Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC-AD 2007: Peace, Birds and Frogs

by Edith Hall

Overview

This book traces the international performance history of Aristophanic comedy, and its implication in aesthetic and political controversies, from 421 BC to AD 2007. It includes Brechtian experiments in East Berlin, and musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan to Stephen Sondheim.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367602222
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Pages:	410
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.62(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Introduction: Aristophanic Laughter across the Centuries Part I: Precedents 1. The Ups and Downs of Aristophanic Travel 2. Aristophanes in Early Modern England 3. The English-Speaking Aristophanes, 1650–1914 Part II: Excursus: Publication as Performance 4. Publication as Intervention: Aristophanes in 1659 5. Revolutionary Aristophanes? 6. Aristophanes’ Wealth and Dalpatram’s Part III: Revival to Repertoire 7. Aristophanes Revitalized! Music and Spectacle on the Academic Stage 8. From Scandal to Success Story: Aristophanes’ Birds as Staged by Karolos Koun 9. The Use of Masks in Koun’s Stage Interpretations of Birds 10. ‘Aristophanes is Back!’ Peter Hacks’s Adaptation of Peace 11. Sondheim Floats Frogs Part IV: Close Encounters 12. Freeing Aristophanes in South Africa: From High Culture to Contemporary Satire 13. Aristophanes’ Peace on the Twentieth-Century French Stage: From Political Statement to Artistic Failure 14. Poetry and Politics, Advice and Abuse: The Aristophanic Chorus on the Italian Stage 15. A Poet without ‘Gravity’: Aristophanes on the Italian Stage 16. A Version of the Birds in two Productions 17. Translating/Transposing Aristophanes 18. Aristophanes in Translation before 1920

Editorial Reviews

This book is full of wonders: an eighteenth-century musical comedy based on Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris, a best-selling nineteenth-century translation of Plutus into Gujarati and the news that with just a little tweaking, the frogs chorus from Ranae can be sung to the tune of Cavanaugh and Barris 1928 hit 'Mississippi Mud'. The conference at Oxford in 2004 that led to this publication of papers must have been great fun. The book retains much of the flavor of that original venue.[...]... a valuable collection of essays...'

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2008 - Lee T. Pearcy