{"title":"Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the world of Ancient Comedy with this enlightening Bloomsbury series. Perfect for enthusiasts of theatre history, these companions offer fresh perspectives and scholarly insights into classic works.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"aristophanes-frogs-book-c-w-marshall-9781350080911","title":"Aristophanes: Frogs","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49736622407953,"sku":"NGR9781350080911","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51720759804177,"sku":"GOR013112193","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1350080918.jpg?v=1750889037"},{"product_id":"plautus-menaechmi-book-v-sophie-klein-9781350092723","title":"Plautus: Menaechmi","description":"This new volume in the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series is perfect for students coming to one of Plautus' most whimsical, provocative, and influential plays for the first time, and a useful first point of reference for scholars less familiar with Roman comedy. Menaechmi is a tale of identical twin brothers who are separated as young children and reconnect as adults following a series of misadventures due to mistaken identity. A gluttonous parasite, manipulative courtesan, shrewish wife, crotchety father-in-law, bumbling cook, saucy handmaid, quack doctor, and band of thugs comprise the colourful cast of characters. Each encounter with a misidentified twin destabilizes the status quo and provides valuable insight into Roman domestic and social relationships.    The book analyzes the power dynamics at play in the various relationships, especially between master and slave and husband and wife, in order to explore the meaning of freedom and the status of slaves and women in Roman culture and Roman comedy. 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Like most of the poet's comedies, this play is heavy on fantasy and imagination, light on formal structure, being an exuberant farce that champions the opponents of War and celebrates the delights of the return to country life with its smells, food and drink, its many pleasures and none of the complications that war brings in its wake.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50037539078417,"sku":"GOR009999348","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1350020214.jpg?v=1751986373"},{"product_id":"aristophanes-cavalry-book-robert-tordoff-9781350065673","title":"Aristophanes: Cavalry","description":"Offering for the first time a student introduction to Aristophanes’ most explosive political satire, this volume is an essential guide to the context, themes and later reception of Cavalry. 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It launches a much-needed new series of books, each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Four chapters highlight the play’s historical context, themes, performance and reception, including its reflection of recent societal trends in marriage and property ownership by women after the Punic Wars, and its complex dynamics on stage. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a brief introduction to the play.   Casina pits a husband (Lysidamus) and wife (Cleostrata) against each other in a struggle for control of a 16-year-old slave named Casina. Cleostrata cleverly plots to frustrate the efforts of her lascivious elderly husband, staging a cross-dressing ‘marriage’ that culminates in his complete humiliation. The play provides rich insights into relationships within the Roman family. 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Six chapters highlight the play’s context, themes, staging and legacy including its response to contemporary wartime politics and the possible staging options for flying. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction to the play.  Peace was first performed in 421 BC, perhaps only days before the signing of a peace treaty that ended ten years of fighting between Athens and Sparta (the Archidamian War).  Aristophanes celebrates this prospect with an imaginative fantasy involving his hero's flight on a gigantic dung-beetle to Olympus, the rescue of the goddess Peace from her imprisonment in a cave, and her return to a Greece weary of ten years of war.  Like most of the poet's comedies, this play is heavy on fantasy and imagination, light on formal structure, being an exuberant farce that champions the opponents of War and celebrates the delights of the return to country life with its smells, food and drink, its many pleasures and none of the complications that war brings in its wake.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52589345374481,"sku":"NLS9781350020221","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781350020221.jpg?v=1761059867"},{"product_id":"plautus-menaechmi-book-v-sophie-klein-9781350092730","title":"Plautus: Menaechmi","description":"This new volume in the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series is perfect for students coming to one of Plautus' most whimsical, provocative, and influential plays for the first time, and a useful first point of reference for scholars less familiar with Roman comedy. Menaechmi is a tale of identical twin brothers who are separated as young children and reconnect as adults following a series of misadventures due to mistaken identity. A gluttonous parasite, manipulative courtesan, shrewish wife, crotchety father-in-law, bumbling cook, saucy handmaid, quack doctor, and band of thugs comprise the colourful cast of characters. Each encounter with a misidentified twin destabilizes the status quo and provides valuable insight into Roman domestic and social relationships.   The book analyzes the power dynamics at play in the various relationships, especially between master and slave and husband and wife, in order to explore the meaning of freedom and the status of slaves and women in Roman culture and Roman comedy. 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The plot is ridiculously simple: when a father returns home after three years abroad, a clever slave named Tranio devises deceptions to conceal that the son has squandered a fortune partying with pals and purchasing his prized prostitute’s freedom. Tranio convinces the gullible father that his house is haunted, that his son has purchased the neighbor’s house, and that he must repay a moneylender. Plautus animates this skeletal plot with farcical scenes of Tranio’s slapstick abuse of a rustic slave, the young lover’s maudlin song lamenting his prodigality, a cross-gender dressing routine, a drunken party, a flustered moneylender, spirited slaves rebuffing the father, and Tranio hoodwinking father and neighbor simultaneously.    This is the first book-length study of Mostellaria in its literary and historical contexts. It aims to help readers and theater practitioners appreciate the script as both cultural document and performed comedy. 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This will be the first port of call for anyone studying or researching the play.  Though Andria launched Terence’s career as a dramatist at Rome, it has attracted comparatively little attention from modern critics. It is nevertheless a play of great interest, not least for the sensitivity with which it portrays family relationships and for its influence on later dramatists. It also presents students of Roman comedy with all the features that came to characterize Terence’s particular version of traditional comedy, and it raises all the interpretive questions that have dogged the study of Terence for generations. 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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. 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While early modern playwrights such as Ben Jonson and Jean Racine tended to co-opt memorable scenes from Wasps such as the dog trial, more recent productions have interpreted the play as a political comedy about the fragility of democratic institutions. This is the ideal companion for anyone studying Wasps and its effect on later theater.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52686364180753,"sku":"NLS9781350344006","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781350344006.jpg?v=1762327854"},{"product_id":"plautus-mostellaria-book-george-fredric-franko-9781350205383","title":"Plautus: Mostellaria","description":"Plautus' Mostellaria is one of ancient Rome’s most breezy and amusing comedies. 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