Aristophanes
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Aristophanes | |
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Birthplace | Athens |
Known for | Playwright and director of Old Comedy |
Aristophanes
Bibliography
See his plays (ed. by M. Hadas, 1962); studies by G. Murray (1933, repr. 1964), C. Whitman (1964), K. J. Dover (1972), and V. Ehrenberg (new ed. 1974).
Aristophanes
Born circa 445 B.C.; died circa 385 B.C. Ancient Greek playwright; the “father of comedy.”
Biographical information about Aristophanes is very meager. Of the 44 comedies attributed to him, only 11 have survived in their complete forms. They are as follows: Acharnians (425), Knights (424), Clouds (423), Wasps (422), Peace (421), Birds (414), Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata (411), Frogs (405), Ecclesiazusae (392), and Plutus (388). Only about 900 small fragments are left of the other plays.
Aristophanes’ comedies contained a criticism of the war policy, of the worsening social inequality, and of the ideological tendencies that were undermining the traditional foundations of Athenian democracy. It was characteristic for Aristophanes to utilize individual traits of specific historical persons who were his contemporaries (the tanner Cleon and the philosopher Socrates).
The scourging, satirical boldness of Aristophanes’ comedies was highly valued during the Renaissance by Erasmus of Rotterdam and F. Rabelais; in the 18th century by H. Fielding; in the 19th century by H. Heine, V. G. Belinskii, N. V. Gogol, A. I. Herzen, and N. G. Chernyshevskii; and in Soviet criticism by A. V. Lunacharskii. J. Racine’s The Litigants is an adaptation of Wasps; there is a reworking of Birds by J. W. Goethe and of Peace by L. Feuchtwanger (1917). Lysistrata was staged in the musical studio of the Moscow Art Theater (1923) as well as in the S. E. Radlov Theater (1924).
WORKS
Aristophane, vols. 1–5. Text established and translated by V. Coulon and H. Van Daele. Paris, 1949–54.In Russian translation:
Komedii, vols. 1–2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1934.
Ibid., vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1954.
REFERENCES
Sobolevskii, S. I. Aristofan i ego vremia. Moscow, 1957.Golovnia, V. V. Aristofan. Moscow, 1955.
Iarkho, V. Aristofan. Moscow, 1954.
Aristofan: Sb. statei. [Moscow,] 1956. (In honor of the 2,400th anniversary of his birth.)