SOURCE: Hopkins, Elaine R. “Comedy and Parody in Le Menteur.” Romance Notes 22, no. 2 (winter 1981): 192-96.

In the following essay, Hopkins elucidates the elements of classical tragedy which are parodied in The Liar.

Histories of the theatre show that tragedy came first, and that comedy developed later as a new reflection upon well-known themes. In Tragedy and Comedy, Walter Kerr states that the Greek tragic trilogies almost always were followed by a fourth play, a comic treatment of the same material covered in the tragedies. This was the “satyr play,” from which our word satire got its original meaning of a comic imitation. Kerr states further that

The earliest comic fragments to have survived are parodies of serious passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the very first playwright who can be identified as a comic playwright, Epicharmus, seems to have specialized in burlesquing heroic legend.¹

At its...