ABSTRACT
‘[Q]uestionless we are deprived of a great stock of wit in the loss of Menander.’ Thus Dryden in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, who goes on to lament the loss not only of Menander, but also of his ablest Roman adaptors. ‘ ’Tis probable that these, could they be recovered, would decide the controversy.’ 1 The controversy Dryden has in mind is the question of the necessity of the dramatic Unities. Thus, Menander emerges, for Dryden at least, as the missing linchpin for a full understanding not so much of the history of drama per se, as of the real aesthetic significance of the received rules of dramatic construction. Not only for Dryden, but for his contemporaries more generally, the infamously overapplied passage of Aristotle’s Poetics (ὅτι μάλιστα πειρα̃ται ὑπὸ μίαν περίοδον ἡλίου εἰν̃ αιã, 1449 b 12–13) was never the sole source for thinking about the Unity of Time. Early modern critics were usually keenly interested in moving beyond Aristotle’s nonprescriptive observation to see how Greek and Roman dramatists constructed their plots to fit them into a single day, and they usually regarded the evident selfconsciousness of this practice as a feature, not a flaw, of ancient dramatic ars. So it is especially strange that modern scholarship has paid so little attention to the fact that almost all extant ancient plays do indeed conform to the Unity of Time, and it is hard to explain classicists’ reticence on this topic, unless perhaps they share in the pervasive late modern revulsion at the idea of such unnatural constraint placed on dramatic creativity. 2 For classicizing poets and critics from the Italian Renaissance down through Dryden, however, the conventional single-day limit of the play’s erz ä hlte Zeit was not felt to be a negative stumbling block for the ancient playwrights, but rather a positive hurdle against which they could prove their artistry. 3 This is both a more historically appropriate and a more interesting way for classicists to approach this feature of ancient drama than regarding it as a quaint superstition or passing over it in embarrassed silence.
