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81-652: Penelope Skinner is a British playwright . Born in 1978, she came to prominence after her play Fucked was first produced in 2008 at the Old Red Lion Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival to critical acclaim and has had other plays staged in London including at the Bush Theatre , National Theatre and Royal Court Theatre . Skinner's play Eigengrau , staged at the Bush Theatre in 2010,

162-482: A murder mystery play which is the longest-running West End show , it has by far the longest run of any play in the world, with its 29,500th performance having taken place as of February 2024. Contemporary playwrights in the United States are affected by recent declines in theatre attendance. No longer the only outlet for serious drama or entertaining comedies, theatrical productions must use ticket sales as

243-474: A boy when the events in The Symposium are supposed to have occurred and it is possible that his Aristophanes is in fact based on a reading of the plays. For example, conversation among the guests turns to the subject of Love and Aristophanes explains his notion of it in terms of an amusing allegory, a device he often uses in his plays. He is represented as suffering an attack of hiccups and this might be

324-509: A clever and discerning audience, yet he also declared that "other times" would judge the audience according to its reception of his plays. He sometimes boasts of his originality as a dramatist yet his plays consistently espouse opposition to radical new influences in Athenian society. He caricatured leading figures in the arts (notably Euripides , whose influence on his own work however he once grudgingly acknowledged), in politics (especially

405-442: A dramatist and the plays contain few clear and unambiguous clues about his personal beliefs or his private life. He was a comic poet in an age when it was conventional for a poet to assume the role of teacher ( didaskalos ), and though this specifically referred to his training of the chorus in rehearsal, it also covered his relationship with the audience as a commentator on significant issues. Aristophanes claimed to be writing for

486-512: A form of playwright. Outside of the Western world there is Indian classical drama , with one of the oldest known playwrights being Śudraka , whose attributed plays can be dated to the second century BC. The Nāṭya Shāstra , a text on the performing arts from between 500BC-500AD, categorizes playwrights as being among the members of a theatre company, although playwrights were generally the highest in social status, with some being kings. In

567-615: A humorous reference to the crude physical jokes in his plays. He tells the other guests that he is quite happy to be thought amusing but he is wary of appearing ridiculous. This fear of being ridiculed is consistent with his declaration in The Knights that he embarked on the career of comic playwright warily after witnessing the public contempt and ridicule that other dramatists had incurred. Aristophanes survived The Peloponnesian War , two oligarchic revolutions and two democratic restorations; this has been interpreted as evidence that he

648-431: A parabasis have been defined and named by scholars but it is probable that Aristophanes' own understanding was less formal. The selection of elements can vary from play to play and it varies considerably within plays between first and second parabasis. The early plays ( The Acharnians to The Birds ) are fairly uniform in their approach however and the following elements of a parabasis can be found within them. The Wasps

729-532: A permanent place in proletarian theatre and yet conservative, Prussian intellectuals interpreted Aristophanes as a satirical opponent of social reform. The avant-gardist stage-director Karolos Koun directed a version of The Birds under the Acropolis in 1959 that established a trend in modern Greek history of breaking taboos through the voice of Aristophanes. The plays have a significance that goes beyond their artistic function, as historical documents that open

810-654: A playwright, winning awards for his play The Phoenix at both the New York International Fringe Festival in 1999 and the Route 66 American Playwriting Competition in 2000. Today, theatre companies have new play development programs meant to develop new American voices in playwriting. Many regional theatres have hired dramaturges and literary managers in an effort to showcase various festivals for new work, or bring in playwrights for residencies. Funding through national organizations, such as

891-525: A source of income, which has caused many of them to reduce the number of new works being produced. For example, Playwrights Horizons produced only six plays in the 2002–03 seasons, compared with thirty-one in 1973–74. Playwrights commonly encounter difficulties in getting their shows produced and often cannot earn a living through their plays alone, leading them to take up other jobs to supplement their incomes. Many playwrights are also film makers . For instance, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock began his career as

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972-562: A stricter interpretation of Aristotle, as this long-lost work came to light in the late 15th century. The neoclassical ideal, which was to reach its apogee in France during the 17th century, dwelled upon the unities , of action, place, and time. This meant that the playwright had to construct the play so that its "virtual" time would not exceed 24 hours, that it would be restricted to a single setting, and that there would be no subplots. Other terms, such as verisimilitude and decorum, circumscribed

1053-455: A typical anapestic gallop, slows down to consider the revered poets Hesiod and Homer, then gallops off again to its comic conclusion at the expense of the unfortunate Pantocles. Such subtle variations in rhythm are common in the plays, allowing for serious points to be made while still whetting the audience's appetite for the next joke. Though to myself I often seem A bright chap and not awkward, None comes close to Amynias, Son of Sellos of

1134-445: A useful source of biographical information about Aristophanes, but its reliability is open to doubt. It purports to be a record of conversations at a dinner party at which both Aristophanes and Socrates are guests, held some seven years after the performance of The Clouds , the play in which Socrates was cruelly caricatured. One of the guests, Alcibiades , even quotes from the play when teasing Socrates over his appearance and yet there

1215-506: A warmer and more vivid form of comedy than he could derive from readings of Terence and Plautus) adapted a short play Die Vögel from The Birds for performance in Weimar. Aristophanes has appealed to both conservatives and radicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries— Anatoly Lunacharsky , first Commissar of Enlightenment for the USSR in 1917, declared that the ancient dramatist would have

1296-632: Is Hans Sachs (1494–1576) who wrote 198 dramatic works. In England, The Second Shepherds' Play of the Wakefield Cycle is the best known early farce. However, farce did not appear independently in England until the 16th century with the work of John Heywood (1497–1580). Playwright William Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Most playwrights of

1377-412: Is an address to the audience by the chorus or chorus leader while the actors leave or have left the stage. In this role, the chorus is sometimes out of character, as the author's voice, and sometimes in character, although these capacities are often difficult to distinguish. Generally the parabasis occurs somewhere in the middle of a play and often there is a second parabasis towards the end. The elements of

1458-526: Is composed in eupolidean meter rather than in anapests and the second parabasis includes a kommation but it lacks strophe, antistrophe and antepirrhema ( The Clouds lines 1113–1130). The second parabasis in The Acharnians lines 971–999 can be considered a hybrid parabasis/song (i.e. the declaimed sections are merely continuations of the strophe and antistrophe) and, unlike the typical parabasis, it seems to comment on actions that occur on stage during

1539-443: Is from Middle English pleye , from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsperson or builder (as in a wheelwright or cartwright ). The words combine to indicate a person who has "wrought" words, themes, and other elements into a dramatic form—a play. (The homophone with "write" is coincidental.) The first recorded use of

1620-457: Is no indication of any ill-feeling between Socrates and Aristophanes. Plato's Aristophanes is in fact a genial character and this has been interpreted as evidence of Plato's own friendship with him (their friendship appears to be corroborated by an epitaph for Aristophanes, reputedly written by Plato, in which the playwright's soul is compared to an eternal shrine for the Graces ). Plato was only

1701-410: Is speaking to the "art" of flattery, and evidence points towards the fact that many of Aristophanes' plays were actually created with the intent to attack the view of rhetoric. The most noticeable attack can be seen in his play Banqueters, in which two brothers from different educational backgrounds argue over which education is better. One brother comes from a background of "old-fashioned" education while

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1782-542: Is still useful to playwrights today is the " French scene ", which is a scene in a play where the beginning and end are marked by a change in the makeup of the group of characters onstage rather than by the lights going up or down or the set being changed. Notable playwrights: Greek theater was alive and flourishing on the island of Crete. During the Cretan Renaissance two notable Greek playwrights Georgios Chortatzis and Vitsentzos Kornaros were present in

1863-483: Is the original." Nevertheless, there are competent, respectable translations in many languages. Despite the fact that translations of Aristophanes may not be perfect, "the reception of Aristophanes has gained extraordinary momentum as a topic of academic interest in the last few years." Most of these are traditionally referred to by abbreviations of their Latin titles; Latin remains a customary language of scholarship in classical studies. The standard modern edition of

1944-462: Is thought to offer the best example of a conventional approach and the elements of a parabasis can be identified and located in that play as follows. Textual corruption is probably the reason for the absence of the antistrophe in the second parabasis. However, there are several variations from the ideal even within the early plays. For example, the parabasis proper in The Clouds (lines 518–562)

2025-455: Is useful to comprehend his plays in their historical and cultural context. The themes of Old Comedy included: The structural elements of a typical Aristophanic plot can be summarized as follows: The rules of competition did not prevent a playwright arranging and adjusting these elements to suit his particular needs. In The Acharnians and Peace , for example, there is no formal agon whereas in The Clouds there are two agons. The parabasis

2106-592: The Channel 4 series Fresh Meat . In the same year, her play The Sound of Heavy Rain was produced by Paines Plough and Sheffield Theatres touring in Roundabout. In 2012. her play Fred's Diner was staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre 's pop-up stage, following which The Independent newspaper described Skinner as "Our leading young feminist writer." In 2013, Skinner co-wrote

2187-590: The Lenaia and City Dionysia , where they were judged and awarded prizes in competition with the works of other comic dramatists. An elaborate series of lotteries, designed to prevent prejudice and corruption, reduced the voting judges at the City Dionysia to just five. These judges probably reflected the mood of the audiences yet there is much uncertainty about the composition of those audiences. The theatres were certainly huge, with seating for at least 10,000 at

2268-624: The National Endowment for the Arts and the Theatre Communications Group , encouraged the partnerships of professional theatre companies and emerging playwrights. Playwrights will often have a cold reading of a script in an informal sitdown setting, which allows them to evaluate their own plays and the actors performing them. Cold reading means that the actors haven't rehearsed the work, or may be seeing it for

2349-449: The 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics , in which he analyzed the principle of action or praxis as the basis for tragedy. He then considered elements of drama: plot ( μύθος mythos ), character ( ἔθος ethos ), thought ( dianoia ), diction ( lexis ), music ( melodia ), and spectacle ( opsis ). Since the myths on which Greek tragedy were based were widely known, plot had to do with

2430-543: The 5th century it was institutionalised in competitions ( agon ) held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysos (the god of wine and fertility ). As contestants in the City Dionysia's competition (the most prestigious of the festivals to stage drama), playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. For

2511-675: The Attic dialect in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries AD. It is possible that Plato sent copies of the plays to Dionysius of Syracuse so that he might learn about Athenian life and government. Latin translations of the plays by Andreas Divus (Venice 1528) were circulated widely throughout Europe in the Renaissance and these were soon followed by translations and adaptations in modern languages. Racine , for example, drew Les Plaideurs (1668) from The Wasps . Goethe (who turned to Aristophanes for

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2592-728: The Attic dialect is couched in verse and his plays can be appreciated for their poetic qualities. For Aristophanes' contemporaries the works of Homer and Hesiod formed the cornerstones of Hellenic history and culture. Thus poetry had a moral and social significance that made it an inevitable topic of comic satire. Aristophanes was very conscious of literary fashions and traditions and his plays feature numerous references to other poets. These include not only rival comic dramatists such as Eupolis and Hermippus and predecessors such as Magnes , Crates and Cratinus , but also tragedians, notably Aeschylus , Sophocles and Euripides , all three of whom are mentioned in e.g. The Frogs . Aristophanes

2673-530: The Bigwig Clan, a man I once saw Dine with rich Leogorus. Now as poor as Antiphon, He lives on apples and pomegranates Yet he got himself appointed Ambassador to Pharsalus , Way up there in Thessaly , Home of the poor Penestes: Happy to be where everyone Is as penniless as he is! It can be argued that the most important feature of the language of the plays is imagery, particularly

2754-561: The Middle Ages, the earliest of which is The Play of the Greenwood by Adam de la Halle in 1276. It contains satirical scenes and folk material such as faeries and other supernatural occurrences. Farces also rose dramatically in popularity after the 13th century. The majority of these plays come from France and Germany and are similar in tone and form, emphasizing sex and bodily excretions. The best known playwright of farces

2835-611: The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. This period saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn . As a reaction to the decadence of Charles II era productions, sentimental comedy grew in popularity. Playwrights like Colley Cibber and Richard Steele believed that humans were inherently good but capable of being led astray. The Italian Renaissance brought about

2916-555: The Theatre of Dionysus. The day's program at the City Dionysia for example was crowded, with three tragedies and a satyr play ahead of a comedy, but it is possible that many of the poorer citizens (typically the main supporters of demagogues like Cleon) occupied the festival holiday with other pursuits. The conservative views expressed in the plays might therefore reflect the attitudes of the dominant group in an unrepresentative audience. The production process might also have influenced

2997-630: The Traverse in Edinburgh, "probes into power, resistance and men's rights" In 2023, Skinner's play "Lyonesse" opened at The Harold Pinter Theatre. Playwright The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks . William Shakespeare is amongst the most famous playwrights in literature, both in England and across the world. The word "play"

3078-512: The address. An understanding of Old Comedy conventions such as the parabasis is necessary for a proper understanding of Aristophanes' plays; on the other hand, a sensitive appreciation of the plays is necessary for a proper understanding of the conventions. The tragic dramatists Sophocles and Euripides died near the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the art of tragedy thereafter ceased to develop, yet comedy continued to evolve after

3159-420: The ancient Greeks, playwriting involved poïesis , "the act of making". This is the source of the English word poet . Despite Chinese Theatre having performers dated back to the 6th century BC with You Meng , their perspective of theatre was such that plays had no other role than "performer" or "actor", but given that the performers were also the ones who invented their performances, they could be considered

3240-404: The arrangement and selection of existing material. Character was determined by choice and by action. Tragedy is mimesis —"the imitation of an action that is serious". He developed his notion of hamartia , or tragic flaw, an error in judgment by the main character or protagonist , which provides the basis for the "conflict-driven" play. There were also a number of secular performances staged in

3321-748: The caricatures of him continued up to and even beyond his death. In the absence of clear biographical facts about Aristophanes, scholars make educated guesses based on interpretation of the language in the plays. Inscriptions and summaries or comments by Hellenistic and Byzantine scholars can also provide useful clues. We know from a combination of these sources, and especially from comments in The Knights and The Clouds , that Aristophanes' first three plays were not directed by him; they were instead directed by Callistratus and Philoneides, an arrangement that seemed to suit Aristophanes since he appears to have used these same directors in many later plays as well (Philoneides for example later directed The Frogs and he

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3402-408: The charm and grandeur of the Attic dialect made Old Comedy an example for orators to study and follow, and he considered it inferior in these respects only to the works of Homer. A revival of interest in the Attic dialect may have been responsible for the recovery and circulation of Aristophanes' plays during the fourth and fifth centuries AD, resulting in their survival today. In Aristophanes' plays,

3483-480: The controversy over The Babylonians or a subsequent controversy over The Knights . It has been inferred from statements in The Clouds and Peace that Aristophanes was prematurely bald. Aristophanes was probably victorious at least once at the City Dionysia, with Babylonians in 427, and at least three times at the Lenaia, with The Acharnians in 425, Knights in 424, and Frogs in 405. Frogs in fact won

3564-462: The defeat of Athens, and it is possible that it did so because, in Aristophanes, it had a master craftsman who lived long enough to help usher it into a new age. Indeed, according to one ancient source (Platonius, c. 9th century AD), one of Aristophanes's last plays, Aioliskon , had neither a parabasis nor any choral lyrics (making it a type of Middle Comedy), while Kolakos anticipated all

3645-465: The elements of New Comedy, including a rape and a recognition scene. Aristophanes seems to have had some appreciation of his formative role in the development of comedy, as indicated by his comment in Clouds that his audience would be judged by other times according to its reception of his plays. Clouds was awarded third (i.e. last) place after its original performance and the text that has come down to

3726-655: The first time, and usually, the technical requirements are minimal. The O'Neill Festival offers summer retreats for young playwrights to develop their work with directors and actors. Playwriting collectives like 13P and Orbiter 3 gather members together to produce, rather than develop, new works. The idea of the playwriting collective is in response to plays being stuck in the development process and never advancing to production. Aristophanes Aristophanes ( / ˌ ær ɪ ˈ s t ɒ f ə n iː z / ; Ancient Greek : Ἀριστοφάνης , pronounced [aristopʰánɛːs] ; c.  446  – c.  386 BC )

3807-572: The hardest job of all." The English name Aristophanes comes from the Ancient Greek : Ἀριστοφάνης meaning ' one who appears best ' , from ἄριστος ( áristos , lit.   ' best ' ) and φανής ( phanḗs ) from the verb φαίνω , lit.   ' to appear ' . An Athenian citizen, Aristophanes came from the deme of Kydathenaion . His father was Philippus from the Attic clan ( phyle ) of Pandionis and his mother

3888-427: The hero of his third play The Acharnians (staged at the Lenaia , where there were few or no foreign dignitaries), the poet carefully distinguishes between the polis and the real targets of his acerbic wit: ἡμῶν γὰρ ἄνδρες, κοὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω, μέμνησθε τοῦθ᾽ ὅτι οὐχὶ τὴν πόλιν λέγω, ἀλλ᾽ ἀνδράρια μοχθηρά, παρακεκομμένα... People among us, and I don't mean the polis, Remember this – I don't mean

3969-474: The intellectual fashions of the period—the structure of his plays evolves from Old Comedy until, in his last surviving play, Wealth II , it more closely resembles New Comedy . However it is uncertain whether he led or merely responded to changes in audience expectations. Aristophanes won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC with his first play The Banqueters (now lost). He won first prize there with his next play, The Babylonians (also now lost). It

4050-644: The island of Aegina . Similarly, the hero in The Acharnians complains about Cleon "dragging me into court" over "last year's play." Comments made by the Chorus referring to Aristophanes in The Clouds have been interpreted as evidence that he can hardly have been more than 18 years old when his first play The Banqueters was produced. The second parabasis in Wasps appears to indicate that he reached some kind of temporary accommodation with Cleon following either

4131-490: The latter part of the 16th century. The plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Friedrich Schiller , and other Sturm und Drang playwrights inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides to moral behavior and were part of the German romanticism movement. Aleksandr Ostrovsky was Russia's first professional playwright). Author and playwright Agatha Christie wrote The Moustrap ,

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4212-436: The life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates , although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. Aristophanes' second play, The Babylonians (now lost),

4293-425: The main reasons why Aristophanes was so against the sophists came into existence from the requirements listed by the leaders of the organization. Money was essential, which meant that roughly all of the pupils studying with the sophists came from upper-class backgrounds and excluded the rest of the polis. Aristophanes believed that education and knowledge was a public service and that anything that excluded willing minds

4374-495: The marriage of the hero Pisthetairos to Zeus 's paramour in The Birds and the "recreation" of old Athens, crowned with roses, at the end of The Knights . It is widely believed that Aristophanes condemned rhetoric on both moral and political grounds. He states, "a speaker trained in the new rhetoric may use his talents to deceive the jury and bewilder his opponents so thoroughly that the trial loses all semblance of fairness" He

4455-498: The modern age was a subsequent draft that Aristophanes intended to be read rather than acted. The circulation of his plays in manuscript extended their influence beyond the original audience, over whom in fact they seem to have had little or no practical influence: they did not affect the career of Cleon , they failed to persuade the Athenians to pursue an honourable peace with Sparta and it is not clear that they were instrumental in

4536-441: The other brother appears to be a product of the sophistic education The chorus was mainly used by Aristophanes as a defense against rhetoric and would often talk about topics such as the civic duty of those who were educated in classical teachings. In Aristophanes' opinion it was the job of those educated adults to protect the public from deception and to stand as a beacon of light for those who were more gullible than others. One of

4617-407: The period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. In England, after the interregnum , and Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, there was a move toward neoclassical dramaturgy. Between

4698-423: The plays can give us insights into the operettas. The plays are a source of famous sayings, such as "By words the mind is winged." Listed below are some of the many works influenced (more or less) by Aristophanes. Alan H. Sommerstein believes that although there are good translations of Aristophanes' comedies, none could be flawless, "for there is much truth in the paradox that the only really perfect translation

4779-429: The polis – But wicked little men of a counterfeit kind.... Aristophanes repeatedly savages Cleon in his later plays. But these satirical diatribes appear to have had no effect on Cleon's political career—a few weeks after the performance of The Knights —a play full of anti-Cleon jokes—Cleon was elected to the prestigious board of ten generals. Cleon also seems to have had no real power to limit or control Aristophanes:

4860-574: The political conservatism of the plays may reflect the views of the wealthiest section of Athenian society, on whose generosity all dramatists depended for putting on their plays. When Aristophanes' first play The Banqueters was produced, Athens was an ambitious, imperial power and the Peloponnesian War was only in its fourth year. His plays often express pride in the achievement of the older generation (the victors at Marathon ) yet they are not jingoistic, and they are staunchly opposed to

4941-432: The populist Cleon ), and in philosophy/religion (where Socrates was the most obvious target). Such caricatures seem to imply that Aristophanes was an old-fashioned conservative, yet that view of him leads to contradictions. It has been argued that Aristophanes produced plays mainly to entertain the audience and to win prestigious competitions. His plays were written for production at the great dramatic festivals of Athens,

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5022-406: The prize at the City Dionysia in 387. It appears that a second son, Philippus, was twice victorious at the Lenaia and he could have directed some of Eubulus ' comedies. A third son was called either Nicostratus or Philetaerus, and a man by the latter name appears in the catalogue of Lenaia victors with two victories, the first probably in the late 370s. Plato's The Symposium appears to be

5103-623: The province of poets. This view was held as late as the early 19th century. The term "playwright" later again lost this negative connotation. The earliest playwrights in Western literature with surviving works are the Ancient Greeks . These early plays were for annual Athenian competitions among play writers held around the 5th century BC. Such notables as Aeschylus , Sophocles , Euripides , and Aristophanes established forms still relied on by their modern counterparts. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides . The origins of Athenian tragedy remain obscure, though by

5184-455: The screenplay for the film How I Live Now . In 2015, Skinner's play "Linda", staged at London's Royal Court theatre, "raises important questions with bracing rhetorical force" Timeout. Also in 2015, her off-broadway play "The Ruins of Civilisations" was described as offering "a powerful portrait of an anguished woman fixating on the prospect of a baby as a source of affection, hope and escape" by The Guardian, In 2018, her play "Meek", staged at

5265-557: The subject matter significantly. For example, verisimilitude limits of the unities. Decorum fitted proper protocols for behavior and language on stage. In France, contained too many events and actions, thus, violating the 24-hour restriction of the unity of time. Neoclassicism never had as much traction in England, and Shakespeare 's plays are directly opposed to these models, while in Italy, improvised and bawdy commedia dell'arte and opera were more popular forms. One structural unit that

5346-478: The term "playwright" is from 1605, 73 years before the first written record of the term "dramatist". It appears to have been first used in a pejorative sense by Ben Jonson to suggest a mere tradesman fashioning works for the theatre. Jonson uses the word in his Epigram 49, which is thought to refer to John Marston or Thomas Dekker : Jonson described himself as a poet, not a playwright, since plays during that time were written in meter and so were regarded as

5427-416: The trial and execution of Socrates, whose death probably resulted from public animosity towards the philosopher's disgraced associates (such as Alcibiades ), exacerbated of course by his own intransigence during the trial. The plays, in manuscript form, have been put to some surprising uses—as indicated earlier , they were used in the study of rhetoric on the recommendation of Quintilian and by students of

5508-407: The unique distinction of a repeat performance at a subsequent festival. A son of Aristophanes, Araros, was also a comic poet and he could have been heavily involved in the production of his father's play Wealth II in 388. Araros is also thought to have been responsible for the posthumous performances of the now lost plays Aeolosicon II and Cocalus , and it is possible that the last of these won

5589-402: The use of similes, metaphors and pictorial expressions. In The Knights , for example, the ears of a character with selective hearing are represented as parasols that open and close. In The Frogs , Aeschylus is said to compose verses in the manner of a horse rolling in a sandpit. Some plays feature revelations of human perfectibility that are poetic rather than religious in character, such as

5670-570: The views expressed in the plays. Throughout most of Aristophanes' career, the Chorus was essential to a play's success and it was recruited and funded by a choregus , a wealthy citizen appointed to the task by one of the archons . A choregus could regard his personal expenditure on the Chorus as a civic duty and a public honour, but Aristophanes showed in The Knights that wealthy citizens might regard civic responsibilities as punishment imposed on them by demagogues and populists like Cleon. Thus

5751-426: The war with Sparta. The plays are particularly scathing in criticism of war profiteers, among whom populists such as Cleon figure prominently. By the time his last play was produced (around 386 BC) Athens had been defeated in war, its empire had been dismantled and it had undergone a transformation from being the political to the intellectual centre of Greece. Aristophanes was part of this transformation and he shared in

5832-426: The window on life and politics in classical Athens , in which respect they are perhaps as important as the writings of Thucydides . The artistic influence of the plays is immeasurable. They have contributed to the history of European theatre and that history in turn shapes our understanding of the plays. Thus for example the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan can give us insights into Aristophanes' plays and similarly

5913-495: Was Zenodora. His family was believed to have owned property on the island of Aegina . Little is known about Aristophanes' life, his plays being the main source of biographical information. It was conventional in Old Comedy for the chorus to speak on behalf of the author during an address called the parabasis , where some biographical facts can usually be found. These facts, however, relate almost entirely to his career as

5994-680: Was a critical and box office hit and Skinner was nominated for the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2010. Her play The Village Bike was her first play to be staged at the Royal Court Theatre where it had a sell out, twice-extended run starring Romola Garai and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins , winning her the George Devine Award and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright in 2011. In 2011, she wrote episodes for

6075-409: Was also credited, perhaps wrongly, with directing The Wasps ). Aristophanes's use of directors complicates our reliance on the plays as sources of biographical information, because apparent self-references might have been made with reference to his directors instead. Thus, for example, a statement by the chorus in The Acharnians seems to indicate that the "poet" had a close, personal association with

6156-546: Was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy . He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries. Also known as "The Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy", Aristophanes has been said to recreate

6237-403: Was denounced by Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis . It is possible that the case was argued in court, but details of the trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially The Knights , the first of many plays that he directed himself. "In my opinion," he says through that play's Chorus , "the author-director of comedies has

6318-538: Was not actively involved in politics, despite his highly political plays. He was probably appointed to the Council of Five Hundred for a year at the beginning of the fourth century, but such appointments were very common in democratic Athens . The language of Aristophanes' plays, and in Old Comedy generally, was valued by ancient commentators as a model of the Attic dialect . The orator Quintilian believed that

6399-509: Was nothing but an abomination. He concludes that all politicians that study rhetoric must have "doubtful citizenships, unspeakable morals, and too much arrogance". The plays of Aristophanes are among the defining examples of Old Comedy. Aristophanes' plays are also the only full-length Old Comedy plays that have survived from antiquity. Thus making them literally among the most defining elements, for defining Old Comedy... For this reason, an understanding of Old Comedy and Aristophanes' place in it

6480-563: Was the equal of these great tragedians in his subtle use of lyrics. He appears to have modelled his approach to language on that of Euripides in particular, so much so that the comic dramatist Cratinus labelled him a 'Euripidaristophanist' addicted to hair-splitting niceties. A full appreciation of Aristophanes' plays requires an understanding of the poetic forms he employed with virtuoso skill, and of their different rhythms and associations. There were three broad poetic forms: iambic dialogue, tetrameter verses and lyrics: The rhythm begins at

6561-491: Was usual for foreign dignitaries to attend the City Dionysia, and The Babylonians caused some embarrassment for the Athenian authorities since it depicted the cities of the Delian League as slaves grinding at a mill. Some influential citizens, notably Cleon , reviled the play as slander against the polis and possibly took legal action against the author. The details of the trial are unrecorded but, speaking through

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