1 Buchanan 2010.

2 Bowie 1993.

3 Harrison 1903 and 1912, Murray 1913, Cook 1914, and Cornford 1914.

4 Harrison 1903, vii.

5 Here and throughout this chapter, when referring to ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ I include both tragedy and comedy unless stated otherwise, partly because most scholarship has concentrated on tragic material and partly because I am going to discuss problems that are common to both dramatic genres.

6 Murray 1913, 60–69, and Murray’s Excursus on the Ritual Forms Presented in Greek Tragedy in Harrison 1912, 341–363.

7 For instance, the appearance of gods at the end of the plays was interpreted as epiphany of the resurrected deity, the final part of the original ritual: Murray 1913, 112.

8 On the parabasis as a nugget of unassimilated ritual embedded in the structure of the play, see Murray 1933, 12.

9 1449a. For analysis and deconstruction of Aristotle’s evidence, see Scullion 2005.

10 See the overview of the scholarship on ritual origins of comedy in Csapo and Miller 2007, 7–2; Lesky 1983, 1–25.

11 Ridgeway 1915.

12 Thomson 1946, 97–150.

13 Burkert 1966.

14 Sourvinou-Inwood 1994. The discussion continues into the twenty-first century. For instance, Rozik 2002, 336–347, rejects existing theories and proposes a psychoanalytic theory of theatre as institutionalised daydreaming that spontaneously creates images and allows one to experience the unconscious in a legitimate social context.

15 Harrison 1918, 73.

16 Harrison 1918, 71.

17 Pickard-Cambridge 1968.

18 Schechner and Schuman 1976; Schechner 2003. There is a discussion of performance theory in its relation to ritual in Bell 1997, 73–76.

19 The concept of ritual as social drama was proposed in Turner 1982.

20 Schechner 2003, 134–162.

21 Bierl 2009.

22 Bierl 2009, 267.

23 Burkert 1966.

24 For example, Adrados 1975 and Seaford 1984, 1–39; also Sfyroeras 2004, 259–262.

25 Friedrich 2000. There is a summary of this approach with essential bibliography in Csapo and Miller 2007, 32. See also Foley 1985 and Easterling 1988 for tragedy, and Bierl 2009 for comedy.

26 Brook 2018. For dromena of the ritual as equivalent to drama in the ritualist terminology, see Harrison 1912, 328–330.

27 Bowie 1993, 3–4.

28 Bowie 1993, 5.

29 Bowie 1993, 1–6. For example, Robertson Smith’s notion of the sacrificial meal was modelled on the Eucharist, and Frazer’s dying god drew on the Christ-figure, as too, perhaps, did Harrison’s concept of monotheism, see Schlesier 1991, 218; also Murray 1913, 60–62.

30 Bowie 1993, 7. However, his later articles on the topic of ritual in comedy (Bowie 2000, 2010) include overviews of rituals that were staged in comedy.

31 Bowie 1993, 146.

32 Noted about structuralist approach in general by Ruffell 2011, 165: ‘Whereas, however, Lévi-Strauss uses myth to explain ritual, for anthropological literary criticism the reverse is the case— stories are explained through, or more strongly, derive their meaning from, their interaction with ritual.’

33 Harrison 1903, vii.

34 Various solutions to the problem are discussed in Csapo and Miller 2007, 4–7. Bell observes that the performance theory ‘fails to account for the way in which most cultures see important distinctions between ritual and other types of activities’ (1997, 76).

35 Rosen 2015, 30; Graf 1974.

36 Ruffell 2011, 38–39: ‘If fiction is a mode of communication involving two consenting parties, then the audience has a much more active, constructive role than in models that rely on illusion or beguilement or charm. […] The audience […] actively constructs a fictional world or worlds on the basis of the fictional utterance (performance). That is to say, fictionality is not a matter of semantics but of pragmatics—not a matter of truth values, but an act of communication. […] Exceptionally, an audience can interpret anything fictionally, but, as a rule, it is an act of cooperation. Gregory Currie argues that fiction operates on the basis of recognition of mutual intentions between author and audience: that is, the author makes a fictional utterance understanding that the listener will interpret it correctly and coherently, while the audience in turn interpret the fictional utterance on the understanding that this is how the author intends it. […] On this model, the audience then are not passive, are not victims of a predatory, illusive text, or merely suspending disbelief, but positively constructing fictional worlds along the lines encouraged and anticipated by the text or, in the case of Old Comedy, the production.’

37 Discussed in Rosen 2015, 23, 30–33, who argues compellingly that although the audience and the playwright could take interest in the similarities between the two kinds of aischrology—a ritual one and a comic one—they nonetheless continued to view them as belonging to two different realms. See also in his earlier work on the parodos in Frogs, Rosen 2007, 31: ‘Indeed, the parodos specifically encourages the audience to view comic and religious mockery as phenomena that require a special understanding, precisely because they are not what they seem to be.’

38 Kleinknecht 1937; Horn 1970.

39 Thus, Tynyanov 1977, 284–309, in an article on parody, mentions in passing that literary parody can also imply the parody of speech behaviour and speech practices and utterances on which literary works are based. Therefore, although parody manipulates a piece of literature, it also manipulates the real-world speech activity on which literature is based.

40 Tynyanov 1977, 284–309.

41 One of the expressions of satire in Greek culture is iambography, a genre of archaic poetry. Iambography, however, is targeted at individuals, whereas in the case of comedy the polis with its institutions becomes the object of comic abuse. Although iambographic elements can also be found in Old Comedy, the whole genre should not be defined as satire. As Rose explains, satire, unlike parody, does not place or incorporate its object in its own system: 1993, 81–82.

42 Parody can be seen as useful criticism or destructive ridicule: Rose 1993, 26. The positive function of parody is explained by Stone in his book Parody, 1914, quoted in Rose: ‘Ridicule is society’s most effective means of curing inelasticity. It explodes the pompous, corrects the well-meaning eccentric, cools the fanatical, and prevents the incompetent from achieving success’.

43 On the terms priyom ostraneniya in Russian formalism and Verfremdung introduced by Bertold Brecht, see Shklovsky 1929, 7–23, and Rose 1993, 79.

44 The alienating function of dramatic representations of choral performances in tragedy has been discussed by Swift 2010, 369–370.

45 Rose 1993, 29. See also Auffarth 2007, esp. p. 407, where he introduces the special term ‘interrituality’ to indicate the creation of new meanings through ‘citing’ real ritual practices on stage.

46 Rose 1993, 79, and Ruffell 2011, 28. In the Russian formalist framework, this process leads to the evolution of new genres and in Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, it renews and transforms society, see Rose 1993, 125–170, esp. 160.

47 Rosen discusses this false pretence of comedy, also using the term ritualisation. He argues that the goal of the comedy’s appeal to ritual is to seek for the divine authorisation of humour and mockery, which would otherwise be threatening and abusive. He also argues that Aristophanes did not believe that comedy in fact needs such an authorisation, so it is a faux-apologia and the aischrology of comedy remains secular, Rosen 2015, 32–33.

48 Bell 1992; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Kurke 2005.

49 Bell 1997, 82.

50 Bell 1992, 90.

51 Bell 1992, 118.

52 Bell 1992, 197–223.

53 Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994, 88–97.

54 Bell 1997, 81–82.

55 Bell 1997, 235

56 Bell 1997, 82.