Initiating Dionysus : Ritual and Theatre in Aristophanes' Frogs

This book offers a fresh and challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it seeks to explore how membership of Greek fifth-century society would have shaped one's understanding of the play, and, more specifically, of Dionysus as a dramatic figure.

This book offers a challenging multi-disciplinary interpretation of Aristophanes'' Frogs. Drawing on a wide range of literary and anthropological approaches, it deploys an impressive series of religious and cultural considerations which have never previously been used to illuminate this text. Rather than seeking to recover the ''authorial'' meaning of the Frogs, Dr Lada-Richards attempts to reconstruct the wider spectrum of potential meanings that various segments of the play could have had in their own socio-cultural milieu. The key question the book explores is how membership in Greek fifth-century society would have shaped understanding of the play, with particular emphasis on the persona of Dionysus who, as Dr Lada-Richards argues, should not be viewed merely as a stock comic character but as inseparable from the complex, paradoxical figure of his mythical and ritual counterpart. Combining sophistication and complexity with clarity and elegance of style, the book is addresses to the scholar as well as the student of Greek drama and culture, and its insights should appeal to anybody interested in the manifold ways theatre (of any period and culture) remoulds the ritual sequences of the social frame to which it belongs.