Let's talk about the plays of ancient Greece. They're a good way to start with the greeks, since they were stories widely known by the average greek citizen.
What's the best greek play, in your opinion, /lit/? I like The Bacchae, Oedipus Rex and Prometheus Bound. Medea is pretty nice too.
The plays were a huge influence over many writers - Shakespeare, Milton, etc.
Any important works that should be read in order to understand the plays even more?
Maybe, greeks general.
>inb4 meme
>>7637155
meme
>>7637155
I like Ibsen very much, OP.
>>7637195
Greeks, not romans, imbecile.
>>7637155
I'm a total pleb. If I start with those, can I move on to read other plays or there's an order to do so?
Agamemnon is still my personal favourite. The lurking House Atredes at the back of the stage that swallows up the doom actors is amazing.
I'm always amazed by how little we actually have of these play writes work - they'd all written 50+ plays, and we're left with just a handful.
>>7637313
Word, Agamemnon is still my favorite too. I particularly like A.W. Verall's translation.
All the Aeschylus I've read thus far has been energizing.
Xanadu and Alexandria, etc.
>>7637155
Aristophanes can be funny
>>7637155
I'm about to embark upon an exploration of the redundancies between Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes. I may use Aristotle for reference.
>>7637155
reading translations is meaningless. read them in the original. Otherwise is meaningless
Lysistrata is fucking hilarious.
The painter Francis Bacon was very influenced by Aeschylus.
>>7637897
the bait tho
My favorite is Amphitruo by Plautus
While technically Plautus is a latin play-writer, the setting, the character and the spirit is greek, literally a palliate play
It's pretty dark from Sosias viewpoint
>>7638254
Plautus was inspired by many greek plays. That's why.
Aristophanes ripping on Euripides is some of my favourite banter ever.
>>7637155
underrated thread.
Give me plays I can read, /lit/.
What's an interesting Greek play I can adapt to a modern setting and film with a black female lead?
>>7639541
Antigone.
And no, I'm not encouraging you to do so.
>>7639541
the assemblywomen, easily
>>7639596
it's about women fighting the patriarchy. there's literally no way you won't make it a better satire for your efforts.
>>7639601
I was trying to avoid a story about sexism.
And I'm not sure how I can adapt Antigone, I kind of have an idea, but not really.
I'm really at a loss at trying to come up with a story, I just went with drama as a genre because I have a very, very, very, very low budget.
>>7639620
Okay maybe you could fuck up a comedy.
>>7639642
Yeah, after all, any good comedy has elements of drama.
But which one though? I've also been sifting through Shakespeare's works for inspiration.
I just need to find a good idea and make it comical, imo the marking of good comedies are when the story doesn't revolve around a comedic situation.
>>7639654
How about you read the two you've been suggested?
>>7639656
Okay, you're right, Assemblywomen could make an amazing comedy.
Sounds a bit too large scale and NSFW than what I'm looking for.
Either way, if you're the one who suggested it, thank you, I might want to adapt that one day.
>>7637155
Shakespeare's major classical influences were the Roman tragedian Seneca and the Roman historian Tacitus. As far as I'm aware, Shakespeare could not read Attic Greek and was quite unfamiliar with these plays.
>>7639720
>implying people have to read in the original
>>7640390
>implying they don't
>>7640390
I implied no such thing since I wrote 'and', not 'and thus' or 'and so'. Generally tho, those in early modern times who engaged with Greek literature read Greek.
>>7640563
>william_caxton_rolling_in_his_grave.mp4
>>7640390
He would have had to know Greek to know anything about the majority of them, since the Romans only imitated New Comedy and didn't care much about tragedy.
>>7640650
>the dark ages were really dark
>i have no explanation how he got romance lyrics from the french
>no idea how he understood danish sagas
>his tragedies fitting aristotle i'm sure are coincidence
How much of canon did you think we lost, and when do you think we got it back?
>>7640666
Aristotle's theories on tragedy were widely studied and influenced the entire dramatic tradition up to Shakespeare. It's absurd to claim that Shakespeare would have needed direct knowledge of Aristotle to have been influenced by him.
Of course you already knew this and are simply muddying the waters to further your Satanic purposes, as your post number proves.
>>7640685
You're the idiot who thinks that translations of Greeks haven't been going since centuries before his birth, so I'm figuring your sudden shift to "widely studied" should let you know what a pleb you've been being about this. But seriously, that's as dumb as thinking he read the Roman authors in Latin.
Anyone Persai here?
>>7640691
I'm an idiot, I'm a pleb, I'm dumb, but Shakespeare's ignorance of Greek tragedy is a well established fact of scholarship. Fuck off and read a book, you retard.
>>7640714
No, Shakespeare wasn't fluent in Greek. That's fact. However, he uses most of Plutarch's Parallel Lives as a basis for his Roman plays, so there's that whole thing where he's copying the North translation in scholarship which says you're a fucking idiot spreading misinformation because you can't tell the diff.
>>7640714
I have heard the same but after reading more and more Shakespeare, Greek literature and scholarship I am no longer sure I agree.
Is it just Latin? Is it the traditions of the theater? Is it the church? It's there but where does it come from?
>>7640729
Plutarch's Parallel Lives isn't Greek tragedy you fucking retard.
>>7640769
Oh, so now you're going back on Aristotle being "widely studied". kek, such a poor loser
>>7640772
Oh no you're right. Aristotle is and always has been very obscure and the only way Shakespeare's plays could possibly fit his theories is by Shakespeare's direct knowledge of Aristotle's Poetics. Every school child who sits an exam on Shakespeare is also a scholar of Aristotle who owns multiple editions of the Poetics and has read all of the secondary literature.
>>7640823
Yes, I know you have no idea what a grammar school in Stratford would teach its students in Shakespeare's time. It's almost as if you're hoping nobody else would, so you don't have to ask a question and learn something.
>>7640836
I know the emphasis would have been on Latin and Latin authors. I don't have any pretense to direct knowledge of educational standards in Stratford, but unlike you I am educated enough in these matters to know that study of Greek was not uniform across England.
Of course tho you are a great authority on this subject, and your worthless speculations are an easy match for hundreds of years of Shakespeare scholarship carried out professionally in the academy.
>>7640856
Aesop for first year study was a regular to the point it's hard to find exclusions. Your surface knowledge that it's mainly Latin ignored that Shakespeare read Latin glosses of the Greeks, and English glosses of Latin, amongst other translation variants. This idea that he based his shit mainly in Latin when the only play we can say for sure he read entirely in Latin is one of Plautus' to make Comedy of Errors is hilarious, because it not only over estimates his Latin, it ignores how many more plays are reflections of Greek writers
[Not just Plutarch btw, but you'll have to ask those pesky questions to find out which ones he copied and from which translations. Try Google, they already know the extent of your ignorance and are accustomed to it.]
I frankly don't believe you have even a sophomoric understanding of the Greeks or Shakespeare, or Latin for that matter. There's reams of scholarship which compares Shakespeare's phrasing directly to the Greek writers he used as source material, and that being surprising to you is a hint you've not scratched the surface.
Gold level:
>Elektra by Eurpidipes
I tried to get into their comedy, but I bet I was taking everything out of context.
I've only read Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Medea
Of those, I probably liked Antigone the best
>>7640886
Yet you haven't been able to provide any evidence for Shakespeare reading or being familiar with Aristotle or the Greek tragedians. Keep up the shitposting tho friend, it's funny seeing retards get angry.
>>7640886
Against all the odds, perhaps, there is a real affinity between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. What there is not is any ‘reception’ in the ordinary sense: any influence of Greek tragedy on Shakespeare; any Shakespearean ‘reading’ of the Attic drama. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare ever encountered any of the Greek tragedians, either in the original language or otherwise. There were no English versions of Greek tragedy published in his time; and any indirect influence from Euripides, Sophocles, or Aeschylus will have been mediated through classical Latin sources and those, in turn, through Renaissance culture in general.
>>7641237
>Aristotle
You ceded that he'd be familiar with him. You've gone from "he was totally quoting these people he rarely quotes from Latin, he couldn't know Greeks at all and defo not translations" to "omg the Greeks were just so in the air, it was impossible for him not to have absorbed tragedy's elements from just being in an English theatre"
Meanwhile, middle school students get told about this "I lurnt Greeks too1!!!" in joke in Hamlet regularly:
Polonius gives advice to his son Laertes, (I, 3, 59; read along kiddies) and he quotes from Isocrates' advice to Demonicos. To an audience which doesn't know what Greek rote learning in a grammar school was, that just seems like advice, so Polonius seems wise to the masses. Anyone with Shakespeare's education would know he's painting Polonius as a Greek rhetoric educated man, but one who learnt his Greeks not in Greek but English and from Bury. In Hamlet's second soliloquy, just after Polonius tells his qtgf to "read on this book", Hamlet quotes Catullus, which sets him up as Latin educated in Latin, but English in his delivery. He's playing the old empire against the new, the one he favours against the one he also knows, and this continues through his other plays.
He's read Homer in older translations, but favours the contemporary, and tells the story of Troy as Horace not Homer where he can. Anyone who had read Chaucer and Chapman knew he was choosing one not the other, and why. And more of his contemporaries had read both, so it's not like you've achieved basic level in their worldview in English translations of Greeks.
These are decisions which make sense only for his familiarity with the Greeks and Romans in general, and above what one would expect of someone who stopped at grammar school. There's a chance he ran into the Greek anthology at school and found one of Zenodotus' epigrams so moving that he wrote a sonnet based in it decades later, but he must have sung Anacreon sober a lot first in Stratford to get his drinking song so close that everyone assumed direct plagiarism in Timon of Athensdon't worry, we know he read Anacreon in translationthis spoiler is to tell you I know you know shit about Latin as a language because Latin uses Greek all the fucking timeAristotle has been the basis of rhetoric since Aristotle, all through the medieval period, and for some reason you think he dropped out when translations were becoming double popular because of the Protestants? I can't even.
You've missed so much of the reactionary parts of Shakespeare, I feel kind of bad for you just reading/watching these plays where the words mean nothing to you. I imagine it's the feeling seated patrons felt at the Globe while listening to the grumbles agree with Polonius' wisdom.
>>7641337
Still no evidence that he was familiar with the Greek tragedians or Aristotle.
Keep trying, cunt.
>>7641343
>Aristotle
Are you saying he didn't go to grammar school, or that just his grammar school didn't have rhetoric?
I've really seen no evidence you're familiar with Shakespeare, the Greeks, or Latin. This is probably why I seem to have to keep asking the above question since you seem to also not know what it implies.Aristotle, it's the word after the implication arrow
You get grumpy when I spoonfeed you tho
>>7641360
I'm saying you haven't presented any evidence that he was familiar with the Greek tragedians or Aristotle.
Keep trying.
>>7641337
>Anyone with Shakespeare's education would know he's painting Polonius as a Greek rhetoric educated man, but one who learnt his Greeks not in Greek but English and from Bury.
Polonius is Danish you dunce.
>>7641373
Answer the question: are you claiming that Shakespeare wasn't grammar school educated, or that his grammar school, unlike all other grammar schools, did not teach rhetoric and therefore Aristotle who is the foundation block of rhetoric throughout the period? You can suggest alternate possibilities if you can come up with any while this butthurt.
>>7641378
undskyld :^)
>>7641389
Some study of Aristotle's Rhetoric in some form or other implies no familiarity with his Poetics, which is the subject under discussion.
>>7641417
You know those two works are usually separated off as twinned works, away from the rest of Aristotle for a reason?of course you don't know, it would make more sense in your world for you to be right than to pair the works, and even more sense for Shakespeare to only know about Aristotlean speeches not playsYou could at least be interesting and claim he'd been taught from a vernacular rhetoric or even try to play up the Latin angle and claim he'd learnt his speeches from the Roman rhetorics. If you go with the second one, what you want to use to back it up is Shakespeare doesn't write speeches like Aristotle recommends but like Cicero.Cicero wrote in Latin btw, you can check it if you think it's a trapWe're shitting up what could be a perfectly good Greek thread with your "i'm ten and what is Shakespeare" routine. Be a bit creative so we can justify this.
>>7641462
>You know those two works are usually separated off as twinned works, away from the rest of Aristotle for a reason?
Yet this is not evidence that the Poetics was taught alongside the Rhetoric to schoolboys in Stratford grammar schools is it?
Once again you totally humiliate yourself by veering off from what anybody has actually said and going off on windbag tangents to show off how clever you are for knowing who Cicero is on an anonymous message board. Really quite embarrassing.
>>7641600
>I'll pretend not to understand rhetorics the discipline included more works than those titled rhetoric, that'll make me seem interesting
c'mon anon, i didn't even mention how much cringeworthy it would be if you tried to talk to me about cicero when you needed to pronounce his name. i told you, be interesting if you're going to be ignorant.
>>7641643
Either provide evidence that Shakespeare as a Statford schoolboy would have studied Aristotle's Poetics and the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, or fuck off. Your pompous shitposting is getting quite tiring.
>>7641655
Every school boy would have: it's the same reason he would know Isocrates' letter because the basic texts of rhetoric were the same for like a millenium (besides the obvious exception which wouldn't apply here). Fuck off unless you have something more than aporia, it's a thread about the Greeks and you're just shitposting your ignorance of Shakespeare, ichthyophagosyeah, i'm insulting you in thread relevant ways you won't understand without a thorough backing in Greeks, elfskin. amazing what you can do with a good education :P
