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Aristophanes: Plays
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Aristophanes is in particular an interesting case. Often during the course of his plays, the audience is directly addressed by the actors. This is of course true in the parabasis, where it becomes a defining element, and ... in the prologue, where it is necessary in setting up the details of the story. However, aside remarks made to the audience continue to appear, sometimes in unexpected places -- in the middle of dramatic conflicts or battles, amidst arguments or vehement discussions, or in other scenes where the action seems to take a more serious turn. The asides then relieve the tension produced at these moments, and add to the humor and comic character of the plays.
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Even in his last period Aristophanes was an innovative force in theater. His last surviving play virtually does away with the chorus as an important character in the action. His later plays resemble modern comedies partly because the chorus does not intrude in the action. His genius helped shape later developments in comedy.
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As such, the function of metadrama in Old Comedy (Aristophanes) seems far less tied to the real action of the play, but instead to a need to substantiate and praise the playwright's own creation. By setting up instances in which a "play" of some kind is put on, the occasion then arises for the deviser of the situation to be praised and flattered. This inevitably leads, then, to the praise of Aristophanes himself, the master creator. The mock trial set up in The Wasps, for example, is a clear case of metadrama: Anticleon sets the stage for a trial at home, in order to cause the repentance of his father by tricking him into acquitting the accused. In the process of setting up the house for the trial, objects and requisite items are brought out from the house, shown to the audience as their purpose is carefully described, and then put into use. The pots, for example, are the urns into which votes are cast, and the pig-pen gate becomes the wooden bar of the court.
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Aristophanes (arr-iss-TA-fa-knees) lived in Athens at about the same time as Euripides, about 450-388 BC, but Aristophanes wrote comedies instead of tragedies. Most of Aristophanes' plays are political satire. They make fun of the politicians of Athens, sometimes in general, and sometimes mocking one specific politician. One of his plays, Lysistrata, poked fun at the generals who would not end the Peloponnesian War, and said that women could do a better job of making peace. Another play, the Frogs, was a sad commentary on the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, and on the difficulty of using art to make peace. The Wasps makes fun of the Athenian jury system.
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Aristophanes' The Frogs and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead both take as their unifying thematic element references to other previous and well-respected dramas. It is significant, of course, that although the two plays are themselves "comedies," the works on which they draw are tragedies, which are then manipulated to fit into the context of the new drama. In achieving this literary transformation, both authors make use of comic tropes such as satire and parody; they ... however, set tragic elements and themes into their own comic plots, thus completing the process of assimilation. Aristophanes' intentions in this respect seem to differ sharply from Stoppard's, however: not only does Stoppard's drama exhibit far more questioning of accepted truths, but he does not attempt to teach a moral lesson in the same way as Aristophanes. Still, there are remarkable similarities between the two works. Perhaps the most important of the tragic elements which are brought into the comedies are the existential views of death and time; these appear to varying extents in both works, as does the question of free will, which is discussed at great length both by the characters and by the dramas themselves.
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This production of Aristophanes' most controversial play began with a new translation by two University College London classics scholars. Charles Connaghan produced an accurate but punchy rendition of the dialogue, including all obscenities. John Curtis Franklin made metrical translations of all choral passages as the basis for the musical reconstruction, the principles of which are drawn from his research into ancient Greek music.
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