Satire

Joel Schechter, Simon Shepherd

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350140073
• eBook ISBN: 9781350140097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Satire reconsiders the entertainment, political dissent and comic social commentary created by innovative writers and directors since this theatrical form took the stage in ancient Athens. From Aristophanes to the 18th-century plays of John Gay and Henry Fielding, to the creations of Joan Littlewood, Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erika Mann, Brendan Behan and Dario Fo, practitioners of theatrical satire have prompted audiences to laugh at corruption, greed, injustice and abusive authority. In the theatre these artists jested at prominent citizens, scandals and fashions. In retrospect it can be seen that their topical references, allegories and impersonations also promoted intervention in public discourse and events outside the theatre, as satire extended its reach beyond the stage into society. Satire focuses on three exemplary satiric plays: The Knights by Aristophanes, The Beggar's Opera by John Gay and The Hostage by Brendan Behan under Joan Littlewood's direction. Detailed discussion of these three innovative works reveals both changes and continuities in stage satire over the course of its long, hilarious history. The survey concludes with a discussion of stage satire as an endangered art in need of preservation by actors, directors and theatre historians.

1

Introduction: What Was Stage Satire? Looking Back at an Endangered Art Form

Stage satire has been applauded for thousands of years; but the applause for this form of theatre erupts less often today than in the past when Aristophanes, John Gay and other playwrights prompted audiences to laugh volubly at scenes of misconduct. They ridiculed prominent individuals and institutions of their day in plays that merit the kind of praise Jonathan Swift gave The Beggar’s Opera after it opened in 1728. John Gay’s satire, said Swift, excels in humour that ‘laughs Men out of their Follies and Vices’ (1730: 21). He thought the play would probably do more good than a thousand sermons. Three centuries later, as we approach the tercentenary of The Beggar’s Opera, the amount of folly and vice in the world has not diminished, sermons are still heard on Sundays and the efficacy Swift attributed to stage satire has been considerably reduced, along with the audience for it.

Before its decline in popularity, satiric theatre attracted sizable audiences. In London, John Gay’s satire ran for sixty-two nights in its first season, setting attendance records and making its producer wealthy. The Beggar’s Opera became the talk of the town and encouraged imitations of its form by other playwrights. In ancient Athens, 15,000 to 17,000 spectators sat together to see the single performance of a satire by Aristophanes. Greek festivals showed his new plays only one day a year; but year after year, thousands of Athenians watched plays by Aristophanes ridicule Greek legislators, philosophers, military generals, rival poets, husbands and wives, despite objections raised by a prominent general or two. The reprisals Aristophanes suffered for his satire did not deter him. One powerful opponent took the author to court; the satirist joked about the lawsuit in a subsequent play, and continued to win prizes in festival competitions.

Plays with the timeliness, wit and popularity of Aristophanes or John Gay are now an endangered species, as electronic media give live stage performances competition. Prospective audiences stay at home, or in front of a screen, instead of assembling in a theatre space in large numbers, as they did in earlier centuries to welcome the satires of Jonson, Molière, Fielding, Gogol, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Brecht, Soyinka, Behan, Fo and Littlewood, as well as Aristophanes and Gay. The considerable contributions of these artists still can be seen in revivals of the plays they created; but stage presentations of their calibre and audiences eager to watch their offerings are encountered more often today in documents of theatre history than in live performance.

Written for live performance, theatrical satire requires actors and audience to be present in a shared space and acknowledge one another for the artistry to be fully realized. It is a participatory art, with scenes staged for spectator responses, particularly laughter and assent to a play’s mockery of well-known individuals. Stripped of scenery, lighting, comic actors and audience after a performance ends, accomplishments of this ephemeral form are harder to assess than satiric novels, poems or mock-travelogues such as Gulliver’s Travels which can be read (and need not be heard) at any time. Texts that offer satire without actors get most of the attention from critics of the art. M.H. Abrams, for example, defines ‘satire’ as ‘the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn or indignation… Comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire “derides”; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon’ (1985: 187). Abrams’s references to derogation, weaponized laughter and ridicule are fine; he even tacitly admits the need for a respondent in his reference to laughter. But the thought that satire can be more than a ‘literary art’ and take shape on stage appears only briefly toward the end of his three-page gloss. To allow the form its due as theatre, a critic would have to consider the contributions of actors and directors abetted by designers, stagehands, financial backers, musicians and spectators, all of whom contribute to a performance that ‘laughs Men out of their Follies and Vices’.

Even in literary satires such as Gulliver’s Travels, though no actors are needed to read the book, different voices speak. Some readers and critics mistake the voice of Lemuel Gulliver or the projector in Swift’s pamphlet A Modest Proposal for that of the satirist himself; but there is a distance between the author and his creations comparable to that between a playwright and stage characters. That distance gives the author license to write and actor license to speak things more outrageous than he or she would say in other circumstances.

When the playwright derogates or diminishes a subject on stage, it is done not only with words: also with exaggeration and distortion of facial expressions, physical movement, an ensemble of voices singing, debating, laughing. The alternately wry, dry, milquetoast and savage intonations with which an actor can deliver lines and various unruly and restrained gestures enhance whatever text is spoken. An author’s voice may be detected somewhere in a play. But it also could elude spectators, as many voices are heard, many characters seen, many offenses offered and some taken.

In topical stage satire addressing contemporary issues, actors also engage in impersonation and embody the voices and physical behaviour of individuals widely known outside the theatre. When Aristophanes’s text required mimicry of the tyrant Cleon in The Knights, the satire focused on an immensely powerful Athenian leader who sat, alive and in person, in the front row at the play’s first and only performance in 424 BCE. No modern production of the play can reproduce those conditions; the Athenian audience, a specific leader and actors who mock that leader together in the present tense of performance made such satire on stage markedly different from other forms of expression. To appreciate The Knights today the play’s original social, artistic and political contexts – the seating capacity of the theatre, the audience’s backgrounds, the tyrant under attack – need to be known, and will be considered in pages that follow.

Satire on stage shares some characteristics with printed and electronic recordings of the art. Persons subjected to ridicule in any of these media are said to have questionable attributes; they exercise not just power but an excess of power, or they show arrogance, greed, hypocrisy, cowardice, self-love, other faults that lend themselves to caricature by an artist who distorts or exaggerates the behaviour for comic effect. To say that a satiric play attacks hypocrisy or greed would be insufficient; it finds these flaws in human behaviour, gives them faces, names, embodies them on stage with actors, holds them to account in a specific time and place, and it is not finished until an audience welcomes the result – or finds itself offended.

This Is What Democracy Looked Like

The art that ridicules immoderate behaviour occasionally has unreasonable limits and definitions imposed on it by critics. Kenneth MacLeish, in an introduction to Aristophanes, separates satiric art from political action when he quotes Philip Roth (satirist of American President Nixon in the novel Our Gang): ‘Writing satire is a literary, not a political act, however volcanic the reformist or even revolutionary passion in the author. Satire is moral rage transformed into comic art’ (Aristophanes 1993: xxvi). Certainly for Roth, who wrote novels and not plays, satire was a literary act, and he excelled at it; but performance of a play such as The Knights can be viewed as a political act, and a democratic act as it criticizes a tyrant in front of thousands of other Athenians. Performance of that play or one by Henry Fielding or Dario Fo ridiculing powerful men differs from conventional political action. It is not a protest march or a senatorial caucus; but The Knights and other satires performed for a public assembly are not entirely different from the texts delivered by legislators. Though legislatures may be less humorous, their speakers, like actors in satire, debate issues, initiate controversies, threaten opponents and may even come to blows.

Votes have played a role in both arenas too. In ancient Athens, ten of the spectators – drama festival contest judges – cast ballots to determine who won the competition among playwrights. Far more Athenian voters participated in decision-making outside the theatre. Many of those other Athenian voters watched satires in the Theatre of Dionysus. Only 6,000 citizens composed the governing Assembly in Athens, but the theatre accommodated up to 17,000. Actors and writers may not have had the authority of government officials; but they brought together a larger number of citizens than the Assembly, and their dialogues aired current issues at the same time they entertained spectators. In his book Anatomy of Satire, Gilbert Highet notes that portrayal of a political leader is liable to transgress the boundaries between satire and politics. The effort may begin as ‘satiric parody’ and ‘pass out of the arts and into action’ (1962: 92–3).

The issues Aristophanes aired were quite varied; not all of the plays focused on politicians. Positions held by wives and slaves, poets and philosophers, as well as assemblymen and generals were questioned with irreverence by the Athenian playwright, his actors and their chorus of twenty-four. A wide range of topics can be found in his stage satires and those that followed.

While Aristophanes, John Gay and Brendan Behan, three innovative writers, and their plays receive most of the attention in these pages, a few words need to be said in praise of another group contributing to their success: namely, past audiences. Since the advent of mass media, most prospective audiences for performance favour film, television and computer screenings over live theatre. The change enlarges viewership, but it also deprives satire of a live audience whose presence was important enough to be acknowledged in The Knights, in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958), all three of which will be considered in more detail. ‘All this we must do, to comply with the Taste of the Town,’ claims a character named Player about his choices in Gay’s stage satire (Gay 2013: 69). The Beggar’s Opera actually changed the taste of the town, but first mocked its fashions, including the vogue of Italian opera. In The Knights, a slave ready to rebel promises ‘upstanding citizens, and every smart spectator’ ‘will rally’ to his side (Aristophanes 1998: 259). Here and in other cases, audience response to the satire was led by the playwright and performers. Objections the plays raised to faulty behaviour influenced behaviour, generated applause and a demand for tickets, and gave the satires by Gay and Behan long runs. While The Knights was scheduled for only one performance at its inception, its controversy continued after the festival ended. (Aristophanes settled the lawsuit out of court.) By contrast, televised screenings of a satiric performance may be rebroadcast occasionally; but an electronic version will not bring together an audience of thousands to laugh in like-minded company and marvel at its own numbers as well as the playwright’s temerity.

During the pandemic of 2020, when theatres were closed to prevent the spread of illness, a New York Times critic lamented having to watch stage performances at home on her computer screen, ‘experiencing them through a filter of a medium they weren’t constructed for… they felt flattened and far away… relics of theater rather than theater itself’ (Collins-Hughes 2020: C6). Even in a theatre seating 17,000 Athenians, those in the back rows could experience a sense of closeness, not only because the place was crowded; the actors shared scandals and accusations with them while a national leader and other prominent citizens subjected to the satire sat there. Audiences attending The Knights, The Beggar’s Opera and The Hostage when those plays first opened would have been able to see in their midst some of the leaders satirized; witnessing a prominent leader confronted by comic critics, or watching a very important person’s imitator mock him or her on stage, spectators could enjoy a kind of complicity and presence that camera close-ups cannot provide. Looking at theatrical satires by Aristophanes, Gay, Behan and a few others, we can begin to understand the kind of stage performances and audiences for them that are missing in our time.

The humorous invective, songs and jests these plays direct at demagogues, cheats, kidnappers, infatuated ingénues and high society fashion-plates do not necessarily improve with age. When first performed, popular stage satires thrive on references to people and events known to the public. A twenty-first-century audience will have difficulty gauging Cleon’s importance to Athens 2,450 years after The Knights opened. Aristophanes’s debunking of his city-state’s tyrant is not likely to provoke audience laughter or win first prize as it did originally, although the play may evoke thoughts about other, more recent tyrants.

Satires that look at other sources of lying, greed and hypocrisy besides politicians often contain references that still resonate centuries after their first performance. The ridicule Gay, Behan and Aristophanes directed at the institution of marriage, for example, may be readily understood by contemporary spectators, although representations of relationships between men and women – and of same-sex relationships – have changed over time too. Only male actors performed women’s roles in ancient Greek and Elizabethan drama; once actresses appeared in plays, satire of gender roles and matrimony was no longer fully controlled by men. Women’s voices were heard, even if men wrote their lines. In The Beggar’s Opera, when Jeremiah Peachum asks his newly married daughter Polly how she proposes to live, she answers, ‘Like other Women, sir, upon the Industry of my Husband’ (2013: 19). But her comic answer takes on additional meaning once we know that Lavinia Fenton, the actress who first portrayed Polly Peachum, earned her own living on stage. She needed no financial support from a husband. Polly Peachum’s reply to her father retains some humour in any case, because the ‘industry’ of her spouse Macheath involves robbery, assault and gambling; she could not live ‘like other Women’ unless they too were married to notorious criminals.

Satire of this order remains humorous for centuries, but problems of humour with an expiration date and ephemeral topicality arise even in the best of plays. Remedies to the threat of obsolescence have been found in rewriting, adaptation, new translation and innovative stage direction, as will be seen in Brecht’s reworking of Gay’s play. The threats posed by mass media, already introduced, may be less remediable. In the age of internet streaming and cable television, ‘live’ performance often means ‘live when first recorded’. Satire’s capacity to foster a conspiracy against adversaries which actors and spectators share in a theatre space – their unmediated contact, unobstructed by an imaginary fourth wall between them – gives way to studio cameramen and control booth editors deciding what to show viewers. Sound editors decide what is heard on the microphone or bleeped out. Most limiting of all: televised routines often have to stop after a certain amount of time or they will interfere with commercials purchased by program sponsors. Even non-commercial public stations take breaks to thank their sponsors these days.

In deference to their program’s commercial interruptions, satiric television sketches on the American program Saturday Night Live last about five minutes each. A studio audience of hundreds watches in person, the rest of the audience watches from home in small, separated groups. It could be argued this is the state of popular satire today: watched privately by most spectators, the program comprises short sketches separated by advertisements for expensive cars, drugs and new Hollywood films. Sometimes a celebrity, an American presidential candidate or a famous actor, participates as a guest performer and reads quips from a teleprompter. By contrast, as a way to assess the diminution of satire, consider that Aristophanes in Athens could expect thousands attending the first performance of The Frogs, The Clouds or The Knights to sit outdoors in a large amphitheatre and watch his actors for hours. The performance length allowed for detailed, sustained comic forays with song, dance and repeated mockery of prominent citizens. Audiences did more than applaud. In The Knights the chorus leader recalls that the playwright Magnes was ‘booed off the stage… because his powers of mockery had deserted him’, and the writer Crates had to endure ‘violent rebuffs’ (Aristophanes 1998: 297–9). Substantial audience size gave spectators the power to disapprove of an author; if he did not lead them to laugh at miscreants, he risked rejection himself. Although devised for one performance only, satire staged in the Theatre of Dionysus could make a lasting impression, given its length, rarity and the many witnesses. In some cases the impression has lasted 2,500 years despite the originally limited run of one day. Writing for a single performance, Aristophanes did not have to worry about his play’s topical references going out of date. Satire was here and now, live and in person. Now it is rarely here, at least not in live stage plays.

Satura, Satyr and Satire

Ancient Athenian theatre presented some ‘satyr’ plays with actors portraying mythical creatures, half-man, half-goat. The only surviving complete Greek satyr text, The Cyclops (c. 425 BCE) of Euripides, places mythical goat-men on stage to mock the epic heroism of Odysseus as he and the satyrs defy their captor, the Cyclops. The short mythological comedy was devised as an afterpiece to follow a trilogy of tragedies; it should not be confused with the full-length plays of Aristophanes, who placed no satyrs onstage. But the satyrs played a role in the etymology of ‘satire’, contributing their name to the English word.

Linking modern usage of the word to past practice by satirists, Robert C. Elliott notes that ‘our satire is derived from Latin satura (which had the original sense of mixture or medley), while our satirize and satirical come from the Greek word for satyr’ (1960: 102). Elliott traces the use of satiric invective from early Western poets who preceded Greek theatre to Aristophanic comedy and later satire, where maledictions recited to expel enemies, as well as ancient rituals to invoke fertility, took increasingly comic and theatrical form when characters exchanged insults on stage. Satiric poetry written in Rome by Horace and J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: What Was Stage Satire? Looking Back at an Endangered Art Form
• 2 Aristophanes and After: Origins and Legacy of Ancient Athenian Satire
• 3 John Gay’s Swiftian Satire in the Long Eighteenth Century
• 4 Joan Littlewood’s Brendan Behan and the Making of Modern Satire
• Conclusion: The Endangered Future of Satire
• Further Reading/Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint