From Rags to Drag
This chapter proposes that for some twenty years, Aristophanes and Euripides were engaging in a cross-generic dialogue about the appropriate use and effectiveness of dramatic costuming, which concerned the costume choices of dressing a royal in rags and dressing a male character in women’s clothes. It argues that Aristophanes’s Acharnians caricatured Euripides’s tendency to stage heroes in rags and that some years later, Euripides’s Helen reacted by depicting Menelaus as Aristophanes’s caricature of a Euripidean hero in rags. The chapter then suggests that the following year, Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria mocked Euripides by dressing him, his Kinsman, and his fellow tragedian Agathon in women’s clothes and that Euripides’s Bacchae responded by making Pentheus participate in the same kind of cross-dressing scene that Aristophanes used in Women at the Thesmophoria. The chapter analyzes these reappropriations as a type of literary rivalry aimed at achieving poetic supremacy.