Aristophanes' The Birds

Aristophanes' The Birds PDF Author: Brian Reno
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 0822241668
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 61

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Book Description
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.

Aristophanes' The Birds

Aristophanes' The Birds PDF Author: Brian Reno
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 0822241668
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 61

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Birds and Frogs;

Birds and Frogs; PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781019925881
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book is a translation of Aristophanes' play 'The Frogs' by W. J. Hickie, which tells the story of the god Dionysus and his quest to find a great poet to restore the glory of Athens. The play is a satirical commentary on the state of Greek poetry at the time, and a celebration of the power of literature to effect social change. The book is a valuable contribution to the study of Greek drama, and a reminder of the importance of literature in shaping our understanding of the world around us. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Birds

The Birds PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1775418006
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 93

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Book Description
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.

The Birds

The Birds PDF Author: Gwendolyn MacEwen
Publisher: Exile Editions, Ltd.
ISBN: 9781550960655
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description


Philosophy, Poetry, and Power in Aristophanes's Birds

Philosophy, Poetry, and Power in Aristophanes's Birds PDF Author: Daniel Holmes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498590772
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Aristophanes was clearly anxious about the role of the sophists and the “new” education in Athens. After the perceived failure of Clouds in 423 and its subsequent, unperformed revision, Aristophanes, this book argues, returned in 414 with Birds, a continuation and deepening of his critique found in Clouds. Peisetaerus or “persuader of his comrades,” the protagonist of Birds, though an old man, is clearly a student of Socrates’ phrontisterion. Unlike Socrates, however, he is political and ambitious and he understands the whole of human nature, both rational and irrational. Peisetaerus employs the various deconstructive techniques of Socrates and his allies (which is summed up on the comic sage in the image of “father-beating”) to overturn not just human society, but, with the help of his new allies, the divine and musical birds, the cosmos. After his new gods and bird city, Cloudcuckooland, are actually established, however, the hero re-introduces the “old” ways - justice, moderation, and obedience to law – but now under his personal authority, and thereby becomes “the highest of the gods.” Thus, the author postulates, in 414 Aristophanes has come to acknowledge the potency of the apparent civic-minded turn (or element) of the sophists, while aware of the self-aggrandizing nature of their ambition. Peisetaerus, unlike Socrates, is successful: he is establishing a just polis and cosmos and, therefore, must be victorious. But the consequence or cost of this success is illustrated through the Bird Chorus. After the polis is founded, the birds never again sing of their musical reciprocity with the Muses, the source of melodies for men. The birds are now political and the policemen of human beings. The sophist-run cosmos has lost its music. The new Zeus is an ugly bird-mutant. The gods and all nomoi have lost their beauty, honor, and reverential nature. Birds, in its finale, hilariously, but boldlyilluminates the inherent tension between philosophy (reason) and poetry (divinely-inspired tradition).

The Birds

The Birds PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Dramatic Publishing
ISBN: 9780871294968
Category : Athens (Greece)
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
"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.

Birds, Peace, Wealth

Birds, Peace, Wealth PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589880781
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
THREE PLAYS TRANSLATED BY WAYNE AMBLER AND THOMAS L. PANGLE In these three raucous comedies, mortals outwit and even replace Zeus and other Olympian deities of the Greek Pantheon. As Aristophanes provokes laughter at the foibles of gods and men, he arouses wonder at our human need for the divine. * * * “The three comic heroes in the plays included here raise the questions of whether there are gods, who they might be, how powerful they are, and how they might be changed or eliminated. Although the precise form of such questions changes from age to age, these are questions that are inseparable from political life; and they certainly are powerfully present in our own day . . . great theorists and architects of the modern liberal state designed its contours partly with an eye on the goal of diminishing the role of religion in the public square. Not unlike our three comic heroes, they wanted to reduce dependence on “Zeus” and his priests. In his place, and like our three heroes, they sought peace, wealth, and human rulers liberated from exaggerated piety. And nowadays the so-called New Atheists are pressing the case that it is high time for a final defeat and elimination of the powers of darkness that, in their view, have cost us so much blood and treasure . . . Aristophanes was not a modern liberal; still less would he agree with the New Atheists’ advocacy of universal public atheism. He does, however, put dissatisfaction with the gods at the center of the three plays included here, does bestow victories on the human critics of those gods, and does invite us to think with him about the justice of their causes, the tactics behind their victories, and the limits of their successes.” – From the Introduction

Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly

Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631496336
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
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.

The Birds and Other Plays

The Birds and Other Plays PDF Author: Aristophanes
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1427073260
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
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

Aristophanes in Performance, 421 BC-AD 2007

Aristophanes in Performance, 421 BC-AD 2007 PDF Author: Edith Hall
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1904350615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
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.