ABSTRACT
The central figure of Tom Stoppard’s comedy Jumpers (1972) is a philosopher called George Moore, and the play is centrally about his philosophy and his marital problems with his wife Dorothy. George’s career has not been helped by his being a namesake of G.E. Moore, whose wife was also called Dorothy and was apparently quite unlike the Dorothy of Stoppard’s play. The play does not pretend to be a play about G.E. Moore, but George is in many ways a representative twentieth-century English philosopher, and the style of the philosophy that he expounds at some length during the play is recognisably that of much twentieth-century English philosophy. To this extent, Jumpers has something in common with Aristophanes’ Clouds, where Socrates is a representative contemporary philosopher. But Socrates is portrayed as Socrates himself, not a namesake, and nothing is said about his having a wife. On the other hand, from 1680 onwards there has been a tradition of comedies about Socrates in which his marital problems as well as his philosophy have played a prominent part. The title of Stoppard’s play points to a link with Socratic philosophy, since the Jumpers are a team of acrobats containing ‘a mixture of the more philosophical members of the university gymnastics team and the more gymnastic members of the Philosophy School’, as George explains at one point towards the end of the first act. ‘A curious combination of interests’, he adds, ‘but of course in ancient classical Greece’ – at which point he is interrupted by Inspector Bones: ‘We are not in ancient bloody classical Greece’. This chapter will survey first the evidence for the portrayal of Socrates in ancient Greek comedy and then his portrayal in comedies from 1680 onwards. Ideally, if space had permitted, it should also have covered his portrayal in other types of drama and in other genres of comedy.1
