Aristophanes
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join Natalie Haynes and guests for half an hour of comedy and the Classics from the BBC Radio Theatre in London. Natalie is a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. She stands up in the name of Greek playwright and inventor of 'old comedy', Aristophanes. Expect a chorus of frogs, rather too much information about padded costumes, and a sex strike. Oh, and a lot of gossip from two and half thousand years ago. With special guests:
Rosie Wyles Edith Hall Fiona Laird.
Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2016.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I'm standing up for Aristophanes. |
| 0:13.0 | Yeah, he deserves all of that and more. |
| 0:16.0 | He is, of course, the great comic playwright from 5th century Athens. |
| 0:20.0 | He's born around the middle of the century, about 4, 47, something like that. |
| 0:24.9 | He's born to a very wealthy family. |
| 0:26.2 | His father is a landowner. |
| 0:27.7 | We have maybe 11 of his 30 plays that survive. |
| 0:31.5 | And he is the great exponent proponent of old comedy. |
| 0:35.4 | There's old comedy and new comedy. |
| 0:37.2 | A new comedy is more familiar to us because that's what Shakespeare takes. So like maybe there's long lost twins and somebody's got a lock of hair and then they're reunited. Or there's like a pretty girl and she wants to marry a pretty young man. And then she has to marry this horrible crusty old man. and then somebody turns out with the other half of her locket, |
| 0:55.0 | and it turns out the crusty old man is her dad, hooray! She can marry the young man, forget about the incest subtext, that's fine, that's fine! I loathe new comedy, as you can doubtless tell, I literally can't bear it. But I adore old comedy, which is much funnier, more smutty, is dirty, it's |
| 1:13.7 | political, it's satirical, in every regard better. And Aristophanes is the genius who creates it. |
| 1:19.0 | And to give you an example, well, not created it, but he's the greatest exponent of it, I think. |
| 1:23.1 | And to give you an example of perhaps his most performed now play, the Lysistrata. It is written in |
| 1:29.4 | 411 BCE. So the Peloponnesian War, which has ruined Athens for 20 years, has been going on |
| 1:36.0 | for that long. They've been at war with Sparta, their neighbour in the southern part of Greece, |
| 1:40.0 | and things have not gone beautifully. And it's a theme which runs through Aristophanes' plays, |
| 1:44.0 | is wishing that Athens would make peace, wishing that the war would come to an beautifully. And it's a theme which runs through Aristophanes' plays, is wishing that Athens would make peace, |
| 1:46.0 | wishing that the war would come to an end. |
| 1:47.6 | And there's one comic fantasy after another, |
| 1:49.8 | which takes this as its essential premise. |
... |
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