The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy

The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy

Author: Martin Revermann

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-06-12

Total Pages: 523

ISBN-13: 0521760283

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This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.


Performing Greek Comedy

Performing Greek Comedy

Author: Alan Hughes

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1107009308

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A new account of Greek comedy performance from its sixth-century origins to New Comedy, drawing upon fresh visual evidence.


New Comedy

New Comedy

Author: Aristophanes

Publisher: Methuen Drama

Published: 1994-03-14

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Contains: Women in power; Wealth; The malcontent; The woman from Samos.


The Art of Greek Comedy

The Art of Greek Comedy

Author: Katherine Lever

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1000579271

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Originally published in 1956, this is a critical analysis of the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander studied in the context of the history of comedy, of the allied arts, and of contemporary life. Aristophanes and Menander are deservedly the most famous writers of Greek comedy. The extant comedies of Aristophanes are notable for wit, comical action, beautiful poetry, and the dramatization of such problems as health of mind and body, sex, money, government, law, religion, education, and drama, music and poetry. Menander portrays with delicate and sympathetic understanding a world in which the seeming evils of loss and discord eventually lead to the genuine goods of discovery and concord. The art of Aristophanes is critically examined in three chapters and that of Menander in one. For centuries Dionysos had been worshipped in a spirit of ecstasy which manifested itself in song, dance and the wearing of masks and costumes, pantomime, farce, and satire. The processes by which these diverse elements were developed and fused into the complex literary form of Old Comedy are the subject of the first three chapters. Aristophanes was not only pre-eminent as a writer of Old Comedy; he also participated in the transformation of Old Comedy into Middle Comedy, a curious and interesting dramatic form which is fully treated in the seventh chapter. In the last chapter the emergence of New Comedy is traced and the art of Menander criticized. The book ends with a brief indication of the various forms in which the spirit of Greek comedy had survived to the present day.


Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly

Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly

Author: Aristophanes

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 1631496336

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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.


The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy

Author: Michael Fontaine

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-04

Total Pages: 913

ISBN-13: 0199743541

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The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From its birth in Greece to its end in Rome, from its Hellenistic to its Imperial receptions, no topic is neglected. The 41 essays offer cutting-edge guides through comedy's immense terrain.


Greek Comedy

Greek Comedy

Author: GILBERT. NORWOOD

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-27

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9781032218045

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Originally published in 1931, this book surveys the origin and development of Greek Comic Drama, with full discussion not only of Aristophanes and Menander but also of other important playwrights whose work had usually received scant notice because only fragments of it have survived. The important papyrus-finds of the previous forty years have been expounded and used. The final chapter is an introduction to comic metre and rhythm.


Greek Comedy and Ideology

Greek Comedy and Ideology

Author: David Konstan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1995-04-06

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0195357698

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In comedy, happy endings resolve real-world conflicts. These conflicts, in turn, leave their mark on the texts in the form of gaps in plot and inconsistencies of characterization. Greek Comedy and Ideology analyzes how the structure of ancient Greek comedy betrays and responds to cultural tensions in the society of the classical city-state. It explores the utopian vision of Aristophanes' comedies--for example, an all-powerful city inhabited by birds, or a world of limitless wealth presided over by the god of wealth himself--as interventions in the political issues of his time. David Konstan goes on to examine the more private world of Menandrean comedy (including two adaptations of Menander by the Roman playwright Terence), in which problems of social status, citizenship, and gender are negotiated by means of elaborately contrived plots. In conclusion, Konstan looks at an imitation of ancient comedy by Moliére, and the way in which the ideology of emerging capitalism transforms the premises of the classical genre.


The Greek Sense of Theatre

The Greek Sense of Theatre

Author: J Michael Walton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-22

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1317513967

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In this updated and extended edition of The Greek Sense of Theatre, scholar and practitioner J.Michael Walton revises and expands his visual approach to the theatre of classical Athens. From the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to the old and new comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, he argues that while Greek drama is seen now as a performance-based rather than a strictly literary medium, more attention should still be paid to the nature of stage image and masked acting as part of this conception.


Paracomedy

Paracomedy

Author: Craig Jendza

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0190090944

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Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Drama is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that paracomedy was a prominent feature of Greek tragedy. Blending a variety of interdisciplinary approaches including traditional philology, literary criticism, genre theory, and performance studies, this book offers innovative close readings and incisive interpretations of individual plays. Jendza presents paracomedy as a multivalent authorial strategy: some instances impart a sense of ugliness or discomfort; others provide a sense of light-heartedness or humor. While this work traces the development of paracomedy over several hundred years, it focuses on a handful of Euripidean tragedies at the end of the fifth century BCE. Jendza argues that Euripides was participating in a rivalry with the comedian Aristophanes and often used paracomedy to demonstrate the poetic supremacy of tragedy; indeed, some of Euripides' most complex uses of paracomedy attempt to re-appropriate Aristophanes' mockery of his theatrical techniques. Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy theorizes a new, ground-breaking relationship between Greek tragedy and comedy that not only redefines our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but also reveals a dynamic theatrical world filled with mutual cross-generic influence.