Francesco Morosi

That a strong relationship must have existed between Ben Jonson’s theatre works and Aristophanes’ plays is a long-standing scholarly commonplace. The question, however, has hardly ever been approached from a truly comparative perspective, taking into account the formal, structural, literary, and ideological peculiarities of both Aristophanic and Jonsonian drama.
This book aims to address this issue with reference to an enlightening case study – meta-performance, a fundamental comic strategy that characterizes both authors and their corpora. Scenes of meta-performance frequently depict would-be poets, incompetent musicians, or treacherous intellectuals. But how do Aristophanes and Ben Jonson represent poetic, musical, and artistic performances within their own plays?
At the crossroads of philology, reception studies, and comparative studies, this book will make a significant contribution toward a substantial re-evaluation of Ben Jonson’s classical reading and dramatic strategies.

Con la sua fantasia inesauribile, Aristofane è senza dubbio uno dei veri inventori del teatro europeo. Ma proprio la fantasia esplosiva di Aristofane ha impedito per molto tempo alla critica di considerare la sua produzione alla stregua di quella di autori ritenuti più seri e drammaturgicamente inquadrati. Questo studio si propone di offrire una nuova prospettiva sulla tecnica teatrale di Aristofane, a partire da un’indagine della gestione dello spazio scenico nelle sue commedie: non tanto una ricostruzione della messa in scena, ma un’interpretazione in chiave semiotica della creazione, diegetica e mimetica, dello spazio in cui si muove l’azione teatrale. Tramite una prospettiva aperta e comparata, il libro offre una nuova lettura di tutte le commedie superstiti, e una riconsiderazione complessiva e radicale del teatro di Aristofane: un teatro fondato interamente sullo scontro fra identità e poteri contrapposti, innescato dalla miccia formidabile dell’eroismo comico, capace di stravolgere, inventare e dominare.

This essay aims at reassessing Aristophanic presence in Ben Jonson’s «The
Staple of News» (first performed in 1626). Although single verbal references
to Aristophanic drama are scant in the play, it will be contended that both
the ideological posture and the dramatic technique of the English play are
strongly influenced by Jonson’s in-depth reading of Aristophanes. This will
also lead us to re-evaluate at least partially Jonson’s intertextual strategies.

In 2019, a group of university students from the Scuola Normale (Pisa, Italy) was admitted to a theatre course held in an Italian jail and normally open only to inmates. Students and inmates worked together for some months to a production of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". This paper tells their story.

Building on an insight by Kenneth Dover, this paper proposes a comparative reading of the finale of Aeschylus’ Eumenides and that of Aristophanes’ Frogs: in both texts, a torch-lit procession accompanies a character (the Semnai in the tragedy, Aeschylus in the comedy) who must ensure the well-being of the city. In this performative, structural, dramaturgical and thematic similarity, we find Aristophanes’ inten- tion to revive not only Aeschylus as a character, but also Aeschylus as a playwright, espousing a qualifying point of his ideology, the call for the city harmony.

This essay aims at comparing and contrasting two instances of the paradox of poverty: the agon of Aristophanes’ Wealth (the first explicit extant formulation of the paradox), and Thomas Randolph’s translation-adaptation of the scene in "Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery" (approx. 1625). By so doing, this essay will show the intellectual matrix of the paradoxical defence of poverty: in both scenes, the personification of Poverty is clearly represented as an intellectual. This relates to the intellectual nature of the paradox of poverty, and to its intellectual origin, which will be traced back to Socratic thinking.

The Pythia’s prologue in Aeschylus’ Eumenides serves an important function – since the action has just moved to Delphi, it must create its own space, and provide the spectators with a credible ‘verbal setting’. This paper wishes to show how Aeschylus achieves this poetic and dramatic aim. It will contend that Aeschylus uses topographical and archaeological data to represent the new space, and it will zero in on two parts of the Pythia’s monologue – the initial prayer to the Delphic gods, and the description of the Erinyes. By means of comparison with coeval lyric and dramatic passages, the paper aims at showing how archaeology can be used as a poetically effective strategy.

The description of the Erinyes given by the Pythia in the prologue of Aeschylus’ Eumenides is a fundamental dramaturgical moment in the trilogy: after appearing to Orestes alone in the finale of Choephori, the Furies are now visible – exactly in the same terms in which they were to Orestes – to other characters, too. However, the paradosis of lin. 54 is certainly corrupt. Which liquid should drip from the Erinyes’ eyes? This paper reviews Burges’ influential emendation, and puts forward a new hypothesis.

Eumenides 517-25 contains a centrepiece of Aeschylean ideology—the role of punishment and fear in the ruling of the city. However, the text is vexed by serious issues at lines 522-5. This paper reassesses the main problems, reviews the most influential emendations, and puts forward a new hypothesis. It argues in favour of circumscribing the corruption, offering a new interpretation that permits retention of parts of the text that most editors have deemed impossible to restore.

Sex is a centerpiece of most Aristophanic comedies: the hero’s triumph is often rewarded, and represented, by sexual pleasure. However, sex in Aristophanic drama is a complex phaenomenon, involving desire, power, money, and some of the fundamental dynamics of the archaia as a genre. In Aristophanes’ plays, it is possible to draw in broad terms a distinction between sex as a narcissistic realization of individual desire, and sex as a tool in power plays and relationships. This paper investigates both these aspects of sex in Aristophanic comedy (from Acharnians to Lysistrata, from Ecclesiazusae to Wealth), in order to provide a new interpretive framework for sexual pleasure in Aristophanes.

The agon of Aristophanes’ Wealth has puzzled scholars for decades, raising some major thematic issues: who wins the agon? Penia’s argumentation seems more rational and easy to be shared; but did Aristophanes really want his audience to sympathize with the antagonist rather than with Chremylus? The question has proven a conundrum for Aristophanic scholarship.
In my paper, I will take one aspect of the question into closer consideration – Penia’s representation: how is she portrayed? Is it a typically Aristophanic personification or can be some precise models be recognized? In my opinion, Aristophanes was consistently drawing from a quite common model in ancient comedy, philosophers: Penia looks, speaks, and acts as a philosopher – or rather, as the comic type of philosopher (with special reference to Socratic thinkers).
This observation can help reach some conclusions about the winner of the agon: Penia’s being in all respects a philosopher is what makes her argue in a rationalistic and more conclusive way; but it is also what makes her a negative character, preventing the audience from sympathizing with her reasons: since (comic) philosophers are usually portrayed as living destitute lives, Penia’s programme is intrinsically philosophical, and profoundly negative in a comic, and Aristophanic, context.
Moreover, an in-depth analysis of Penia’s vocabulary and argumentation also shows that her arguments are hardly unparalleled in 4th-century Greek literature. A close relation can be shown to exist between Penia’s arguments about wealth and poverty and those of Socrates in Plato’s Republic (especially as outlined in Books 4 and 5). It seems therefore possible to hypothesize that Wealth, quite as much as Ecclesiazusae, shows some relevant philosophical and textual similarities to the Republic.

As scholarship on Elizabethan theatre has widely recognized, Elizabethan drama depended heavily on words to create its own world: on a relatively bare stage, the only tool to have audiences visualize changes of settings was to describe them. Such an importance of words, of course, entails the possibility to gloss over whatever was not relevant for the poet: when the playwright did not need any specific description of a place or a time, it was sufficient not to mention it. Placelessness is a technique that Elizabethan dramatists used consciously.
Aristophanic drama works in a similar way: as it presupposes poor technical resources, it is a fundamentally anti-realistic genre, and it depends on words as much as Elizabethan theatre. This paper aims to show, through an analysis of Peace, how Aristophanes used placelessness to create meanings.

Scholarship has zeroed in on the portrait of Socrates and Socratism in Aristophanes’ Clouds, but has usually neglected the poetic creation of the Thinkery throughout the play. By studying the symbolic use of theatrical space (both mimetic and diegetic) along the horizontal and the vertical axes in the construction of the φροντιστήριον, this paper aims to show that, in featuring the Thinkery and Socrates, Aristophanes had a precise parallel in mind: Pythagorean schools.

Clouds and Wasps share a common theme: the problematic relationship between father and son. Is it a simple affinity, or is there something more? The first part of this paper aims to show that the two plays share more profound features. The second part of the paper will offer a parallel reading of Clouds and Wasps , showing that the two fathers are described in a similar way, but with quite opposite ends.

Clouds and Wasps share a common theme: the problematic relationship between father and son. Is it a simple affinity, or is there something more? The first part of this paper aims to show that the two plays share more profound features. The second part of the paper will offer a parallel reading of Clouds and Wasps, showing that the two fathers are described in a similar way, but with quite opposite ends.

Prometheus’ description of Basileia in Aristophanes’ Birds has always aroused interest among scholars. However, some new perspectives can be offered by the analysis of ARISTOPH. Av. 1537-43. My paper will focus on the comic procedures used by Aristophanes in these lines, with particular attention to the most important verb in the passage, ταμιεύειν. By the polysemy of the verb, I will argue, Aristophanes not only conjures up a semi-Athenian nature for his goddess, but also makes explicit reference to an Athenian official, the ταμίας εἰς τὰ νεώρια, that we find attested only in 4th-century inscriptions.

This paper deals with a crucial moment of the history of classicism and classical culture in the Western world: American independence and the classical rhetoric developed by patriots. The paper focuses on Mercy Otis Warren's dramatic works, and explores their relationship with late antiquity as a new paradigm of classicism in America, as opposed to the dominant paradigm of republican Rome. The paper also tries to explain the origins and the reasons of the development of this new cultural model.

* To be published *

Pasolini’s translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (1960), though disapproved by many scholars, is a very valuable piece of poetry and textual interpretation. Pasolini transferred his interpretation of the trilogy into his translation, by means of a widespread process of ‘linguistic re-functioning’. Through the compared analysis of Pasolini’s translation, his other works and the three translations of Oresteia to which he referred, this paper tries to identify and contextualize the terms of this process.

Peace is one of Aristophanes’ most poetically resonant comedies. This work provides an analysis of a paratragic feature hitherto almost neglected by scholars, the figure of Prometheus, especially as characterised in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In his poetical and parodistic texture, Aristophanes uses some of Prometheus’ most evident peculiarities to describe Trygeus and Hermes, once he has accepted to join the Greeks in the release of Peace; the observation of the different uses that Aristophanes makes of this paradigm throughout the comedy helps to understand the progression of action and characterization in Peace.

The episode of Cyzicus in book 1 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, which has long been considered a useless narrative connection, is on the contrary a fundamental point in the definition of Jason and the other Argonauts as characters and of their role in the poem. This definition is brought about by a direct contrast between Herakles’ deed against the Gegeneis and Jason’s hamartia during the battle against the Doliones. This paper tries to identify the terms of this literary process, and supplies a brief analysis of both apollonius’ mythological sources and of the use he made of them for his poetical purpose.