The Birds and Other Plays

I just read the Birds for an assignment, but I enjoyed it! It was funny in a weird, I don’t fully get it way. I felt like I could see it in my head tho, so that was fun.

Bought this for my Greek comedy course. I find I prefer Menander to Aristophanes, possibly because he is slightly easier to read! I do like the fantastical elements to Aristophanes' work but just sometimes feel it a bit hard going to read a whole play. (or in the case of my essay, as many as possible in a day :P) However, the translation is very good and I do think in performance it would be much more enjoyable.

Several years ago I resolved to read all existing ancient Greek drama. I have read all the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Now I have read all of Aristophanes too. Only Euripides and Menander to go and my pledge will be fulfilled.

These five plays are all very good. The Birds is utterly tremendous, perhaps my favourite of Aristophanes' plays with the exception of The Frogs. The outcome of this work is rather shocking, no less than the overthrow of the gods, but the individual scenes are mostly delightful, sometimes grotesque, exuberant and fantastical.

I also enjoyed Peace (very absurd) and The Assemblywomen (although regarded as one of Aristophanes' weaker plays I found it genuinely hilarious). Wealth began strongly but had a disappointing climax.

I am now in a position to list my three favourites of his plays as follows:
(1) The Frogs
(2) The Birds
(3) Lysistrata

Menander next! I have a copy of his Plays and Fragments waiting for me.

Birds is amazing. I honestly couldn't believe it when I read it.

Birds is great, the plays about women even are still good. Theaterkino.

Of Aristophanes’ intact plays, here survive the two worst. First, The Assemblywomen, which begins as an improved riff upon Women at the Thesmophoria and Lysistrata before abruptly – past the middle section – shifting into a different, hardly related collection of vaguely inspired ‘gags’. Some are funny; none complete the comic drama so carefully aligned in the play’s beginning. There is something sad about it. A kind of disintegration. The chorus were, at this period, fading from the Greek stage (for reasons of misery before those of art); this play seems a representative of an artform in decline. A shift from the grand Old Comedy to the miserly New; only without whatever fine-spun talent or detail that might glory the latter. It is instead a compromised work. The translator implies the second part might be the hand of another, the elder Aristophanes uninterested in completing the play. I cannot speak to the linguistic plausibility of this, but it is a tempting proposal. The Knights is the other weak play of the set, although its circumstances are wholly different. It hails not from the flailing end but the skyscraper beginnings of Aristophanes’ career. And it is defined not by compromise; rather its opposite. The issue is one of breadth: it is, in essence, a play-long diatribe against a particularly dreadful demagogue in Athenian politics (the infamous Cleon, populist urtext). This drama is not built upon nor shifted in any way. It is a continuous piling of insults, a vast work opprobrium that drives on relentlessly. Being removed from its original context, I cannot help but be removed from its effect. It is, more than The Assemblywomen in general, funny, but perhaps ragging on the same bit for much too long. A similar takedown on a slightly less abstract politician would, no doubt, be somewhat more cathartic. (Though: crude, gauche? Those elements are probably inherent.) Leaving the rough works aside, there remain some of Aristophanes’ gleaming artefacts. Peace begins with the kind of genius image Hieronymus Bosch might dream: a man flying to heaven atop a dung beetle, to entreat the gods. The drama is quickly resolved: here is a play more concerned with farcical situation and revelry than plot; this preference succeeds. The Birds might well be Aristophanes’ best play: at the least, it is the easiest for a modern reader to parse without wondering how many jokes he’s missing, and how many footnotes lie ahead. It builds in the way of a Gilbert & Sullivan – an absurd premise is established, and then escalated to the extreme of absurdities. The base suggestion – past the talking birds – is that these birds ought to wall off the sky and take tribute from the offerings meant for the gods. An extremely literal interpretation of godly position versus that of man (ignoring, dutifully, those gods who supposedly dwell beneath); this idea is compounded upon the revelation that there exists another pantheon above the familiar Greek set. Aristophanes does not take it so far, but like in Euripides’ Helen one could envisage infinite heavens above one another, and perhaps infinite below, an endlessly repeating absurdity kept in check only by the continued faith in things remaining as they are. Aristophanes throws the balance off, and in his outward ridicule reveals so many exposed sinews. He jabs at them, not in search of revolution (it seems Aristophanes is of the reactionary class in several respects), but rather to see how they squirm. Wealth is then a fine epilogue to the Penguin series on Aristophanes: it is of the ‘new’ style but, unlike The Assemblywomen, it does not seem caught up in the old, nor does it collapse upon its own conceit. Instead it is a long and strung-out metaphor, one that both enjoys a certain wish fulfilment (makes its noble characters rich; its ignoble poor) while acknowledging the fundamental problem of this wish. It is not unlike a variation on Psalm 73, here imagining the ‘alternate world’ where the good prosper and (by a kind of necessity) God is shown to be cruel, and his cruelty is overthrown. But that short agon with Poverty, which seems stabbed in the midst of this play with no provocation nor resolution, complicates matters. It reminds us that wealth and poverty are, in wheel-form, motivators; that without motivation human hands grow idle, and industry fails. Today we may aspire to fully-automated luxury communism; the olden Greeks still relied upon genuine toil as a fact of life. If we all have everything in great quantities, what would propel human society? Of course, this is Aristophanes at his most wily and most conservative; he is the wealthy poet musing upon the ‘idle poor’, should the poor be rendered idly wealthy. But he strings this bow with expected poise; the truth of its aim matters little.

Aristophanes is a hoot. This book contains my favourite, The Birds.

I only read The Birds. All potty humor...I guess people are people not only everywhere, but at every time.