ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on James Robinson Planché one of the writers who made their names, reputations and, indeed, fortunes in this world of the dedicatedly unserious, but who might, nonetheless, claim to have most contact with the spirit of of Aristophanes. The 'Birds' of Aristophanes is a short and unsurprisingly sanitized version of the Aristophanes which concludes with a transformation scene to Olympus and the intervention of Jupiter to restore conventional morality. A Harvard Birds of 1883 has been claimed as the first production of an Aristophanes play since classical times and that was certainly closer to the Greek original. English burlesque by contrast was born in the newly legitimate theatre of the Restoration and had its heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as parodies of serious plays. The first translation of Aristophanes into English is usually identified as Thomas Randolph's Wealth published in 1651 as Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery.
