The Frogs ARISTOPHANES (1937 1st Edition/ Limited to 1500 Copies, ARTIST SIGNED)
$ 21.12
Description
The Frogs ARISTOPHANES (1937 1st Edition/ Limited to 1500 Copies, ARTIST SIGNED). His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates, although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. Offered here is a text entitled: The Frogs, by Aristophanes, published by The Limited Editions Club/ Joh. Enschede En Zonan (NY/ Haarlem) in 1937, Edition Limited to 1500 copies [this being #358], SIGNED by the artist, illustrated in b/w by John Austen, 8 1/4" x 12"; 62pp. Decorated cloth covers have light wear/ some soiling, very good internally; lacking slipcase. ARISTOPHANES (Greek: Αριστοφάνης; c. 446 – c. 386 BC) was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries. Also known as "The Father of Comedy" and "the Prince of Ancient Comedy", Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates, although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. Aristophanes' second play, The Babylonians (now lost), was denounced by Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. It is possible that the case was argued in court, but details of the trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially The Knights, the first of many plays that he directed himself. "In my opinion," he says through that play's Chorus, "the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all." In THE FROGS, Euripides, the great tragic playwright, has recently died, and Athens has undergone years of political turmoil. Dionysus, the god of parties and of drama, decides that the two phenomena are causally related, and he makes a plan to retrieve Euripides from the Underworld to save the city.
