Introduction

A clever citizen founds a city in the sky, rules over the birds, and replaces Zeus; a poor farmer negotiates a private peace with his city’s arch-enemy; war-weary brides refuse sex with their husbands and an army of old women seize the city’s treasury to force a peace treaty; a man disguised as a woman sneaks into a secret women’s festival to save his relative from death; a group of women dressed as men overthrow the government through a peaceful coup d'état: Aristophanes’ plots present readers and spectators with wonderful worlds that long for peace, plenty, and happiness for the underdog. Yet, the interpreter of ancient Greek comedy faces a problematic and frustrating task. Not only do we possess a relatively small number of representative texts - tragedy remains in better condition than comedy, with whole extant works by three central authors compared to comedy’s one author - but these texts also often appear fragmentary or spurious in part. The manuscripts contain no stage directions, actors’ notes, or author’s revisions. We have no information about the original productions, no reviews, no detailed history of any play’s reception. Our information about almost every imaginable aspect of ancient Greek theater production is extremely limited. Hence, the enterprise of this book will require a stretch of imagination. We can, however, approach the circumstances surrounding the original production of Aristophanes’ plays with educated guesses and imaginative suggestions based on the little retrievable evidence. This chapter will review the available information about the conditions of theatrical performance and production in ancient Athens as well as describe the current state of research on the images of women in ancient Greek literature. At its end, I will describe the theories of feminist performance critics and develop a methodology for looking at the construction of the female figures in Aristophanes' plays.