The Euripides described by ancient biographers is the Euripides Aristophanes portrays in the comedies he wrote for Athenian audiences after the devasting plague of 430–429 BC: immoral, sophistic, and irreligious. Biographers created new anecdotes about him, using the comic poets’ techniques, taking lines from his dramas out of their original contexts and placing them in anecdotes in which they could be repurposed to express his personal thoughts. The process of transforming literature into biography can be seen most clearly in the Life of Euripides by the Hellenistic biographer Satyrus, which is based almost entirely on anecdotes created to provide new contexts for some of Euripides’ most memorable lines; for example, an account of Euripides’ death mirrors the account of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ drama Bacchae. The idea that Euripides was critical of ancient religion, like some famous philosophers, explains why Diogenes Laertius refers to Euripides more frequently than any other poet. These ancient characterizations continue to have a profound and misleading influence on modern interpretation of his dramas, demonstrating how transformative an effect a skillful comic poet can have on the course of literary history.

An ‘in context’ biography. What is available to a biographer when he is deprived of all correspondence and personal papers and is reduced to working on impersonal documents and archives? What can he do if his subject lived at a time when it was unthinkable to reveal anything about oneself in a work of fiction? What remains if he wants to eliminate all the invented tales and imaginary anecdotes contained in the first ‘lives of Molière’? What is left is to contextualise Molière. There is the historical, documentary (and thereby sociological) contexualisation that, over the last century, has radically transformed the traditional image of Molière the homme du théâtre; the aesthetic contextualisation made possible by the last fifty years of studies of galanterie, which can only be fully understood when linked to its socio-literary context; the recontextualisation of the conditions in which Molière’s plays were created; the contextualisation of theatre practices; the contextualisation of his sources in connection with their aesthetic context… Contextualising Molière, is to leave behind the vicious circles (the misanthropic Molière), legends (the jealous Molière) and errors (the sick Molière and medicine) to capture as best one can one of the most extraordinary comic dramatists of all time.

In the ‘two bucket’ version of literary history whatever praise lightens Shakespeare’s load must fill Jonson’s with invective. This history is abetted by anecdotal accounts that bring the writers together in ‘wit contests’, which ransom Shakespeare’s reputation at the expense of Jonson. The prevailing morphology of the Jonson anecdote is that he often ends up as the butt of the joke. Such stories seem to respond to his attempts to manage his own legacy, especially his effrontery in supervising his own ‘works’ in 1616. This essay studies the tradition of Jonsonian anecdotes – including three previously unknown eighteenth-century examples – all of which show Jonson trying and failing to play executor to his own literary legacy. Tellingly, these rebuttals to Jonson often address him in his own terms, specifically poetic ones. For be it epigram, epitaph, or epilogue, these anecdotes offer light verse rejoinders to Jonson’s attempts to have the last word. Attention to Jonson’s reputation in his own time and in the century following his death complicates and enriches a narrative about the dilation of that reputation across the centuries, presenting him as not just the foil to Shakespeare but the casualty of his efforts to author his own legacy.