Wasps, Lysistrata, Frogs, the Sexual Congress (Aristophanes) (v. 2) [Hardcover]

Aristophanes (Author), Campell McGrath (Editor), X. L. Kennedy (Editor), R. H. Dillard (Author)

Book Description

Series: Aristophanes | Publication Date: June 1999

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

About the Translators Alfred Corn's seventh book of poems, entitled Present, appeared in 1997, along with his novel Part of His Story and a study of prosody The Poem's Heartbeat. He has published six earlier volumes of poetry and a collection of critical essays entitled The Metamorphoses of Metaphor. Fellowships and prizes awarded for his poetry have come from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. He has taught at the City University of New York, Yale, the University of Cincinnati, U.C.L.A, Ohio State, and the University of Tulsa. At present he teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The Nation, he also writes art criticism for Art in America and ARTnews magazines. He lives in New York City. R. H. W. Dillard has published five volumes of original poetry (most recently Just Here, Just Now), two novels (most recently The First Man on the Sun), a book of short fiction entitled Omniphobia, and four books of criticism (most recently Understanding George Garrett), in addition to numerous critical articles and a translation of Cistellaria (or The Little Box), by the Roman comic playwright Plautus. His honors include a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a DuPont Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and an O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. A graduate of Roanoke College, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. Since 1964 R. H. W. Dillard has taught at Hollins College, where he is currently Professor of English. X. J. Kennedy has published thirteen collections of original poetry and poetry in translation (including Dark Horses: New Poems), as well as more than a dozen books of verse for children (including Uncle Switch), and is editor, or coeditor, of several influential college textbooks on literature and writing (including The Bedford Guide for College Writers). He has studied at the University of Michigan, the Ecole Superieure des professeurs de franandccedil;ais andagrave; l'andeacute;tranger, Sorbonne, at Columbia University, and at Seton Hall University. Before turning freelance in 1977, X. J. Kennedy taught at the Tufts University, Leeds University, University of California at Irvine, Wellesley College, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Michigan. Widely recognized for his work, he is the recipient of the Michael Braude award for light verse of the Amercian Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Los Angeles Times book prize for poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, an NEA grant, the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets, and the Bess Hokin prize from Poetry magazine. Campbell McGrath has published three collections of poetry: Capitalism, American Noise, and Spring Comes to Chicago. A fourth, Road Atlas, is forthcoming, and his play, The Autobiography of Edvard Munch, premiered in 1984. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Ohio Review, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He has won the Academy of American Poets Prize (three times), an Illinois Arts Council Literary Advancement Grant, the Pushcart Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. He has taught at Columbia University, The University of Chicago, and, since 1993, at Florida International University. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (June 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812234839
• ISBN-13: 978-0812234831
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,907,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #52 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > Comedy

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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ribald and Uproarious, April 21, 2004

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Frank T. Klus (Phoenix, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Aristophanes, 2: Wasps, Lysistrata, Frogs, The Sexual Congress (Penn Greek Drama Series) (v. 2) (Paperback)

Aristophanes was a ribald playwright whose raucous plays were brilliantly brought to life by Alfred Corn, RHW Dillard, XJ Kennedy, and Campbell McGrath. In the first play of the series of four plays, Wasps, satirizes the jury-for-pay system, prevalent in Athens during the war with Sparta. Athens was populated with older men, veterans of the wars with Persia, and were particularly noted for the severity of their judgments. In the play, Philocleon is being kept prisoner in his own home by his son, Bdelycleon, in an attempt to prevent the father from going to the courthouse to pronounce sentence on a criminal before even hearing the evidence. Bdelycleon uses a clever argument to convince his father to stay home and serve as judge and jury over household matters. His first case was trying the pet dog for stealing food and not sharing it with the cat.

Lysistrata is a hilarious play about Athenian women who team up with the women of Sparta and Thebes to force the men to make peace. Written during the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes, like his play, Peace, takes a strong anti-war stance (...) .

In Frogs, Aristophanes hits upon the theme of a lack of good playwrights in Athens. Written after the death of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, the hero of the comedy, Dionysus (god of arts, among other things) wants to bring back Euripides from Hades. He pretends to be Hercules (who had gone to Hades to capture Cerberus, the guard dog of Hades) and runs into all kinds of trouble. He eventually referees a crazy debate between Euripides and Aescylus, to determine who the best playwright is.

Finally, in The Sexual Congress, we have an uproarious comedy about the women of Athens disguising themselves as men and stocking the General Assembly. Praxagora, as the leader of the women, proposes that the affairs of the city be turned over to the women. The women won the day and instituted a utopian society not to different from Plato's Republic, but this one went way overboard. Written after the war with Sparta, Athens was beset with corruption and low morale at the time.

The four plays in Aristophanes, 2 span the gamut from Old Comedy to New Comedy. The former was characterized by vulgar and slapstick humor with a Chorus used to interact with the audience. As comedy evolved the Chorus played less a role and there was a softening of the ribald humor so characteristic of Old Comedy.

To make the plays more readable and understandable without losing any of the humor of the plays the translators often made references to Twentieth Century phrases instead of the original Greek phrases. This might be annoying to the scholar but makes these plays eminently enjoyable to the general reader.