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The Birds is a comic play by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. It garnered awards in 141 BC when it was first performed, and continues to be critically received today. A middle-aged Athenian convinces the world's birds to build a new city between the heavens and the earth. This position fortuitously allows them to intercept all communication of gods and men. The Athenian is transformed into a bird-like figure and with the help of his winged friends - and others - he replaces Zeus as the master of heaven and earth.
Two movie moguls abandon an increasingly vain and shallow society, making their way into the desert to live among the birds. Seeking the freedom and tranquility that come with bird-living, they must make a case for why they deserve an avian transformation, but all they have to offer are the pieces of civilization they’ve tried to leave behind. THE BIRDS begs the question: Can human beings truly go against their nature? Originally performed in 414 B.C. and written chockablock full of pop culture references of the time, Reno and Weissman have dusted off Aristophanes’ Attic Comedy and provided opportunities for theatremakers to tailor the play to their particular place and time. ARISTOPHANES’ THE BIRDS is a hilarious examination of humanity’s desperate need for control, privilege, and conspicuous consumption.
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Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.
A contemporary translation of one of Aristophanes' comedies with scholarly notes and introduction.
"The Birds" (414 B.C.) was Aristophanes' first Utopian play. In this instance, he has his "comedy team" leave Athens, fed up with frauds and bores of that society, in an effort to found a better society among the birds. To do so, they must first locate Epops, King of the Birds, who was once a man like themselves and who might be expected to know both sides of the problem. How they find him and what they persuade him to do is the body of the play.
A pair of Athenians unite with the birds to found a utopia in this comic masterpiece of antiquity. Aristophanes' finest work, this imaginative farce abounds in wit and vitality.
Flying to Heaven to demand an end to war, building Cloudcuckooland in the sky, descending to Hades to retrieve a dead tragedian - such were the cosmic missions on which Aristophanes, the father of comedy, sent his heroes of the classical Athenian stage. The wit, intellectual bravura, political clout and sheer imaginative power of Aristophanes' quest dramas have profoundly influenced humorous literature and satire, but this volume, which originated at an international conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University in 2004, is the first interdisciplinary study of their seminal contribution to the evolution of comic performance. Interdisciplinary essays by specialists in Classics, Theatre, and Modern Literatures trace the international performance history of Aristophanic comedy, and its implication in aesthetic and political controversies, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The story encompasses Jonson's satire, Cromwell's Ireland, German classicism, British Imperial India, censorship scandals in France, Greece and South Africa, Brechtian experiments in East Berlin, and musical theatre from Gilbert and Sullivan to Stephen Sondheim.