Study Guide: The Clouds p.1

Study Guide for The Clouds, Fall 2006. by Amy R. Cohen, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College

There’s almost no wrong way to approach the play. My way is traditionalist in that I try to understand the plays with the traditional conventions for which they were written, but people have been finding new ideas and new things to do with the Greek plays for 2500 years, and I encourage you to do the same.

What follows is background information of various sorts to get you oriented. In most cases, I’ll use the Latinized versions of Greek names, which are usually the more familiar forms to Americans.

I always welcome more questions. Please don’t hesitate to email or call: [email protected] or 434/947- 8306.

I. Basics of the Organization of Fifth-Century Athenian Drama How the Greeks put on the plays along with some basic terms.

II. Aristophanes and Old Comedy Who he was and what he did.

III. The Clouds The play and its importance. What’s this play all about anyway?

IV. The R-MWC Greek Plays What Miss Mabel did, and what we do now.

Study Guide: The Clouds p.2

I. Basics of the Organization of Fifth-Century Athenian Drama Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes wrote their plays in verse for an annual five- or six-day spring festival of dramatic competition dedicated to Dionysus called the Great (or City) Dionysia, which began with a procession and a ceremony called a proagôn—a before-the-contest—which was a preview of the plays to come. Three tragedians competed at the festival, each presenting three tragedies and a satyr play (a tetralogy) over the course of a day, and three or five comic playwrights presented one comedy each on a fourth day. An official (archon) of the city presided over the festival and chose the playwrights who would compete. Although it is not entirely clear who financed the productions, we do know that wealthy citizens, known in this capacity as choregoi, paid for and were responsible for the training of the choruses and received the prizes for the winning plays. The chosen playwrights not only wrote and acted in their plays, they also directed and rehearsed the other actors. This involvement in all aspects of production earned them the name didaskaloi—teachers—since they taught the plays to the rest of their companies. The plays and later the tragic actors (one from each tetralogy from around 449) were judged by ten men, one chosen by lot from each of the administrative districts of Athens and sworn to impartiality. The winning playwright and actor each earned a place in the following year’s festival. The productions took place in the Theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis. In the fifth century the natural curve of the land was enhanced to accommodate wooden seats for the audience that formed an irregular semicircle (known as the theatron or watching space) around the acting area they looked down on. That area—the orchêstra or dancing place—was a flat, generally round space with a diameter of at least sixty-five feet. Behind it was the skênê, which in the fifth century was probably a temporary wooden structure with one central door. The skênê provided the door as an entrance and exit, a “backstage” in which to change costume and store props, a simple backdrop for the action, and a roof- level surface for the occasional appearance above. By 431 some sort of crane allowed actors to appear apo tês mêchanês—from the machine or ex machina—flying in above the skênê. In addition to the skênê door, two pathways to the left and the right of the skênê and just in front of the forward edge of the theatron— the eisodoi—provided ways to reach and retreat from the orchêstra. Part of the audience could see performers for much of the length of their entrances on these two paths. Men performed the dramas. Actors played the named roles and twelve or fifteen men sang and danced the part of the chorus; all wore costumes and masks (prosôpa), which covered their whole faces and head. The playwright was also probably the first and, at first, the only actor, in dialogue with his chorus. At some point someone added a second actor (Aristotle gives Aeschylus the credit), and then, by 458, a third (the addition of which is traditionally said to be an innovation of Sophocles). Comedies regularly need four actors to play all the roles.

Study Guide: The Clouds p.3

This is a schematic of the Theater of Dionysus. The orchêstra was probably not so regularly round in the first hundred or so years of the dramatic festivals. The theatron is where the seats are, and it was also probably not so perfectly round, but it was very large, and as many as 15,000 spectators attended the plays. The Dell at R- MWC is really much like the Theater of Dionysus, except that our theatron is smaller (although we've played for an audience of 1100), and the surface of our orchêstra is grass, not dirt.

Things you may have been taught about Greek Drama that Are Not True: 1) “Tragic flaw.” It doesn’t exist. 2) “Aristotelian Unities.” They don’t exist. (The last play of The Oresteia changes scenes from Delphi to Athens, just to give one example.) 3) “The Chorus is a) Everyman or b) the playwright.” Nope and Nope. The Chorus was the one element of a story that didn’t come from the myth. The playwrights exploited that freedom to do all kinds of things with their choruses. 4) “Absolutely only three actors.” Close, but not quite. At least two other extant tragedies need four actors. 5) “No one dies on stage.” Well, Ajax does in his play. Just to name one we know about.

Things to do in the classroom: Move the chairs around in your classroom so that you make a playing space where the audience curves around the players. Do a scene from a play there and think about what the players have to do differently than they would on a raised stage with the “fourth wall” removed. If you have a proscenium stage (“fourth wall” stage) in your school, try doing the scene there, too. What different concerns does a player have? How is the experience different for the audience? What changes when you turn off the lights over the audience? What was it like for the Greeks, who couldn’t turn off the sun? Make masks! Paper bags will do, or you can try the method on the attached photocopy. How does your acting have to change when you’re wearing a mask? How do masks help you put on a play when you only have a few actors? Make Greek outfits! Boys would would usually have knee-length garments and girls would have longer ones. If you make them, wear them to the play.

Study Guide: The Clouds p.4

II. Aristophanes

Aristophanes, the most famous writer of Greek comedies, was born in the 440s b.c.e. He lived through the upheaval of the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 431 to 404, and stripped Athens of her place as cultural and political capital of the Greek city-states.

Many of his plays comment on the long war—perhaps the most famous is Lysistrata, whose heroine leads a sex strike in order to bring about peace. He often made fun of tragedy and the tragedians: Aristophanes' Frogs is one of the best ancient critiques of the other playwrights that we still have.

He produced his first play in 427. Before his death in the 380s he had written 44 comedies, of which we have eleven. (with dates of production)

Acharnians, 425 Peace, 421 Thesmophoriazusae [Women of the Thesmophoria], 411 Knights, 424 Birds, 414 Frogs, 405 Clouds, 423 Lysistrata, 411 Ecclesiazusae [Women of the Assembly], 393/2 Wasps, 422 Plutus, 388

Old Comedy Aristophanes is our only surviving author of the genre known as Old Comedy, which Kenneth McLeish describes well: Aristophanes’ world is predominantly like that of farce: that is, his plays involve action more often than character, fantasy more often than realism, ridicule and slapstick more often than irony. But they differ from later farce in a crucial way: they contain, as an essential and integral feature of their style, serious themes, seious characters and serious language, all of which are combined with hilarity and slapstick in a manner characteristic of no other writer. (The Theatre of Aristophanes, Taplinger: 1980. p. 14) Most Old Comedies feature at least one agôn—a more-or-less formal debate, with a speech on each side of an argument—fitting for Athens’ rhetorical, competitive society. They had dancing choruses: as many as 24 men, costumed as everything from frogs to birds to clouds or even renegade Athenian women, singing songs about all sorts of things. They also typically stopped the play at some point to deliver a parabasis— the Greek word means “standing beside”—in which they stood outside the play proper and delivered speeches and songs as if direct from the playwrights mouth.

The topics were current events: politics and education in Athens, the progress of the long war with Sparta, and so on. Apart from the inherent quality of the plays, they’re also a valuable source of information about the daily life and politics of classical Athens. Aristophanes was also a shrewd critic of other literature, particularly tragedy, and he quotes, parodies, and critiques many plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In fact, Aristophanes add enormously to our knowledge of plays and playwrights we’ve no other record of.

TV’s The Daily Show might be the right modern analogy, at least in the way that the show combines humor and politics: ridiculous farce on serious themes.

(Middle Comedy, a fourth century development which Aristophanes seems to have been a part of, reduced the role of the chorus considerably. New Comedy, of which we have one by Menander, is much more recognizable to modern audiences of TV sitcoms: family comedies of errors and manners and coincidences.)

Study Guide: The Clouds p.5

III. The Clouds Our translation is by Peter Meineck.

First performed in 423bce, The Clouds skewers the culture of classical Athens and the fashion for young men to polish their prose rather than their propriety. We meet Strepsiades, a father beleaguered by his partying son Pheidippides. The father determines that all his problems can be solved by the education provided at the Pondertorium, an institution presided over by none other than Socrates.

What’s it really about? It’s about Athens, as Aristophanes’ plays usually are. Athens was unusual among Greek city-states in being a democracy, and it was a direct, not a representative democracy. That means that citizens had to persuade one another for every piece of legislation and even every court case. That meant a lot of speeches and a lot of arguing. In the 5th century BCE, citizens teachers began to realize that a little rhetorical training might be useful to wealthy citizens, and a new sort of education arose. At their best, the Sophists (as the new teachers were called) brought polish, reasoning, and dynamism to the constant speaking in the Athenian Agora (the marketplace and political center). At their worst, they taught students how to use the tricks of language to win any argument, right or wrong.

In our play, Socrates stands in for all the Sophists. Athenians may not have understood the Socrates we know from Plato, who, of course, records a much more in depth education in Socrates’ circle than mere rhetorical training. Plato tells us, in fact, that the philosopher disapproved of the Sophists. Socrates, nevertheless, in part because of The Clouds, had a reputation for teaching young men strange things about the gods, corrupting them away from their parents, inculcating weird theories about the natural world, and revealing the secrets of making the Inferior Argument defeat the Superior Argument.

Things to do in the classroom: Think of the silliest Inferior Arguments you can (“the best food for people to eat is cat food”) and then find a logical way to prove it (“because it has all the nutrients you need packed into a convenient form. And it makes your hair shiny”).

Have a few students act out a familiar story, and have a larger group think of good songs to go with it. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” for instance, might include a song about going for a walk in the woods when the Bears go out, and a lullaby when Goldilocks falls asleep in Little Bear’s bed.

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Characters in The Clouds (in order of appearance)

Strepsiades: Socrates: cranky, put-upon father who knows that the the famous philosopher, Aristophanes style. way to win in Athens is in court. Not the Chorus of Clouds: quickest-thinking citizen in town. our goddesses for the duration. Pheidippides: Superior and Inferior Argument: Strepsiades' drinking and gambling son. embodiments of rhetoric, good and bad. Can't be bothered to clean up or pay for his Pasias, Amynias: own messes. Strepsiades owes them money because of Students of the Pondertorium: Pheidippides' gambling. pupils at Aristophanes' sendup of Athenian Houseboy, Xanthias, Witness: education. the little people who make the world work.

The Plot of The Clouds

Strepsiades introduces us to his good-for-nothing son Pheidippides, and suggests that he enroll in the Pondertorium to learn how to talk his way out of debt. Pheidippides having refused, Strepsiades gets an intro to the Pondertorium by Student Guide.

Socrates make an elevated entrance, and begins to educate Strepsiades. Socrates explains that the true divinities are the Clouds, goddesses who appear now as the Chorus of our play.

Strepsiades signs on for his formal Pondertorium education.

The Parabasis: the Chorus explain a few things to us.

We find out how Strepsiades has been faring in the Pondertorium, and Socrates tries (and fails) to educate him nevertheless.

After he’s been expelled, Strepsiades tries to get Pheidippides to enroll in the Pondertorium. Socrates declines to be Pheidippides’ tutor, but says he’ll send Arguments themselves.

Superior and Inferior Arguments discuss each their own merits, to impress Pheidippides and get him to enroll in the Pondertorium, which he does after Inferior’s victory.

Strepsiades inquires after Pheidippides’ progress, and anticipates the usefulness of his son’s new skills, which Pheidippides shows off.

Pasias shows up with a Witness to try to claim his loan, and Strepsiades rebuffs him with his cleverness. Amynias also tries to get his money back, and Strepsiades drives him off, too.

The Clouds anticipate trouble . . . and sure enough, Pheidippides has beaten his father. Of course, Pheidippides can prove that he’s done the right thing.

Overcome by the injustice of it all, Strepsiades decides to destroy the Pondertorium.

Study Guide: The Clouds p.7

IV. The R-MWC Greek Plays

Mabel K. Whiteside, professor of Greek, led her students in an annual production of a Greek play from 1909 until 1954. She was an innovator in teaching Greek conversationally, and she and her Greek students produced the plays in their original language. She presented her first full-length tragedy in 1910. Over the years Miss Mabel (as she was affectionately known) led productions of tragedies and comedies by all of the great Greek playwrights, culminating in 1954 with Aeschylus's trilogy The Oresteia - - it was the first time the trilogy had been staged as a whole in Greek in the new world. Although there were a few interruptions in the annual schedule, R-MWC saw 40 Greek plays in 45 years. It rained only once. The Dell was built in honor of Miss Mabel and this unparallelled series of productions. The Greek Plays inspired so much interest in the ancient world that by the end of her tenure, Miss Mabel taught Greek to a full ten percent of the R-MWC student body. The revived tradition began in 2000 with Antigone, and continued in 2001 with Iphigeneia at Aulis. The Play is now bi-annual in the fall. The renewed series produces the plays mostly in English. We adhere to most of the original conventions that governed theater in the time of the great tragedians (I believe that the best plays will emerge from the conditions for which they were written): we perform in the Dell, an outdoor Greek theater, which allows the plays to be performed in daylight for an audience seated in a semi-circle around the performers. The R-MWC Greek Play adheres to other ancient conventions as well: three or four actors play all the roles; the chorus--who sing and dance--remain on stage for most of the play; the performers all wear masks; and one sex plays both men and women (of course, in ancient Athens, the actors were men rather than women).

Dates and stats since 2000: Antigone by Sophocles: April 7–9, 2000; 3 actors, 8 in the chorus Iphigeneia at Aulis by Euripides: April 20–22, 2001; 3 actors, 10 in the chorus The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus: October 11–13, 2002; 4 actors, 10 in the chorus The Bacchae by Euripides: October 8-10, 2004; 3 actors, 12 in the chorus The Clouds by Aristophanes: October 6–8, 2006; 4 actors, 12 in the chorus