Frogs and Other Plays

355 Pages·2008·1.25 MB·English

by  Aristophanes

PENGUIN CLASSICS
FROGS AND OTHER PLAYS
ARISTOPHANES was born, probably in Athens, c. 447–445 BC and died
between 386 and 380 BC. Not much is known about his life, although
there is a sympathetic portrait of him in Plato’s Symposium. Early in his
career, during the 420s, he was prosecuted for attacks on the prominent
politician Cleon, but later, in 405, he was awarded public honours for
promoting Athenian unity in Frogs. Aristophanes wrote forty plays in all.
Of these the eleven surviving plays are Acharnians (425), Knights (424),
Clouds (423), Wasps (422), Peace (421), Birds (414), Lysistrata (411),
Women at the Thesmophoria (411), Frogs (405), Assemblywomen (c. 392)
and Wealth (388).
DAVID BARRETT (1914–98) was born in London where he attended the City
of London School, having already learnt Greek by the age of ten. He
studied Classics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and then worked at the
British Museum Library where he developed a particular interest in the
Finnish collection. After the Second World War he became a lecturer in
English at Helsinki University. Over the years he translated many classic
Finnish texts and was later made a Knight, first class, of the Order of the
White Rose of Finland. On his return to England in 1965 he joined the
staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He was quite well versed in over
thirty languages, some of them little known, and at the Department of
Oriental Books he specialized in Georgian and Armenian books and
manuscripts. As well as the plays in the present volume David Barrett’s
translations of The Birds and The Assemblywomen are also published by
Penguin Classics.
SHOMIT DUTTA was educated at the Royal Grammar School, High
Wycombe, University College, Oxford, King’s College, London, and Lady
Margaret Hall, Oxford. He has taught classics at various schools and
universities. Besides working as a freelance arts reviewer, he has
published a translation of Sophocles’ Ajax and a volume of Greek
tragedy for Penguin Classics.
ARISTOPHANES
Frogs and Other Plays
Translated by DAVID BARRETT
Revised Translation with an Introduction
and Notes by SHOMIT DUTTA
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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This translation first published by Penguin Books 1964
Revised translation with new Introduction and Notes published in Penguin Classics 2007
3
Copyright © David Barrett, 1964
Revised translation, Introduction and Notes copyright © Shomit Dutta, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
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purchaser
ISBN: 9781101488942
Contents
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Revised Translations
Preface to Wasps
Wasps
Preface to Women at the Thesmophoria
Women at the Thesmophoria
Preface to Frogs
Frogs
Notes
Introduction
The plays of Aristophanes, the oldest surviving genre of comedy in
Western literature, still have much to tell us. As recently as 2003, a
thousand one-off performances of Lysistrata – the play in which the
women of Greece mount a sex-strike to bring about peace – were staged
across the world (including one in every US state) as a protest against
the invasion of Iraq.
Aristophanic comedy’s enduring relevance in spite of its antiquity is
just one way in which it may be seen as simultaneously old and new.
The tension between old and new is itself a prominent theme in several
plays; none more so than Frogs, where the comic hero Dionysus is asked,
in his capacity as the god of theatre, to judge a contest between the old-
fashioned Aeschylus and the avant-garde Euripides. But while Frogs
appears to condemn Euripides as a debaser of tragic convention, we
should not infer from this that Aristophanes was an unequivocal
conservative. The same Euripides is portrayed as the tirelessly innovative
hero of Women at the Thesmophoria.1 Aristophanes is also at pains to
emphasize his own innovativeness as a dramatist. The Chorus of Wasps,
speaking on the poet’s behalf, openly berates the audience’s
conservatism in failing to appreciate his previous, highly original and
unconventional play Clouds.
Even Aristophanes’ method of constructing his plays reflects a
preoccupation with the old and the new. As a poet and dramatist he
borrows, plunders and parodies from earlier writers remorselessly and
yet, as his recycling of Euripidean tragedy in Women shows, he
transforms what he appropriates into something utterly new. For
Aristophanes, as for T. S. Eliot, tradition and novelty (or originality) are
not in conflict but rather complementary elements of artistic creation;
this is evident in his implicit attempt in Frogs to incorporate the once-
modern Euripides into an evolving tragic canon.
It is often said that classic works are both of their time and timeless.
This is true of Aristophanic comedy. The plays are highly topical and
firmly located in contemporary Athens, but in creating their own
autonomous blend of fact and fiction they attain universal scope.
Aristophanes is also the earliest canonical writer to use comedy
systematically to examine and contest core cultural values – artistic,
social, religious, political and philosophical – of the society to which he
belonged.
Critical judgement of Aristophanes’ writing crosses the whole spectrum.
Many have hailed him as an artist of the highest order, some damned
him with faint praise, others condemned him unequivocally. One reason
for such a mixed reception is Aristophanic comedy’s seemingly
contradictory characteristics: ceaselessly innovative and irrepressible yet
rooted in tradition and generic convention; unashamedly highbrow and
yet inordinately fond of slapstick and vulgarity. Still, critical differences
notwithstanding, most scholars across the ages agree on two things.
First, Aristophanes has few rivals for sheer ingenuity. Secondly, he is one
of the greatest exemplars of the grace, charm and scope of Attic Greek –
the dialect of fifth-and fourth-century Athens in which its drama,
history, philosophy and oratory were composed. Hopefully, the former
history, philosophy and oratory were composed. Hopefully, the former
of these qualities and something of the latter come across in these
revised translations of three of his finest plays.
Today we may read Aristophanes simply for entertainment. Over and
above this, however, there have been three main approaches to his
work. The first is to treat Aristophanic texts as documents for
understanding the cultural life of fifth-century Athens. This idea can be
traced back to Plato who, when asked by the tyrant Dionysius of
Syracuse to explain the Athenians’ system of governance, responded by
sending him the complete works of Aristophanes. The second is to regard
Aristophanes as a comic writer. From such a perspective his work may be
studied in its own context, compared with other comic literature, or
considered in terms of its influence on later forms of comedy. The third
is to see Aristophanes as a comic dramatist. Aristophanes may well have
intended his work to be read (the fact that we have the second,
unperformed version of Clouds, and evidence in the plays themselves,
such as Dionysus’ recollection of perusing a play of Euripides in Frogs
52–3, suggest that play texts existed in Aristophanes’ day), but it
primarily was through spectacular one-off performances in dramatic
festivals that his plays made their impact on the culture of fifth-century
Athens.
Performance radically enhances, or alters, our understanding of any
dramatic text. With Aristophanes the gap between the texts and their
realization as performances is especially wide. The aspects of
performance about which we know very little include delivery, stage
action and theatrical effects. We do know from vase-paintings depicting
theatrical scenes that various kinds of scenery and props were used in