【紀錄片】古希臘 世界上最偉大的戲劇 2 國王【1080p】 【雙語特效字幕】【紀錄片之家字幕組】 P12 - 古希臘 世界上最偉大的戲劇 2 國王 12

The Garrulous Man Your Garrulous Man is one who sits beside a stranger and tells the dream he had last night, everything he ate for supper, how the present age is sadly degenerate, that wheat is selling very low and that hosts of strangers are in town. The Exquisite Man He has his hair cut frequently, his teeth are always pearly white. While his old suit is still good, he gets himself a new one, and he anoints himself with the choicest perfumes. Everyday character types like these provided moulds for writers of what we now call new comedy, and the most famous of the new comedy playwrights was one of Theophrastus' students, Menander. Sadly, hardly any examples of this new style have survived. We have lots of names and titles, but only one complete play. It was only revealed in 1957 after being discovered in Egypt buried in a sealed jar, and it was by Menander. But from this one surviving play and a number of other fragments, we can get a pretty good idea what new comedy was really like. And in fact, many of Menander's titles could have come from Theophrastus' characters. He has plays called The Flatterer, The Woman Hater, or The Superstitious Man. But the key thing is here that just like Theophrastus, the titles are of ordinary people. No mythical heroes, no political leaders, just people like you and me. The importance of these stock character types for new comedy is also demonstrated by the fact that there are lots of stock character masks surviving that would have been used on the stage. So we have, for example, the ruler slave, or the courtesan, or my personal favourite, the first old man. And a number of these can be found in Menander's sole surviving complete play, The Grouch. The Grouch is a man named Knaymon. He hates the outside world and wants to shut himself away from life. He shouts at servants, insults his neighbours and pelts visitors with stones. But Knaymon's seclusion is threatened when a wealthy young man, Sostratos, falls in love with his daughter and wants to marry her. Knaymon is having none of it, that is until he falls down a well and is only able to escape with the help of his stepson and the love-lorn Sostratos. This ordeal forces Knaymon to realise that no man is an island. I admit I may have made one error. That was thinking that a single person could exist who's fully self-reliant with no need of anyone. New comedy is far less bawdy. You still have some slapstick, you still have a little bit of innuendo here and there, but for the main part, you know, the strap-on fallacies are gone. A lot of the jokes about bodily function are gone. There's a shift to concern about the domestic. And, well, you get the emergence of stock characters. In the example of the grouch, you have a boy falling in love with a girl and there's going to be some obstacle. In this case, the obstacle is Knaymon, the father of the girl, who is this terrible misanthrope, okay? He just does not want to speak to anyone ever at all. And what sense of the key elements of new comedy do you think resonate with the comedy that we understand today? If we think about the grouch and this misanthropic figure who's right at the centre of it, then you might think about more relatively recent playwrights. So you might think about Moliere and his misanthrope. Here's a production that was done in Liverpool's Playhouse. And here you see Alceste, the misanthrope in the play. He, like Knaymon in Menander, is resisting the rules of society. And the same thing you can see being explored in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. You have an essential character who's really grumpy with society. Here he is in this dinner party with his apparent friends who turn out just to be using him for his wealth. You know, while these aren't directly drawn from Menander, they take that original idea as a way of really shaping the entire play.