Search results for ""Author C. W. Marshall""

Libation Bearers is the 'middle' play in the only extant tragic trilogy to survive from antiquity, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, first produced in 458 BCE. This introduction to the play will be useful for anyone reading it in Greek or in translation. Drawing on his wide experience teaching about performance in the ancient world, C. W. Marshall helps readers understand how the play was experienced by its ancient audience. His discussion explores the impact of the chorus, the characters, theology, and the play’s apparent affinities with comedy. The architecture of choral songs is described in detail. The book also investigates the role of revenge in Athenian society and the problematic nature of Orestes’ matricide. Libation Bearers immediately entered the Athenian visual imagination, influencing artistic depictions on red-figured vases, and inspiring plays by Euripides and Sophocles. This study looks to the later plays to show how 5th-century audiences understood Libation Bearers. Modern reception of the play is integrated into the analysis. The volume includes a full range of ancillary material, providing a list of relevant red-figure vase illustrations, a glossary of technical terms, and a chronology of ancient and modern theatrical versions.

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A comedy about tragedy and a play about playmaking, Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BCE) is perhaps the most popular of ancient comedies. This new introduction guides students through the play, its themes and contemporary contexts, and its reception history. Frogs offers sustained engagement with the Athenian literary scene, with the politics of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and with the religious understanding of the fifth-century city. It presents the earliest direct criticism of theatre and a detailed description of the Underworld, and also dramatizes the place of Mystery cults in the religious life of Athens and shows the political concerns that galvanized the citizens. It is also genuinely funny, showcasing a range of comic techniques, including literary and musical parody, political invective, grotesque distortion, wordplay, prop comedy, and funny costumes. Frogs has inspired literary works by Henry Fielding, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. This book explores all of these features in a series of short chapters designed to be accessible to a new reader of ancient comedy. It proceeds linearly through the play, addressing a range of issues, but paying particular attention to stagecraft and performance. It also offers a bold new interpretation of the play, suggesting that the action of Frogs was not the first time Euripides and Aeschylus had competed against each other.

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Athenian comedy is firmly entrenched in the classical canon, but imperial authors debated, dissected and redirected comic texts, plots and language of Aristophanes, Menander, and their rivals in ways that reflect the non-Athenocentric, pan-Mediterranean performance culture of the imperial era. Although the reception of tragedy beyond its own contemporary era has been studied, the legacy of Athenian comedy in the Roman world is less well understood. This volume offers the first expansive treatment of the reception of Athenian comedy in the Roman Empire. These engaged and engaging studies examine the lasting impact of classical Athenian comic drama. Demonstrating a variety of methodologies and scholarly perspectives, sources discussed include papyri, mosaics, stage history, epigraphy and a broad range of literature such as dramatic works in Latin and Greek, including verse satire, essays, and epistolary fiction.

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