Flying to Heaven to demand an end to war, building Cloudcuckooland in the sky, descending to Hades to retrieve a dead tragedian - such were the cosmic missions on which Aristophanes, the father of comedy, sent his heroes of the classical Athenian stage. The wit, intellectual bravura, political clout and sheer imaginative power of Aristophanes' quest dramas have profoundly influenced humorous literature and satire, but this volume, which originated at an international conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University in 2004, is the first interdisciplinary study of their seminal contribution to the evolution of comic performance. Interdisciplinary essays by specialists in Classics, Theatre, and Modern Literatures trace the international performance history of Aristophanic comedy, and its implication in aesthetic and political controversies, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The story encompasses Jonson's satire, Cromwell's Ireland, German classicism, British Imperial India, censorship scandals in France, Greece and South Africa, Brechtian experiments in East Berlin, and musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan to Stephen Sondheim.

Excerpt from The Frogs of Aristophanes, Adapted for Performance by the Oxford University Dramatic Society, 1892: With an English Version Partly Adapted From That of J. Hookham Frere and Partly Written for the Occasion The Frogs appeared late in the poet's career, in the year 405 b.c. Aristophanes was indeed only thirty-nine, but he had lived through a great deal He could hardly remember a time when Athens had not Keen struggling in the hopeless Peloponnesian war, spending vast sums and many lives, losing her dependencies one by one, and earning the jealousy and hatred of half the Grecian world. Like all his party, the poet had never been in sympathy with the war, and he had welcomed at last, in 421, that truce whose expediency he had so often preached in the Theatre. Then came the Sicilian expedition, the offspring of a new ambi tion for foreign dominion, which was more universal than the old antagonism to Sparta had been, and appealed to most elements in the Athenian State: therefore when the terrible crash came, all parties, and among them that of Aristophanes, felt equally the national character of the calamity which reduced Athens at one stroke from imperial power to a struggle against overwhelming odds for dear existence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In considering the practice and theory of translating Classical Greek plays into English from a theatrical perspective, Found in Translation, first published in 2006, also addresses the wider issues of transferring any piece of theatre from a source into a target language. The history of translating classical tragedy and comedy, here fully investigated, demonstrates how through the ages translators have, wittingly or unwittingly, appropriated Greek plays and made them reflect socio-political concerns of their own era. Chapters are devoted to topics including verse and prose, mask and non-verbal language, stage directions and subtext and translating the comic. Among the plays discussed as 'case studies' are Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides' Medea and Alcestis. The book concludes with a consideration of the boundaries between 'translation' and 'adaptation', followed by an appendix of every translation of Greek tragedy and comedy into English from the 1550s to the present day.

A bibliography of English translations, from the establishment of Caxton's printing press in 1476 to the early 20th century, of Ancient Greek texts to 200 A.D.

Volumes for 1898-1968 include a directory of publishers.