Aristophanes, the supreme master of Old Comedy, wrote plays whose cheerful obscenity and sharp political satire have never been equalled.
In The Wasps an old-fashioned fther and his loose-living son come to blows - and end up in court; elsewhere Aristophanes milks the clash of generations for all it's worth by sending up the purveyonrs of new ideas like Socrates and Euripides (the most controversial of the great tragedians). In The Poet and the Women Euripides, accused of misogyny, gets a relative in drag to infiltrate an all-woman festival and find out what revenge is being plotted, with predictably bawdy results. In The Frogs, written in the darkest days of the Peloponnesian War, the god Dionysus descends to the Underworld to find a poet to bring back: does Athens in her hour of danger need the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus or the brilliant modern cleverness of Euripedes? As the great debate proceeds, Aristophanes combines parody with slapstick and political discussion with pantomime high spirits to produce a hilarious and unique masterpiece.
