A Study of Entrances in Four Plays of Aristophanes

Abstract

<p>This thesis is an approach to the subject of the production of Aristophanic comedy. Much scholarship over the years has treated the plays as literary works and as social documents, but proportionately little thought has been given to a consideration of the comedies as theatrical productions. One cannot ignore the value of concentrating on the former, but at the same time further and fuller appreciation of both the poet and his plays is ,to be gained by approaching the comedies as scripts without stage directions. It is this latter aspect of Aristophanes with which the paper is concerned. <br /><br />Entrances are an integral and extremely important part of "non-static" drama; the entrance of a new character is the appearance of a fresh element into the play, and therefore it possesses a crucial dramatic importance. It is, however, all too easy when reading a play to take the entrance of a character for granted, and in doing so to ignore its dramatic function. Accordingly this paper attempts to reconstruct, as closely as is possible with only the text to work from, the staging of entrances as they might have been produced in the fifth century B.C.</p>