Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/235

 comedies as late as 429, are for us little more than names. We cannot, therefore, recover any such graduated change in the chorus and characters of comedy as the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides enable us to observe. Still, the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes compared with fragments of later comedians and the Latin imitations of the "New Comedy" made by Plautus and Terence, enable us to watch a part of the development of comedy at Athens, a part which the better-known development of tragedy aids us in understanding. As in tragedy, the comic stage represented an open space in the background of which were public and private buildings; as in tragedy, the number of the comic actors is limited to three, and masks and gay costumes, such as would have been used in the old choral carnival of Bacchus, are worn. The chorus, indeed, is almost as prominent in the earlier dramas of Aristophanes as in Æschylus, and the parabasis, or address of the chorus to the audience in the middle of the comedy, whether it was the nucleus of the comic drama or an afterthought, at least marks the chorus as the central figure. Out of the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes six are named after the chorus; and though the Thesmophoriazousæ and Ecclesiazousæ do not necessarily take their names from their choruses of women, they also seem to look to the chorus as the centre of the piece. No extant play of Aristophanes, not even the Plutus, which approaches so closely to the later comedy in its want of political allusions, is without a chorus; but the new comedy of Menander and Philemon, which, by borrowing its characters and incidents from contemporary