FROGS SCHOLARS Flashcards
Frogs is a fantasy play
– everything is ‘unreal’. Political and topical comment are less important.’ – McLeish
The Chorus of Initiates
Initiates is used to establish a particular atmosphere – a dimension removed from everyday mortal experience. It doesn’t advance the plot at all.’ – McLeish
Comedy tends to
take normal life situations and suspends and subvert them.’ – Cartledge
Dionysus in Frogs is a
coward, buffoon and literary critic.’ – Russel
The gods were assumed to be
sensible enough to take a joke.’ – Macdowell
it is interesting how
Dionysus the character would be performing in front of his own image. This ‘doubling’ allows the play to create ‘a satirical setting of its own.’ – McLeish
Dramatic poetry,
it seems, can save the city. Drama and civic life are inextricably connected. The very fact that you could write a comedy about tragedy marks the place that drama, as an institution, occupied in Athenian life. - Agocs
Aeschylus wins because he represents
a nostalgic vision, uncontaminated by the small-mindedness of daily life, by corrupt and incompetent leadership, and by the losses of war, of a bygone age of Athenian heroism.
- Agocs
Frogs is more
preoccupied by tragedy than comedy.
shows awareness of its status as a comedy.
- Tsoumpra
tragedy should
teach - it should display cleverness and good advice and make men better.
for Euripides, the goal is to examine conventional wisdom, to scrutinise and provoke. For Aeschylus, dramatic characters should be models of good behaviour for the audience to imitate.
- Ruffell
Euripidean
subversiveness and Aeschylean morality
- Ruffell
there is nothing
so universal as a fart joke
- Dover
women in comedy
were passed over or represented as sex mad or crazed
- Jones
Aristophanes truly believes
tragedy has an educational function
- MacDowell
Aeschylus and Euripides’
characters are seen like their plays
- Halliwell
tragedies were written for mass audiences
and so could be used as material for humour - it was part of the life of the community
- Dover
you won’t learn much that
is positive about tragedy from Aristophanes’ Frogs, but you will discover a lot that is wrong with it.
- Ruffell
Dionysus has no idea to row
this would seem contemptible and ridiculous especially to Athenian spectators, many of whom would have been oarsmen in the navy.
- MacDowell
cowardly and effeminate Dionysus
seems naturally servile… trespassed too far on the human side to qualify for godhood.
- Cartledge
Dionysus is deliberately made
ridiculous because he was a force to be reckoned with
- Cartledge
incongruity between the effeminacy of the
god and his dangerous power has a potentially comic side
- Segal
the choice of the Eleusinian Mysteries
would reassure the audience that the religious proprieties were not being entirely neglected.
- Cartledge
Aristophanes shows considerable versatility
in his use of different sorts of humour and fun.
- Macdowell
he shows supreme
mastery of almost every known means of making people laugh
- Stanford
Aristophanes used many of his plays as
vehicles for the expression of serious political views
- de Ste Croix
serious in its
ultimate political message
- Edith Hall
mixture of
seriousness and foolery
- de Ste Croix
political topics are
notably absent from the early parts of Frogs
- Macdowell
