The Stock Masks of the Old Comedy

Extract from
Francis MacDonald Cornford (1914) The Origin of Attic Comedy. Chapter VIII: The Stock Masks of the Old Comedy: London: Edward Arnold pp. 154–. ISBN 978-0-521-18207-2.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022693117


p. 173

§85. The list of Stock Masks in the Old Comedy

We have thus collected a Uttle gallery of stock masks :

Aa Old Man, a rustic, testy, morose, stingy, given to beating his
slaves.

An Old Woman, wrinkled and hideous, amorous and drunken,
who dances the kordax.

A Young Woman, a mute person, who appears only as bride in
the final marriage.

A Learned Doctor or Pedant, lean, pale, remote from the world
(Socrates, Euripides).

A Cook (AgoracrituS).

A Parasite (Cleon), probably borrowed from the Dorian tradition,
and the Mime of Epicharmus and his school.

A Swaggering Soldier (Lamachus, Aeschylus).

A Comic Slave, or pair of slaves (the two slaves in the Knights,
Wasps, Peace, etc. Xanthias in the Frogs, who offers in the prologue
to go through the traditional antics. The minor Bufioon (Euelpides,
etc.), of other plays may take his place, as attendant of the hero).

[The Impostor can hardly be called a stock mask. He is multi-
plied into an indefinite variety of professional types. These, again,
are not stock masks, but generalised from life. They all fill suc-
cessively one fixed role in the main action.]

References

Stock character - Wikipedia

Eli Rozik (April 2005). The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. University of Iowa Press. pp. 62–. ISBN 978-1-58729-426-6.

Gwendolyn Compton-Engle (27 April 2015). Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes. Cambridge University Press.. ISBN 978-1-107-08379-0.

Paul Zanker (1995). The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20105-7.

Eiron - Wikipedia