Download or read book Lysistrata and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Acharnians/The Clouds/Lysistrata 'We women have the salvation of Greece in our hands' Writing at a time of political and social crisis in Athens, the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes was an eloquent, yet bawdy, challenger to the demagogue and the sophist. In Lysistrata and The Acharnians, two pleas for an end to the long war between Athens and Sparta, a band of women on a sex strike and a lone peasant respectively defeat the political establishment. The darker comedy of The Clouds satirizes Athenian philosophers, Socrates in particular, and reflects the uncertainties of a generation in which all traditional religious and ethical beliefs were being challenged. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Alan H. Sommerstein

Download or read book Lysistrata written by Aristophanes and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Frogs and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 The Wasps, in which an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows and end up in court. And in The Poet and the Women, Euripides, accused of misogyny, persuades a relative to infiltrate an all-women festival to find out whether revenge is being plotted against him.

Download or read book Aristophanes Four Plays Clouds Birds Lysistrata Women of the Assembly written by Aristophanes and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.

Download or read book Tartuffe written by Molière and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2021-07-15T19:16:01Z with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first three acts of Molière’s Tartuffe were first performed for Louis XIV in 1664, but the play was almost immediately suppressed—not because the King disliked it, but because the church resented the insinuation that the pious were frauds. After several different versions were written and performed privately, Tartuffe was eventually published in its final five-act form in 1669. A comic tale of man taken in by a sanctimonious scoundrel, the characters of Tartuffe, Elmire, and Orgon are considered among some of the great classical theater roles. As the family strives to convince the patriarch that Tartuffe is a religious fraud, the play ultimately focuses on skewering not the hypocrite, but his victims, and the hypocrisy of fervent religious belief unchecked by facts or reason—a defense Molière himself used to overcome the church’s proscriptions. In the end, the play was so impactful that both French and English now use the word “Tartuffe” to refer to a religious hypocrite who feigns virtue. In its original French, the play is written in twelve-syllable lines of rhyming couplets. Curtis Hidden Page’s translation invokes a popular compromise and renders it into the familiar blank verse without rhymed endings that was popularized by Shakespeare. The translation is considered a seminal one by modern translators. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Download or read book Aristophanes and Women Routledge Revivals written by Lauren Taaffe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Birds and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2008-11-28 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Each edition has been optimized for maximum readability, using our patent-pending conversion technology. We are partnering with leading publishers around the globe to create accessible editions of their titles. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to read - today. To find more books in your format visit www.readhowyouwant.com

Download or read book Sex and War on the American Stage written by Emily Klein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American adaptations of Aristophanes’ enduring comedy Lysistrata have used laughter to critique sex, war, and feminism for nearly a century. Unlike almost any other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata has outlived its classical origins in 411 BCE and continues to shock and delight audiences to this day. The play’s "make love not war" message and bawdy humor render it endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and community theatres – so much so that none of Aristophanes’ plays are performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata. Starting with the play’s first mainstream production in the U.S. in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the Federal Theatre’s 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical The Second Greatest Sex and Spiderwoman Theater’s openly political Lysistrata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War. Although Aristophanes’ oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholarship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysistrata’s dubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the socio-political climates of their origins. Emily B. Klein is Assistant Professor of English and Drama at Saint Mary's College of California. Her work has appeared in Women and Performance and Frontiers as well as Political and Protest Theater After 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (Routledge, 2012).

Download or read book Frogs and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vibrant collection of verse translations of Aristophanes' works-featuring Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria (or Thesmophoriazusae), and Frogs-combines historical accuracy with a sensitive attempt to capture the rich dramatic and literary qualities of Aristophanic comedy. Including expansive introductions to each play, as well as detailed explanatory notes and an illuminating appendix, this volume presents freshinterpretations of three key works from one of the most original playwrights in the entire Western tradition.

Download or read book The Birds and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-09-25 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In THE BIRDS, two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. THE KNIGHTS is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while THE ASSEMBLY WOMEN deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of PEACE, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and WEALTH reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.

Download or read book Four Plays by Aristophanes written by Aristophanes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1984-11-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether his target is the war between the sexes or his fellow playwright Euripides, Aristophanes is the most important Greek comic dramatist—and one of the greatest comic playwrights of all time. His writing—at once bawdy and delicate—brilliantly fuses serious political satire with pyrotechnical bombast, establishing the tradition of comedy as high art. His messages are as timely and relevant today as they were in ancient Greece, and his plays still provoke laughter—and thought. This volume features four celebrated masterpieces: Lysistrata, The Frogs, The Birds, and The Clouds, translated by three of the most distinguished translators and classicists of our time.

Download or read book Looking at Lysistrata written by and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the women of Athens, fed up with the war against Sparta, go on a sex strike and barricade themselves into the acropolis to persuade their husbands to vote against the war. It is the most often performed of all Aristophanes' comedies. It is also, perhaps, the most misunderstood. This collection of essays by eight leading academics - written for sixth-form students and the general public alike - sets the play firmly in its historical and social context, while exploring Aristophanes' purpose in writing it and considering the responses of modern audiences and directors. The collection has been assembled and edited by David Stuttard, whose energetic new performing version of the play is included in this volume. Contributors include: Alan Beale; Edith Hall; Lorna Hardwick; James Morwood; Martin Revermann; James Robson; Alan H. Sommerstein; Michael Walton.

Download or read book Lysistrata written by Aristophanes and published by Classical Texts. This book was released on 1990 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lysistrata is the third and last of Aristophanes' peace plays. It is a dream of peace, of how the women could help to achieve an honourable settlement, conceived when Athens was going through its blackest, most desperate crisis since the Persian War. Though in modern times this is perhaps the most popular of his works, it has never before had an English translation that aims to be reliable in detail and that is fully annotated. The Greek text is based on a fuller body of evidence than any previous edition.It is astonishing to think that this play was first performed 2,400 years ago, because of all Aristophanes great comedies, Lysistrata seems to speak most clearly to our own age. It could perhaps be described as the world's first feminist drama.Text with facing translation, commentary and notes. 224pp(Aris and Phillips 1990).

Download or read book Hedda Gabler and Other Plays written by Henrik Ibsen and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these three unforgettably intense plays, Henrick Ibsen explores the problems of personal and social morality that he perceived in the world around him and, in particular, the complex nature of truth.

Download or read book Hysterical Laughter written by David Michael Christenson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hysterical Laughter: Four Ancient Comedies About Women is the first text to uniquely employ comedy as a vehicle to explore women, gender, and sexuality in Greek and Roman antiquity. Featuring new, engaging, and accessible translations by David Christenson of four of the finest classical comedies--Lysistrata (Aristophanes), Samia (Menander), Casina (Plautus), and Hecyra (Terence)--it provides instructors with an attractive and innovative way to explore the social and cultural dimensions of ancient theater and the construction of gender roles in ancient society. The volume is enhanced by an extensive general introduction and includes an introduction, notes, and essays for each comedy, all of which assume no prior background in classical studies. Ideal for courses in classical literature in translation and women in the ancient world, Hysterical Laughter can also be used in a variety of other courses in ancient history, women's studies, cultural studies, and theater.

Download or read book Birds and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, the exuberant, satirical form of festival drama which flourished during the heyday of classical Athenian culture in the fifth century BC. His plays are characterized by extraordinary combinations of fantasy and satire,sophistication and vulgarity, formality and freedom. Birds is an escapist fantasy in which two dissatisfied Athenians, in defiance of men and gods, bring about a city of birds, the eponymous Cloudcuckooland. In Lysistrata the heroine of the play organizes a sex-strike and the wives of Athens occupythe Akropolis in an attempt to restore peace to the city. The main source of comedy in the Assembly-Women is a similar usurpation of male power as the women attempt to reform Athenian society along utopian-communist lines. Finally, Wealth is Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, in which Ploutos, thegod of wealth is cured of his blindness and the remarkable social consequences of his new discrimination are exemplified. This is the first complete verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies to appear for more than twenty-five years and makes freshly available one of the most remarkable comic playwrights in the entire Western tradition, complete with an illuminating introduction including play by play analysis anddetailed notes.

Download or read book Wasps and Other Plays written by Aristophanes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'No matter which way you look at us, you'll find that we're in all respects; Remarkably wasp-like in our habits, in every aspect of our lives.' Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, an exuberant form of festival drama which flourished in Athens during the fifth century BCE. One of the most original playwrights in the entire Western tradition, his comedies are remarkable for their brilliant combination of fantasy and satire, their constantly inventive manipulation of language, and their use of absurd characters and plots to expose his society's institutions and values to the bracing challenge of laughter. This is the third and final volume of a new verse translation of the complete plays of Aristophanes. It contains four of his most overtly political plays: Acharnians, in which an Athenian farmer rebels against the city's war policies; Knights, a biting satire of populist demagogues; Wasps, whose main theme is the Athenian system of lawcourts; and Peace, in which escape from war is symbolized in images of rustic fertility and sensuality. The translation combines historical accuracy with a sensitive attempt to capture the rich dramatic and literary qualities of Aristophanic comedy. Each play is presented with a thought-provoking introduction and extensive editorial notes to accompany the vivid translations, balancing performability with faithfulness to the original.