Frogs scholars

Segal - Dionysus and Comedy

Comedy is the one safe place where taboos can be broken and normal conventions can be overthrown. In comedy a god can be mocked. The humour lies partly in the face that is has a dangerous edge.

MacDowell - Comedy

Aristophanes is using the gods as comic characters and wants the audience to laugh at them, but this does not necessarily mean that he and the audience do not believe in their real existence. Rather, the performance of a comedy was the right time and place for making fun of everyone, and the gods were assumed to be sensible enough to take a joke.

Sommerstein - D’s journey

Reminiscent of Persephone’s return from the underworld, bringing spring with her. Bringing life back to Athens after a time of long peril.

Cartledge - The Chorus

The use of the initiates as the chorus would assure the audience that Religion is still important, and not everything is topsy turvy in this carnivalsesque world.

MacDowell - Comedy

Aristophanes shows considerable versatility in his use of different sorts of humour and fun

Cartledge - Comedy

‘In comedy, there is an ingrained tendency for the norms of ordinary life to be suspended, subverted or even turned on their heads’ 

Ruffell

‘sound-bites’

Barrett - The Parabasis

‘It has sometimes been suggested that the Frogs is a splendid piece of escape literature… nothing could be farther from the truth’ ‘He gives us a sense of occasion, of urgency, of an intense seriousness underlying all the fun and the bawdy and the wit’ 

Heath - Aristophanes

Aristophanes offers nostalgic Athens. This is not serious policy but escapist feel-good entertainment

What does Heath say

Politics was the material of comedy, but comedy did not aspire to be a political force.