Lysistrata

Lysistrata
Author: Aristophanes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 64
Release: 1916
Genre: Lysistrata (Fictitious character)
ISBN:

Aristophanes and Women (Routledge Revivals)

Aristophanes and Women (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Lauren Taaffe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1317700147

Aristophanes and Women, first published in 1993, investigates the workings of the great Athenian comedian’s ‘women plays’ in an attempt to discern why they were in fact probably quite funny to their original audiences. It is argued that modern students, scholars, and dramatists need to consider much more closely the conditions of the plays’ ancient productions when evaluating their ostensible themes. Three plays are focused upon: Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae, and Ecclesiazusae. All seem to speak quite eloquently to contemporary concerns about women’s rights, the value of women’s work, and the relationships between women and war, literary representation and politics. On the one hand, Professor Taaffe tries to retrieve what an ancient Athenian audience may have l appreciated about these plays and what their central theses may have meant within that culture. On the other hand, Aristophanes is discussed from the perspective of a late twentieth-century, specifically female, reader.

Aristophanes: Birds. Lysistrata. Women at the Thesmophoria

Aristophanes: Birds. Lysistrata. Women at the Thesmophoria
Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 634
Release: 1998
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780674995871

Aristophanes (ca. 446-386 BCE), one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. In this third volume of a new Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristophanes, Jeffrey Henderson presents a freshly edited Greek text and a lively, unexpurgated translation of three plays with full explanatory notes. In Birds Aristophanes turns from the pointed political satire characteristic of earlier plays to a fantasy that soars literally into the air in search of a carefree world. Here the enterprising protagonists create a utopian counter-Athens, called Cloudcuckooland, ruled by birds. Lysistrata blends boisterous comedy and an earnest call for peace. Lysistrata, our first comic heroine, organizes a panhellenic conjugal strike of young wives until their husbands end the war between Athens and Sparta. Athenian women again take center stage in Women at the Thesmophoria, this time to punish Euripides for portraying them as wicked. Parody of Euripides' plots enlivens this witty confrontation of the sexes.

Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι

Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι
Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2004-09-30
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0199265275

Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae is the story of a quarrel between the tragic playwright Euripides and Athens' women, who accuse him of slandering them in his plays. Austin and Olson offer a fresh text of the play; an extensive introduction; and a detailed commentary; most Greek cited in the introduction and commentary is translated, and much of the edition is accessible to non-specialists.

Aristophanes and Politics

Aristophanes and Politics
Author: Ralph M. Rosen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004424466

The essays in this volume explore the many aspects of the “political” in the plays of Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (5th century BCE), posing a variety of questions and approaching them through diverse methodological lenses. They demonstrate that “politics” as reflected in Aristophanes’ plays remains a fertile, and even urgent, area of inquiry, as political developments in our own time distinctly color the ways in which we articulate questions about classical Athens. As this volume shows, the earlier scholarship on politics in (or “and”) Aristophanes, which tended to focus on determining Aristophanes’ “actual” political views, has by now given way to approaches far more sensitive to how comic literary texts work and more attentive to the complexities of Athenian political structures and social dynamics. All the studies in this volume grapple to varying degrees with such methodological tensions, and show, that the richer and more diverse our political readings of Aristophanes can become, the less stable and consistent, as befits a comic work, they appear to be.

Aristophanes

Aristophanes
Author: Angus M. Bowie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1993
Genre: Greek drama (Comedy)
ISBN: 9780521440127

This book places the plays of Aristophanes in their contemporary context, asking what aspects of Greek, and especially Athenian, culture these comedies brought into play for their original audiences. It makes particular use of the structural analysis of Greek rituals and myths to demonstrate how their meanings and functions can be used to interpret the plays. This information is then used to suggest ways in which twentieth-century audiences may read the plays in terms of contemporary literary theories and concerns. This is the first book to apply the techniques of structural anthropology systematically to all the comedies. It does not impose a single interpretative structure on the plays but argues that each play operates with a range of different structures, and that groups of plays use similar structures in different ways. All Greek is translated.

Aristophanes

Aristophanes
Author: Carlo Ferdinando Russo
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1997
Genre: Aristophanes
ISBN: 0415154049

This is the classic book about Aristophanes. Russo examines the plays as libretti for actors and singers rather than as mere texts, and never loses sight of the stage.

Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama

Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama
Author: Judith Fletcher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2011-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 113950035X

Oaths were ubiquitous rituals in ancient Athenian legal, commercial, civic and international spheres. Their importance is reflected by the fact that much of surviving Greek drama features a formal oath sworn before the audience. This is the first comprehensive study of that phenomenon. The book explores how the oath can mark or structure a dramatic plot, at times compelling characters like Euripides' Hippolytus to act contrary to their best interests. It demonstrates how dramatic oaths resonate with oath rituals familiar to the Athenian audiences. Aristophanes' Lysistrata and her accomplices, for example, swear an oath that blends protocols of international treaties with priestesses' vows of sexual abstinence. By employing the principles of speech act theory, this book examines how the performative power of the dramatic oath can mirror the status quo, but also disturb categories of gender, social status and civic identity in ways that redistribute and confound social authority.

The Mask of Comedy

The Mask of Comedy
Author: Thomas K. Hubbard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1991
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Hubbard demonstrates that far from being a digression or a relic of long-forgotten rituals, the parabasis provides a critical link between the identities of the poet, chorus, and protagonist, and between the play and its audience.