Top philosopher’s favourite comic dramatist
January 24, 2013
Famously, in his Poetics, the philosopher Aristotle tried to define the nature and social function of tragic drama and what made a good tragic play. But what we know as the Poetics is actually only the first half of Aristotle’s treatise. The second half dealt with comedy, and a recent book by Walter Watson (The …
Comedy Jones? HMS Tragedy??
January 16, 2013
Would you call your son or daughter Comedy? At least two Greek parents did, more or less, in the fourth century BC. Inscriptions tell us of a sculptor working at Epidaurus, named Komoidion, and a woman in the perfume business at Delos named Komoidia. No one (that we know of) named their child Tragedy. But that …
