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Birds: The Complete Greek Comedy
Aristophanes
Open Access
Aren't wings just the most wonderful things? A magpie... a cluckheaded crow... a desolate wilderness and two true blue Athenians lusting for a lovely leisure land, some country like a blanket, soft and snug—This is The Birds re-created here by William Arrowsmith for the modern reader and the modern stage. This is a fantastic extravaganza, eminently stageworthy and readable. It is frankly burlesque, boisterously bawdy, and at times heroically low. It is the best of Aristophanes and the best of Greek comedy, in a new translation, "a fat and succulent haunch of speech, a meal to shiver the soul." The place is Cloudcuckooland in the fifth century B. C., where the birds have been incited to establish their own city, and, according to Aristophanes, Zeus has had it. Overnight the birds have become the vogue of human fashion. Men have begun to play ducks and drakes, to grub for chicken feed, to hatch duels, and being rooked or gulled to have their gooses cooked. One of the greatest comedies ever written, The Birds is splendidly lyrical, shot through with gentle Utopian satire and touched by the sadness of the human condition. In no other play is Aristophanes' comic vision so comprehensively or so lovingly at odds with his world and ours. For, as he says, it's Beautiful for swarming skies and there are birds, birds, billions of birds.