#ancient plays

Just checked, they DO have English subtitles. Some productions are free to watch, some you have to buy a 5€ ticket. You have to sign up for an account to access the productions and once you 'buy' them you have 30 days to view them. And no, it's not geoblocked so the productions can be viewed form anywhere in the world.

-------------- end of ask ----------

𝗔𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱𝘆:

𝗔𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗱𝘆:

We do have some indication of ancient Greek “fanboys” for certain authors. We’re told that when the Athenian naval attack on Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War failed, with hundreds of Athenians taken captive ... some of them were able to win their freedom by quoting large chunks of Euripides’s most recent plays, and summarizing them, as the plays hadn’t reached Sicily yet.

That’s some pretty serious fan jonesing.

There was also significant discussion of plays, but more often for the political and social commentary of that play (e.g. Euripides’s “Trojan Women” in the wake of the Melian Massacre) or because it was regarded as so shockingly transgressive (Euripides again, with “Medea”). They argued less about how plays ended with regard to the myths themselves.

So I think they definitely had the same sort of attachment to stories and plays, but it expressed differently because of a couple BIG differences between them and us.

The ancients (anywhere) had no concept of “intellectual property,” and myths had no “authors” beyond the culture who told them. Thus the Greeks lacked a concept of orthodoxy regarding their myths because there was no institution with the authority to designate “the correct version” (e.g., a canon). While Homer’s versions of myths were widely admired and known, it was simple popularity.

Thus, as indicated, the way they talked about plays was a little different. In addition, the popular type of literature changed over time. In the early archaic age, it was epic poetry, such as Homer, but by the late archaic period down into the early Classical, lyric poetry had mostly replaced it. And with the Classical age into the Hellenistic, it’s dramatic plays. But even that was divided into the “era of playwrights” vs. the era of actors/reproductions. Also the rise of Middle and New Comedy was more escapist. (Old Comedy was heavily political, their version, perhaps of SNL or Stephen Colbert.) With the Hellenistic era we also see the rise of the Romance Novel (amusingly written by men for men), which became another way of mediating stories. But these novels were not in serial format the way we’re used to.

Ἀριστοφάνης ARISTOPHANES

c. 446 – c. 386 BCE

Athenian playwright “The Master of Old Comedy”

>>

Eleven of Aristophanes’ forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as ‘Old Comedy’, and are used to define it.

Old Comedy was the comedy of a vigorously democratic polis at the height of its power and it gave Aristophanes the freedom to explore the limits of humour, even to the point of undermining the humour itself.

Less is known about Aristophanes than about his plays. In fact, his plays are the main source of information about him and his life. It was conventional in Old Comedy for the Chorus to speak on behalf of the author during an address called the ‘parabasis’ and thus some biographical facts can be found there. However, these facts relate almost entirely to his career as a dramatist and the plays contain few clear and unambiguous clues about his personal beliefs or his private life.

Latin translations of his plays by Andreas Divus (Venice 1528) were circulated widely throughout Europe in the Renaissance and these were soon followed by translations and adaptations in modern languages. Racine, for example, drew “Les Plaideurs” (1668) from “The Wasps”. Goethe (who turned to Aristophanes for a warmer and more vivid form of comedy than he could derive from readings of Terence and Plautus) adapted a short play “Die Vögel” from “The Birds” for performance in Weimar.

Aristophanes has appealed to both conservatives and radicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Anatoly Lunacharsky, first Commissar of Enlightenment for the USSR in 1917, declared that the ancient dramatist would have a permanent place in proletarian theatre and yet conservative, Prussian intellectuals interpreted Aristophanes as a satirical opponent of social reform.

Euripides: "I'm about to finish these whole gods' careers."