Monstrous Regiment

Abstract

Meredith argued that one of the pre-conditions for an era of great comedy was that there should not be ‘a state of marked social inequality between the sexes’. 1 The historical evidence would scarcely seem to bear this out as a general proposition. Comic playwrights from Aristophanes on have made capital out of sexual inequality as the social norm. The idea of the women taking over in Lysistrata or Ecclesiasuzae would not be funny if it were not seen as a fantastic aberration from normality. Women enforcing a peace treaty, women voting in the Assembly, these are spectacles as remote from the actual as Cloudcuckooland or the comic Hades of The Frogs. The idea of assembly or congregation, for legislative or educational purposes, is understood to be an essentially male activity, and the banding together of women is the basis of comic works as different as Erasmus’s colloquy Senatulus and Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Princess Ida. To take an example from a minor play, interesting principally as a source for Moliere, the feminist call to arms of Emilie in Chappuzeau’s Academie des Femmes is intended as typically absurd: