Read this if you…
- want one of the most hyped Aristophanes play (even though its overrated)
- like the idea of a utopia called CloudCuckooLand (even though its overrated)
Skip this if you…
- haven't read Clouds or Lysistrata or Frogs to decide if you even like Aristophanes
- don't like having to look at footnotes/online to see why something is funny
The 
Take
Found this one overrated. Kinda a fun fantastical idea, but wasn’t that funny. I liked the vulture joke and everyone dressed as birds. But didn’t find it that good
The lineage through The Birds
- Theogony/Works and Days by Hesiod. The Birds built on it. - The *Theogony* is the cosmogony *The Birds* is sending up — Aristophanes lifts Hesiod's primordial lineup (Chaos, Erebus, Night, Eros) and reshuffles it for laughs - In the bird-chorus's parabasis, Hesiod's genealogy of the gods gets inverted so the birds come first and the Olympians arrive late - Read Hesiod's solemn version first and the comic reversal snaps into focus
Depicted in Art
Greek title page reading 'Aristophanous komodiai ennea' — the first printed edition of Aristophanes' nine comedies, with Peace listed among them, in Venetian Greek type.
Aldus Manutius (printer); Markos Mousouros (editor), 1498
The full Cambridge undergraduate cast in elaborate Hellenist bird costumes, posed on the Theatre Royal stage with painted Greek-temple scenery behind them.
Robert Farren, 1883
Stage scene with a winged man and a young boy beside a speaking actor, surrounded by chorus members in full bird costume gathered at the front of the stage.
Henry Gillard Glindoni
Engraved marble bust of the comic poet Aristophanes
Recommended Editions
Peter Meineck
Hackett Publishing · 1998
Meineck translates for the stage, and the Birds is the play that most needs that. You can see the costumes and hear the bird-calls. Cloudcuckooland actually feels like a real place readers want to move to.
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Notable Quotes
Do you like Nephelococcygia?
Screen & Stage
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looseDie Vögel
Opera · 1920
Walter Braunfels
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, 1844–1900: "Aristophanes — that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose sake one pardons all Hellenism for having existed."
- Harold Bloom, American literary critic, 1930–2019: "I tend to agree with Heinrich Heine that "There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.""
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