Plautus was the single greatest influence on Western comedy. In fact, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Moliere's the Miser are two subsequent classics directly based on Plautine originals. Plautus himself borrowed from the Greeks, but his jokes, rapid dialogue, bawdy humor, and irreverent characterizations are the original work of an undisputed genius. The comedies printed here show him at his best, and Professor Segal's translations keep their fast, rollicking pace intact, making these the most readable and actable versions available. This volume includes, The Braggart Soldier, e Brothers Menaechmus, The Haunted House, and The Pot of Gold.

This unique volume brings together four of Molière's greatest verse comedies covering the best years of his prolific writing career. Actor, director, and playwright, Molière (1622-73) was one of the finest and most influential French dramatists, adept at portraying human foibles and puncturing pomposity. The School for Wives was his first great success; Tartuffe, condemned and banned for five years, his most controversial play. The Misanthrope is his acknowledged masterpiece, and The Clever Women his last, and perhaps best-constructed, verse piece. In addition this collection includes a spirited attack on his enemies and a defense of his theater, in the form of two sparkling short plays, The School for Wives Criticized and The Impromptu at Versailles.

This new verse translation of Aristophanes' comedies offers one of the world's great comic dramatists in a form that is both historically faithful and theatrically vigorous. Aristophanes' plays were produced for the festival theater of classical Athens in the fifth century BC and encompass the whole gamut of humor, from brilliantly inventive fantasy to obscene vulgarity. This edition includes a substantial general introduction and introductory essays for each of the plays, as well as full explanatory notes and an index of names.

<B>The ideal single-volume introduction to the greatest masterpieces of ancient comedy<BR><BR> From the fifth to the second century B.C., theatrical comedy flourished in Greece and Rome. This new anthology brings together four essential masterworks of the genre: Aristophanes’ bold, imaginative The Birds; Menander’s The Girl from Samos, which explores popular contemporary themes of mistaken identity and sexual misbehavior; and two later Roman comic plays—Plautus’s The Brothers Menaechmus, the inspiration for Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors; and Terence’s bawdy yet sophisticated double love plot, <I>The Eunuch. Together, these four plays capture the genius of classical comedy for students, theatergoers, actors, lovers of satire, and anyone interested in the ancient world.

Aristophanes of Athens (ca. 446-386 B.C.), one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity. He wrote at least 40 plays, of which eleven have survived complete. Here Jeffrey Henderson presents a freshly edited Greek text of three of the plays and a lively, unexpurgated translation.

One of Shakespeare's most rollicking and beloved comedies, The Taming of the Shrew was also one of his earliest, probably written about 1592. The introduction to this edition offers a full and original consideration of the play's textual problems, a study of sources, a survey of scholarship and criticism, with the editor's own critical appreciation, and a study of the comedy's fortunes in the theatre.

Aristophanes has long been admired for his brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays--with a suitably romping translation facing a freshly edited Greek text--is now brought to completion with this fourth volume. Frogs was produced in 405 b.c., shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides. Dionysus, on a journey to the underworld to retrieve Euripides, is recruited to judge a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, a contest that yields both comedy and insight on ancient literary taste. In Assemblywomen Athenian women plot to save Athens from male misgovernance. They institute a new social order in which all inequalities based on wealth, age, and beauty are eliminated--with raucously comical results. The gentle humor and straightforward morality of Wealth made it the most popular of Aristophanes' plays from classical times to the Renaissance. Here the god Wealth, cured of his blindness, is newly able to distinguish good people from bad.

<p> Aristophanes of Athens (ca. 446–386 <span class="era">BCE), one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. He wrote at least forty plays, of which eleven have survived complete. In this new Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristophanes, Jeffrey Henderson presents a freshly edited Greek text and a lively, unexpurgated translation with full explanatory notes.

The general introduction that begins Volume I reviews Aristophanes' career and brings current scholarly insights to bear on the intriguing question of the comic poet as a political force. In Acharnians a small landowner, tired of the Peloponnesian War, magically arranges a personal peace treaty and, borrowing a disguise from Euripides, demonstrates the injustice of the war in a contest with the bellicose Acharnians. Also in this volume is Knights, perhaps the most biting satire of a political figure (Cleon) ever written.