The Birds And Other Plays

Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, the exuberant, satirical form of festival drama which flourished during the heyday of classical Athenian culture in the fifth century BC. His plays are characterized by extraordinary combinations of fantasy and satire,sophistication and vulgarity, formality and freedom. Birds is an escapist fantasy in which two dissatisfied Athenians, in defiance of men and gods, bring about a city of birds, the eponymous Cloudcuckooland. In Lysistrata the heroine of the play organizes a sex-strike and the wives of Athens occupythe Akropolis in an attempt to restore peace to the city. The main source of comedy in the Assembly-Women is a similar usurpation of male power as the women attempt to reform Athenian society along utopian-communist lines. Finally, Wealth is Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, in which Ploutos, thegod of wealth is cured of his blindness and the remarkable social consequences of his new discrimination are exemplified. This is the first complete verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies to appear for more than twenty-five years and makes freshly available one of the most remarkable comic playwrights in the entire Western tradition, complete with an illuminating introduction including play by play analysis anddetailed notes.

Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Each edition has been optimized for maximum readability, using our patent-pending conversion technology. We are partnering with leading publishers around the globe to create accessible editions of their titles. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to read - today. To find more books in your format visit www.readhowyouwant.com

Books for All Kinds of Readers ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Each edition has been optimized for maximum readability, using our patent-pending conversion technology. We are partnering with leading publishers around the globe to create accessible editions of their titles. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers' new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to readtoday.

This is a book of five plays by Josef Topol translated into English, only two of which have been produced in the USA. Josef Topol and Vaclav Havel are considered the best Czech living playwrights. The five plays chosen for this volume are representative of Topols chamber plays, dealing with such universal themes as youth, love and parting, life and death in language that is very contemporary and often incredibly poetic. The title of the book The Voices of Birds was chosen because it is the last play Josef Topol has written and indicates that the playwrights newer works are included.

The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In THE BIRDS, two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. THE KNIGHTS is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while THE ASSEMBLY WOMEN deals with the battle of the sexes as the women of Athens infiltrate the all-male Assembly in disguise. The lengthy conflict with Sparta is the subject of PEACE, inspired by the hope of a settlement in 421 BC, and WEALTH reflects on the economic catastrophe that hit Athens after the war.

Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Each edition has been optimized for maximum readability, using our patent-pending conversion technology. We are partnering with leading publishers around the globe to create accessible editions of their titles. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to read - today. To find more books in your format visit www.readhowyouwant.com

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.