Comic Business. Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy

ISBN: 978-0-19-815271-2. doi:10.1017/S0009840X0800019X The author acknowledges that this book belongs to the school of Taplin, the tradition of classical scholars discussing aspects of the performance of Greek tragedy and comedy inaugurated by Oliver Taplins pioneering The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford, 1977). R. thanks several classical scholars for their wise advice in the Preface, and classicists publications ll the Bibliography; but there are no references to the work of the scholar-practitioners who have brought to Greek drama both a classical background and actual experience in the discipline of drama, using practice-as-research in the workshop and the rehearsal room to discover how Athenian drama might have worked, and might be made to work, in performance; among them Graham Ley, Gregory McCart, Rush Rehm, J. Michael Walton, and the author of this review. [...]this book is at its best when it is not dealing with Aristophanes in performance: in Chapter 3, which deals with the questions How authentic is the transmitted performance script in view of re-performances? and How typical of the genre is Aristophanic comedy? (cf.