Aristophanes, Lysistrata

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The reception of Aristophanes’

Lysistrata

is a good example of the polarizing reactions that a literary work can provoke at different times, or even at the same time in different places. Comedy’s first “women-play” went from being one of the most obscure texts of the Aristophanic corpus during the Renaissance to one of antiquity’s most celebrated dramas in the late twentieth and early twenty–first centuries.Citing its alleged indecency, the Cretan scholar Marcus Musurus famously excluded

Lysistrata

from his first edition of the Aristophanic corpus in 1498. The women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth–century Britain resurrected the play’s central character, Lysistrata, as a feminist heroine (Hall 2007: 86-8), while antifeminist Greek theater companies of the same…

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Citation: Sells, Donald. "Lysistrata". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 January 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13329, accessed 19 March 2024.]

13329 Lysistrata 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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