Frogs and Other Plays

Aristophanes, Shomit Dutta, Shomit Dutta , David Barrett

$22.99

Paperback

In stock
Ready to ship

QTY:

English

Penguin
30 July 2007

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Plays & playscripts; Penguin Black Classics

Revised edition

The master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In The Frogs, written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to the Underworld to bring back a poet who can help Athens in its darkest hour, and stages a great debate to help him decide between the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus and the brilliant modernity of Euripides. The clash of generations and values is also the object of Aristophanes' satire in The Wasps, in which an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows and end up in court. And in The Poet and the Women, Euripides, accused of misogyny, persuades a relative to infiltrate an all-women festival to find out whether revenge is being plotted against him.

By: Aristophanes
Introduction by: Shomit Dutta
Revised by: Shomit Dutta
Translated by: David Barrett
Imprint: Penguin
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 17mm
Weight: 213g
ISBN: 9780140449693
ISBN 10: 0140449698
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 30 July 2007
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Aristophanes was born, probably in Athens, c. 449 BC and died between 386 and 380 BC. Little is known about his life, but there is a portrait of him in Plato's Symposium. He was twice threatened with prosecution in the 420s for his outspoken attacks on the prominent politician Cleon, but in 405 he was publicly honored and crowned for promoting Athenian civic unity in The Frogs. Aristophanes had his first comedy produced when he was about twenty-one, and wrote forty plays in all. The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes are published in the Penguin Classics series as The Birds and Other Plays, Lysistrata and Other Plays, and The Wasps/The Poet and the Women/The Frogs. Translated by David Barrett Revised Translation with an Introduction and Notes by Shomit Dutta