largely unmarked and forms part of his agonistic self-definition against tragedy. Meanwhile, through a reading of Euripides’ Cyclops as a metaphorical reflection of the relationship between tragedy and satyr play, I show that even this highly self-conscious play enacts the subordination of satyr play to tragedy within the tragic production.

With the CHS behind me, I will turn to satyr play’s fate beyond classical Athens and how it came to be “the third genre” in performance and in theory. Reworking earlier versions of Chapter 3 has also generated material for a new article on performative and thematic connections between Euripides’ Cyclops and his Orestes and what these links can tell us about the relationship between satyr play and tragedy more generally. Finally, thanks to the time and resources the fellowship put at my disposal, the chapters on ancient criticism and the modern reception of satyr play that I had projected originally have morphed into designs for a second monograph. I am looking forward to being able to follow the thread of satyr play and its ambiguous status as a genre in the works of Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, and Heiner Müller, amongst others. It is surely a sign of how stimulating my time at the CHS was that I leave with more work before me than when I arrived.