Bloomsbury’s companions to ancient comedy cover both Greek and Latin authors and volumes have already appeared on Menander, Plautus, Terence and other plays of Aristophanes. These new guides are intended for readers, students, teachers and drama practitioners who may not read them in Greek but are engaged with these dramas in different ways.

Lysistrata has become one of Aristophanes’ most popular and well-known plays.  This is because of the nature of the plot, based on the women’s anti-war sex strike led by the character who gives her name to the play and the highly sexual comedy found throughout.  Themes of feminism and pacifism have a resonance with contemporary audiences, although as Robson points out the play is in fact neither particularly feminist nor in the end is it anti-war.  This has not stopped readers and directors seeing the play in this way.  In a highly readable way, Robson introduces the play in the context of Athenian Old Comedy and of the historical circumstances of 411BCE and then takes us through the action of the play in summary together with a light analysis.  There follow two thematic chapters, one on the personalities and the politics of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and the other on more literary themes of language/obscenity and the nature of comedy.  The final chapter is devoted to the reception of Lysistrata in the modern world, a rich account of changing attitudes to Aristophanes’ often outrageous comedy of sexual politics.

                  Those coming to Aristophanes for the first time will find in chapter one a well-balanced and judicious introduction to the peculiar world of Athenian comedy: its idiosyncratic structure and style, and to how Lysistrata fits into this pattern.  Some Greek words are used and discussed, always transliterated.  The historical context is lightly sketched in, showing how the play cannot be separated from the world of the Sicilian Expedition and its failure, the Peloponnesian War as a whole and from the position of women in Athenian society.

                  The account of the action of the play so clearly done that a rereading of the text may not be necessary for those familiar with the text.  For those coming to it for the first time a parallel reading of this chapter alongside each scene would make a lot of apparent obscurities much easier to understand.  The nature of the Greek text makes this a play for readers and an audience of relative maturity because of the frank sexuality of the subject-matter and the characters’ expression.  Teachers will want to issue a content warning and Robson does not hold back in discussion of Greek obscenities and their English equivalents, which are openly used throughout.  Robson carries this out with such dispassionate calm that there is never any gratuitous filth in his text (not something you could say about Aristophanes’ original text).  Any strong obscenity in the discussion is used as an equivalent to equally strong language in Aristophanes’ Greek to demonstrate the gradations from mild comic obscenity to language meant to shock.  Attention is paid to the staging of the play and each interpretation is made from the point of view of the member of the audience, which is not always the case in studies of dramatic texts working from a printed version rather than a performance.  There is quite a lot of discussion of the portrayal of women on stage, and the unusual fact of their taking leading roles in a comedy and this leads to consideration of the place of women in Athenian society.  It is easy to lose sight of the fact that a performance of Lysistrata would still have remained a male-oriented occasion with male actors dressed as women playing the parts before a mainly male audience.  For a leading female role to be played on stage by a male today would be problematic for a modern public and the general assumption would be that Lysistrata is a woman played by a woman.  It is intriguing to think what difference it would make to the feminist reading of the play that strong-minded women take action to alter the course of the war if the parts were played by men.  Perhaps a more satirical interpretation would show that the whole scenario is a fantasy, as impossible to achieve as a descent to the underworld or the establishment of a kingdom of birds in the sky. 

                  A closer look at the characters of the play follows in chapter 3, with particular attention paid to Lysistrata herself.  The sophistication of this figure who shows intelligence and strength and her possible link to an historical figure called Lysimache are discussed on the context of different interpretations of recent critics and scholars.  Similarly, Aristophanes’ portrayal of Spartan women involved in the sex-strike invites discussion in the context of the ongoing Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta especially for the sympathetic presentation the Spartans are given.  Robson is of the opinion that Lysistrata is a highly political play, but one in which, unusually for an Old Comedy, individual Athenian politicians do not come in for specific criticism and satire.  The underlying seriousness of the comedy is demonstrated in the discussion of differing political interpretations put forward by a number of different recent scholars.

                  Readers will come to this play for a number of reasons, one of which will be from the literary angle.  Though this book is aimed at an audience which will include those who have not had the chance to study Greek language, Chapter 4 is the most literary section of the book.  It discusses comedy and the technique of making the audience laugh; the use of obscenity and the varying grades of strong language; and finally the structure of the plot, such as it is, and the ways in which the logic of Aristophanes’ dramatic construction should not be pressed too much.

                  The final, and in some ways the most interesting, chapter concerns the reception of Lysistrata. Reception is helpfully defined as the way a text has been “received”, that is how it has been translated, adapted, understood and performed in different cultures.  While this approach, Robson argues, can shed light on social history and changing attitudes to women, sex and obscenity, it can also reveal different perspectives which allow us to see potentialities of the text which we might not otherwise spot.  Mainly confined to anglophone reception, Robson takes us through the comparative neglect of the play until the mid to late 19^th century (“Victorian”) Britain when more interest was taken.  Here we can see the changes in how highly sexual material could be presented taking place, culminating perhaps in the daring illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley (one of which is included).  Some interest was shown in Paris, but the 20^th century sees an explosion of interest and performance, particularly in the UK and USA, and shows how Aristophanes could still stir up controversy: a warrant was apparently issued for the arrest of the writer “Arthur Aristophanes” on grounds of obscenity when one performance was closed down by the police in Los Angeles.  The perceived anti-war and feminist sentiments proved popular in the late 20^th century at the time of protests against various wars and the rise of feminism, and via stage musicals and an opera Lysistrata makes the big screen in a movie called Chi-raq (2015) which moves the setting to present day Chicago.

Reference is made throughout to current scholarship and any current controversies are neatly summarised in a balanced and non-technical way, with the different possibilities set out for readers to make up their own minds.  This is a highly recommended introductory volume for students of drama and Classical Civilisation, and for theatre practitioners (directors, actors, critics and producers) who still see the possibilities for modern culture of reviving and reinterpreting this classic of the comic stage.

John Bulwer