Aristophanes

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“According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.” -Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore //Oh would some god, with sudden stroke,// //Convert me to a cloud of smoke!// //Like politicians’ words I’d rise// //In gaseous vapour to the skies//. (50, Act One, Scene One, //The Wasps// by Aristophanes)

//[On modern poets]// Small fry, I assure you, insignificant squeakers and twitterers, like a lot of swallows. A disgrace to their art. If ever they are granted a chorus, what does their offering at the shrine of Tragedy amount to? One cock of the hind leg and they’ve pissed themselves dry. You never hear of them again. (159, Act One, Scene One, //The Frogs// by Aristophanes)

Perhaps the first thing to strike us--paradoxical as it may sound to say so--about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its modernness. Of its very nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much of the liberty of choice of subject and licence of method that marks present-day conditions of literary production both on and off the stage. Its very existence presupposes a fuller and bolder intellectual life, a more advanced and complex city civilization, a keener taste and livelier faculty of comprehension in the people who appreciate it, than could anywhere be found at an earlier epoch. Speaking broadly and generally, the Aristophanic drama has more in common with modern ways of looking at things, more in common with the conditions of the modern stage, especially in certain directions--burlesque, extravaganza, musical farce, and even 'pantomime,' than with the earlier and graver products of the Greek mind.

The eleven plays, all that have come down to us out of a total of over forty staged by our author in the course of his long career, deal with the events of the day, the incidents and personages of contemporary Athenian city life, playing freely over the surface of things familiar to the audience and naturally provoking their interest and rousing their prejudices, dealing with contemporary local gossip, contemporary art and literature, and above all contemporary politics, domestic and foreign. All this farrago of miscellaneous subjects is treated in a frank, uncompromising spirit of criticism and satire, a spirit of broad fun, side-splitting laughter and reckless high spirits. Whatever lends itself to ridicule is instantly seized upon; odd, eccentric and degraded personalities are caricatured, social foibles and vices pilloried, pomposity and sententiousness in the verses of the poets, particularly the tragedians, and most particularly in Euripides--the pet aversion and constant butt of Aristophanes' satire--are parodied. All is fish that comes to the Comic dramatists net, anything that will raise a laugh is fair game. "It is difficult to compare the Aristophanic Comedy to any one form of modern literature, dramatic or other. It perhaps most resembles what we now call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of broad farce and comic opera, and something also (in the hits at the fashions and follies of the day with which it abounded) of the modern pantomime. But it was something more, and more important to the Athenian public than any or all of these could have been. Almost always more or less political, and sometimes intensely personal, and always with some purpose more or less important underlying its wildest vagaries and coarsest buffooneries, it supplied the place of the political journal, the literary review, the popular caricature and the party pamphlet, of our own times. It combined the attractions and influence of all these; for its grotesque masks and elaborate 'spectacle' addressed the eye as strongly as the author's keenest witticisms did the ear of his audience."[See Ancient Classics for English Readers: Aristophanes, by Lucas Collins, Introductory Chapter, p. 2.] http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/aristophanes/introduction.asp

[|Chapter 9: Aristophanes] [|Aristophanes - Ancient History] [|Aristophanes - Britannica] [|Aristophanes - His Works] [|The Clouds synopsis] [|The Knights synopisis] =[|Aristophanes]= [|Aristophanes - Quotes]
 * [|Aristophanes] - A biography of the Greek comedy writer.
 * [|The Birds] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes
 * [|The Clouds] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Frogs] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Frogs-synopsis=analysis]
 * [|The Knights] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|Peace] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|Plutus] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Thesmophoriazusae] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Wasps] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|Lysistrata] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Knights] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Ecclesiazusae] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|The Acharnians] - An introduction to the play by Aristophanes.
 * [|Lystrasista-prezi]
 * //The Acharnians// - 425 B.C.
 * //The Birds// - 414 B.C.
 * //The Clouds// - 419 B.C.
 * //The Ecclesiazusae// - 390 B.C.
 * //The Frogs// - 405 B.C.
 * //The Knights// - 424 B.C.
 * //Peace// - 421 B.C.
 * //Plutus// - 380 B.C.
 * //The Thesmophoriazusae// - 411 B.C.
 * //The Wasps// - 422 B.C.

[|Split Aparts]