Frogs for Middle School

Abstract

Frogs for Middle School HELAINE L. SMITH When Aristophanes produced Frogs in 405 bc, the age of the great dramatists was over. Aeschylus had died in 456 or 455 bc, Euripides in 406, and Sophocles in 405. In this great comedy, Aristophanes presents the god of theatre, Dionysus, longing for a master playwright to guide Athens in the path of virtue once again. The god sets out, with his slave Xanthias and with the assistance of Heracles, to bring Euripides back from the dead. Instead, Dionysus returns to Athens with Aeschylus, who is more stately and traditional than Euripides, perhaps less fun, but able to write plays that teach the citizens what they and Athens once valued and once were, and what they might again become. It is partly for this reason that updating Frogs—as happened on Broadway a few years ago by transforming Euripides into Bernard Shaw and Aeschylus into Shakespeare—is a mistake. For one thing, the contest between Shaw and Shakespeare, unlike the imagined rivalry of Aeschylus and Euripides, is not a close contest at all. For another, a Broadway script doctor needs to have not only the most thoroughgoing knowledge of both playwrights, but wit equal to Aristophanes’ own genius. Most significantly, the purpose of the katabasis, the descent to the Underworld, is lost with a Shaw-Shakespeare paradigm in which neither playwright is fighting for the soul of England. Frogs is not simply about who is the better playwright; it is about the capacity of a great playwright to guide and regenerate the city at a time when all seems lost—and in 405 bc Athens was lost, her resources depleted from thirty years of war and civil instability , with a Spartan victory imminent. No such weight or moral urgency hangs upon the choice between two British arion 22.2 fall 2014 playwrights, three centuries apart, or, indeed, upon any substitution of modern artists. Directors update shows because they fear that Aristophanes is obscure. There are, of course, highly technical arguments about Greek metrics and Greek music in Frogs that we cannot easily follow. But there is much else in the literary contest scene that is accessible and hilarious—the “bottle of oil” sequence , the weighing scene, and so on—scenes wonderful to act and well within the range of any audience, including students in middle school. In productions of Shakespeare, as in productions by the great Greek dramatists, the closer one keeps to the original text, the more successful the production is likely to be, and certainly more satisfying to a young audience just discovering Aristophanes. Wasps, Birds, Clouds, and Women at the Thesmophoria take their titles from their Choruses. Lysistrata, Peace, and Wealth take theirs either from the protagonist or from an allegorical character who is a god of sorts and is the focus of the action. Not Frogs. Its true chorus is the Chorus of Initiates . The Frog Chorus is utterly unmusical. It neither dances nor sings. It croaks. And in its 58 lines onstage—or, according to some critics, offstage— it does not occupy even four percent of total playing time. It is, then, a false lead, an expectation that goes nowhere. And that, Professor Nancy H. Demand argues in an article called “The Identity of the Frogs,”1 is precisely Aristophanes’ point. One of the three competitors in the Lenaia of 405 bc, in which Frogs won first prize, was the comic playwright Phrynicus, with a comedy called Muses. In Aristophanes’ prologue, Dionysus and Xanthias joke about prologue jokes that dull-witted comic playwrights use time and again, naming Phrynicus as one such hack. Demand points out that there was a tragedian who competed against Aeschylus about fifty years earlier, around 460 bc, also named PhryniFROGS for middle school 98 1. Nancy H. Demand, “The Identity of the Frogs,” Classical Philology, Vol. 65, no. 2, April 1970, pp. 83–87. cus, and that one of the politicians in Athens in the decade in which Frogs was produced, an encourager of factionalism and one who, for personal gain, was an underminer of policies , was yet another Phrynicus. Each of these Phrynicuses is inferior either in art or in governance. Phryne...