The Frogs and Other Plays covers two different books: by Penguin & Oxford, containing different sets of plays. Oxford (all by Halliwell) is more of a "paraphrase" translation; Penguin (by Barrett in this case, and Somerstein in the other two volumes) is (slightly) more of an "imitation" translation. If you're serious about Aristophanes, then you should maybe get both. But if you want to read just one version, get the Penguin editions.

2019-2020 didn't exactly go according to plan, but discovering Aristophanes was one of its bright spots.

Only read Frogs.

This is sincerely one of my top 5 favorite Greek comedies.

The women and the poet

A comedy of classical Feminism and classical Andrew Tate

The Frogs

A comedy of art and artist and their merits

I am slowly working my way through all eleven of Aristophanes' plays. I had already read three (and enjoyed them) before tackling this volume. All three were excellent, but for me THE FROGS stood out as my favourite. I loved the journey to the underworld conducted by the god Dionysus and his slave Xanthias and the entire political-philosophical point of the quest came across strongly across 2500 years. The verbal exchanges between the characters are still funny and the poetry slam between Aeschylus and Euripides is simply brilliant. Wonderful stuff!

I wanted to give it 4 so bad because of Wasps and Women at the Thesmophoria but Frogs let it down. Not because it isn't as culturally important as they other - it definitely it! It was because it was a tad more serious than the others and it just felt like instead of playful fun he was just being rude to his tragic predecessors. The other two were ridiculously funny though, I laughed quite a bit and I did enjoy Frogs but I just wasn't laughing as much.

I bought the rest Aristophanes' collection when I was half way through Wasps so I'm eagerly awaiting their arrival.

3.5 folks.

I'm surprised I like clouds more than frogs tbh.

Translating Aristophanes into English must be the most thankless task in classical scholarship. I have read a many different translations (Roche, the tryhard Fitts, the stale Dickinson) of various plays of Aristophanes and none of them has managed to get a laugh out of me. David Barrett's translations are the freshest and most engaging I have read. Half in prose and half in verse (with varied metric and rhyme schemes to keep things interesting), the result is a little like a W. S. Gilbert libretto (the renderings of the choral songs are very Gilbertish or Lewis Carrollish, and extremely successful) spiced with fart jokes and the occasional Monty Python reference. But though Barrett's translations avoid the stiltedness, monotony, and archaism of many translations,* even in his capable hands Aristophanes yet remains a lot harder to enjoy on the page than the works of the Greek tragedians, because so much of the humor is topical. Endnotes can gloss the topical jokes, but they don't make them funny. I imagine the topical jokes got the biggest laughs in their day, so it is just impossible for a faithful translation to really recreate the experience for a modern reader. In performance one can substitute other topical references, but this would not help on the page since the updated references would quickly stale, compounding the problem. (It also does not help that a lot of the topical humor is of the gay-bashing or fat-shaming variety.) But if much of the comedy is lost in translation, Aristophanes's whimsy and imagination survive. This collection features the charming The Wasps (422 BCE) plus two of the three plays in which Euripides appears: the Thesmophoriazusae aka The Poet and the Women (411) and the much-loved The Frogs (405).

* I should note that like every other Aristophanes translation I have read, Barrett's rely heavily on British slang to render the plays more accessible and less remote, a choice which has the opposite effect for this American reader, at least.

Thesmophoria *****
The Wasps -
The Frogs ****

All I can remember about this was that Euripedes lost his oilcan. And someone made a movie out of it and used Frank Zappa in the soundtrack. It was a pretty bad movie.

fun!!! but not enough frogs

Read as a part of my classical studies course in secondary school.