Greek Drama · Part 17 · New Comedy · A2–B1
Menander: The Grouch
Part 17 of Greek Drama: New Comedy, the comedy of ordinary families, love, mistaken identities and happy endings, which became the model for Roman comedy, Shakespeare and modern sitcoms. Its master was Menander, and his play The Grouch is the only complete New Comedy we have. It was lost for a thousand years, until a papyrus from Egypt was published in 1958. Character adjectives, the present simple with adverbs of frequency for habits (he never smiles, he always shouts), and the language of personality and change, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Our comedies so far have been about gods, philosophers and wars. Tonight’s is about a grumpy old farmer who hates everybody, a young man in love with his daughter, and a dog that runs into a well. No politics, no gods on cranes. Just people.
Everybody does, Marcos. That is why Menander was so loved: he wrote about people we all know. Our Library has many of his plays. But in the future, all of them will be lost except this one, and it will come back from a papyrus buried in Egypt. Tonight we describe people: what they are like and what they always, usually and never do.
Menander (about 342–290 BCE) was the most admired poet of New Comedy. He wrote more than a hundred plays and was quoted everywhere for centuries; one of his lines, “Bad company ruins good character”, was even quoted by the apostle Paul. Yet almost all his work was lost. Then, in the 20th century, papyri found in Egypt began to give him back, and in 1958 the complete text of Dyskolos (The Grouch) was published from a papyrus in the Bodmer…
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