Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes

Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes PDF Author: Gwendolyn Compton-Engle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316033449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book offers an interpretation of the handling of costume in the plays of the fifth-century comic poet Aristophanes. Drawing on both textual and material evidence from the fourth- and fifth-century Greek world, it examines three layers of costume: the bodysuit worn by the actors, the characters' clothes, and the additional layering of disguise. A chapter is also devoted to the inventive costumes of the comic chorus. Going beyond describing what costumes looked like, the book focuses instead on the dynamics of costume as it is manipulated by characters in the performance of plays. The book argues that costume is used competitively, as characters handle each other's costumes and poets vie for status using costume. This argument is informed by performance studies and by analyses of gender and the body.

Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes

Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes PDF Author: Gwendolyn Compton-Engle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316033449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers an interpretation of the handling of costume in the plays of the fifth-century comic poet Aristophanes. Drawing on both textual and material evidence from the fourth- and fifth-century Greek world, it examines three layers of costume: the bodysuit worn by the actors, the characters' clothes, and the additional layering of disguise. A chapter is also devoted to the inventive costumes of the comic chorus. Going beyond describing what costumes looked like, the book focuses instead on the dynamics of costume as it is manipulated by characters in the performance of plays. The book argues that costume is used competitively, as characters handle each other's costumes and poets vie for status using costume. This argument is informed by performance studies and by analyses of gender and the body.

Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes

Costume in the Comedies of Aristophanes PDF Author: Gwendolyn Compton-Engle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107083796
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book interprets the handling of costume in the plays of the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, using as evidence the surviving plays as well as vase-paintings and terracotta figurines. This book fills a gap in the study of ancient Greek drama, focusing on performance, gender, and the body.

The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy

The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy PDF Author: Martin Revermann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521760283
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 523

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Book Description
This book provides a unique panorama of this challenging area of Greek literature, combining literary perspectives with historical issues and material culture.

Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea

Ancient Theatre and Performance Culture around the Black Sea PDF Author: David Braund
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107170591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 583

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Book Description
Presents a landmark study combining key specialists around the region with well-established international scholars, from a wide range of disciplines.

Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise

Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise PDF Author: Dimitrios Kanellakis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110677032
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to examine the variety, the mechanisms, and the poetological intention of the effect of surprise in Aristophanic comedy, addressing the phenomenon not as a self-evident or unselfconscious element of comedy as a genre, but as an elaborate system which characterises the style of the specific dramatist. More precisely, the book analyses Aristophanes’ most prominent verbal, thematic, and theatrical modes of surprise from a typological perspective, and interprets them as comprising the key area in which the playwright claims and demonstrates his artistic superiority over rival genres and individual poets. In line with this purpose, two parallel aims of the book are to provide an original commentary on the passages under examination, and to promote the study of modern performances – a practice which has so far been either restricted to Classical Reception or only theoretically acknowledged (if at all) by mainstream philological scholarship. This is a timely book on a topic of wide current interest across a range of interlocking disciplines: emotion studies, semiotics, narratology, information theory, and -most pertinently for this book- humour research.

Tragedy on the Comic Stage

Tragedy on the Comic Stage PDF Author: Matthew C. Farmer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190492074
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Aristophanes' engagement with tragedy is one of the most striking features of his comedies. Tragedy on the Comic Stage contextualizes this engagement with tragedy within Greek comedy as a genre by examining paratragedy in the fragments of Aristophanes' contemporaries and successors in the fifth and fourth centuries.

Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama

Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama PDF Author: Ben Akrigg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107008557
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Greek comedy offers a unique insight into the reality of life as a slave, giving this disenfranchised group a 'voice'.

A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity

A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity PDF Author: Michael Ewans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350187593
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Drawing together contributions from scholars in a wide range of fields inside Classics and Drama, this volume traces the development of comedic performance and examines the different characteristics of Greek and Roman comedy. Although the origins of comedy are obscure, this study argues that comedic performances were at the heart of Graeco-Roman culture from around 486 BCE to the mid first century BCE. It explores the range of comedies during this period, which were fictional dramas that engaged with the political and social concerns of ancient society, and also at times with mythology and tragedy. The volume centres largely around the surviving work of Aristophanes and Menander in Athens, and Plautus and Terence in Rome, but authors whose plays survive only in fragments are also discussed. Performances and plays drew on a range of forms, including satire and fantasy, and were designed to entertain and amuse their audiences while also asking them to question issues of morality, privilege and class. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to ancient comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Nature, Culture, and the Origins of Greek Comedy

Nature, Culture, and the Origins of Greek Comedy PDF Author: Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521860660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 9

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Book Description
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The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE

The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE PDF Author: Alexa Piqueux
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192660330
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Using both textual and iconographic sources, this richly illustrated book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. The study also aims to refine knowledge of the various connections between Attic comedy and comic vases from South Italy and Sicily (the so-called 'phlyax vases'). After introducing comic texts and comedy-related vase-paintings in the regional contexts, The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE considers the generic features of the comic body, characterized as it is by a specific ugliness and a constant motion. It also explores how costumes —masks, padding, phallus, clothing, accessories— and gestures contribute to the characters' visual identity in relation with speech : it analyzes the cultural, social, aesthetic, and theatrical conventions by which spectators decipher the body. This study thus leads to a re-examination of the modalities of comic mimesis, in particular when addressing sexual codes in cross-dressing scenes which reveal the artifice of the fictional body. It also sheds light on how comic poets make use of the scenic or imaginary representations of the bodies of those who are targets of political, social, or intellectual satire. There is a particular emphasis on body movements, where the book not only deals with body language and the dramatic function of comic gesture, but also with how words confer a kind of poetic and unreal motion to the body.