zmb's review against another edition
3.0
It's a bit surprising to me how stridently anti-war all four plays are even in the depths of the Peloponnesian War. Being comedies, the fart jokes aren't as eloquent on the subject as the frequently lampooned Euripides and his Trojan Women, but they are pretty amusing and it's definitely nice to see the theme.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
This review is of the edition arranged by M. Platnauer.
This is a bilingual edition complete with footnotes, annotations, and notes on the text and translation! Be still my heart.
This is a bilingual edition complete with footnotes, annotations, and notes on the text and translation! Be still my heart.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
This review is of the translation by Peter Meineck.
I love Aquila Theatre. I've been lucky enough to work with them before (backstage only! I do set-related stuff at undisclosed locations), and their performances have been consistently impressive every time I've been able to attend or otherwise observe. I have no complaints about the staging—the casting was great, and this is the perfect play to relate to current events as long as you do it cleverly—Peter Meineck is the founder of Aquila, as well as a long-time theatrical... person, so it makes sense that Aquila would choose this particular translation. It's been nearly a year since the show, so I'm not going to comment on anything but the translation, which is, well. It mentions the Wu-Tang Clan. But I'll let Meineck himself tell it:
I love Aquila Theatre. I've been lucky enough to work with them before (backstage only! I do set-related stuff at undisclosed locations), and their performances have been consistently impressive every time I've been able to attend or otherwise observe. I have no complaints about the staging—the casting was great, and this is the perfect play to relate to current events as long as you do it cleverly—Peter Meineck is the founder of Aquila, as well as a long-time theatrical... person, so it makes sense that Aquila would choose this particular translation. It's been nearly a year since the show, so I'm not going to comment on anything but the translation, which is, well. It mentions the Wu-Tang Clan. But I'll let Meineck himself tell it:
In translating Frogs from ancient Greek to modern English, I am already participating in an act of aesthetic anachronism, and we have to accept that many of our ideas about how we receive the works of Aeschylus and Euripides are, more often than not, quite different than how they were viewed in antiquity. Then what about being "faithful" to the "original Greek"? I would suggest that there is no such thing: we do not have the original play script of Frogs as described earlier, and through the miracle and fortitude of diligent, through culturally predicated scholarship and textual transmission, and a textual version of the play has survived, perhaps remembered by actors and written down at some point after the first performance. But it has gone through a long series of adaptations, emendation, corrections, and interpretations—not all of which can or should be trusted today. We have no stage directions, no assigned character parts, no director's notes, no information from the playwright about how the play might be staged. We have no program from the original performance, and no representations of that performance on stage in other media. Nor do we have the masks, costumes, or props, or even most of the theatre where it was first staged. In short, it is a miracle of scholarship that we have this play with us today at all.Normally I would disagree, but honestly, I have a weak spot for this particular play. I think it can genuinely be adapted for the better with the addition of anachronistic and/or culturally specific elements. Meineck's translation is intended for performance, and doesn't read well in and of itself; but there are no glaring errors I could see at a quick glance, and the scholarship is good. Even if it mentions the Wu-Tang Clan.
Frogs was first performed at the Dionysian Lenaia festival in January 405 BCE, where it won first prize. This would have been just a single daytime performance, probably at the theatre at the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the southeast slope of the Acropolis. We do not know when the text of Frogs was first written down, whether by Aristophanes himself or by somebody in his circle, or if it is a later version from a few years after the original performance. In any event we do not have that text. The Greek text of Frogs that we have today has been meticulously reconstructed from over eighty manuscripts from the tenth to sixteenth centuries CE and two papyrus texts from the fifth and sixth centuries CE. These versions have been corrected, edited, and interpreted by many scholars from the medieval period on, and were probably copies of texts collected and edited by the Alexandrian scholars in the Hellenistic period. Scholars today are still involved in interpreting the text we have based on new information about Athens at the time, and the latest interpretations of both existing and emerging texts. It does seem clear that there were very few copies, and perhaps only one edition, of Frogs in the hundred years following the first performance, and the play did not become more widely copied until Alexandrian scholars and others became interested in establishing collections of classical playwrights.
jalapenyokai's review against another edition
4.0
This was hilarious. I didn't expect "breaking the fourth wall" to be such an old humor technique. Aristophanes used it quite well. I was also impressed with the opening. He managed to create interest in the story and questions in the mind of the reader by focusing on peripheral concerns rather than the main steps of the plot and even the main statements Aristophanes was making. Peace just became one of my new favorite plays and I haven't even seen it performed.
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