Aristophanes

Marrying deft social commentary to a rich, earthy comedy, the three comedies collected in Aristophanes' "The Frogs and Other Plays" offers a unique insight into one of the most turbulent periods in Ancient Greek history.
This "Penguin Classics" edition is translated by David Barrett with revisions, an introduction and notes by Shomit Dutta.
The master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In "The Frogs", written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to the Underworld to bring back a poet who can help Athens in its darkest hour, and stages a great debate to help him decide between the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus and the brilliant modernity of Euripides. The clash of generations and values is also the object of Aristophanes' satire in Wasps, in which an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows and end up in court. And in "Women at the Thesmophoria", the famous Greek tragedian Euripides, accused of misogyny, persuades a relative to infiltrate an all-women festival to find out whether revenge is being plotted against him. Shomit Dutta's introduction discusses Aristophanes' life, the cultural context of his work and conventions of Greek comedy.

This new verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies offers one of the world's great comic dramatists in a form that is both historically faithful and theatrically vigorous. Aristophanes' plays were produced for the festival theater of classical Athens in the fifth century BC and encompass the whole gamut of humor, from brilliantly inventive fantasy to obscene vulgarity. This edition includes a substantial general introduction and introductory essays for each of the plays, as well as full explanatory notes and an index of names.

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