The Clouds :: essays research papers

CLOUDSProductionThe setting of the Clouds requires two thresholds in the skene, one representing Strepsiadess house and the other, the Thinkery, two in the city of Athens. The play begins with Strepsiades and Pheidippides sleeping in their beds. Since the ancient Greek theater had no curtain, these two men in their beds had to be carried out in full view of the audience by stagehands (probably slaves) and placed in front of one of the openings of the skene representing Strepsiadess house. The audience was no doubt expected to imagine that this was an indoor scene, because it was non usual for Greeks to sleep outside. This assumption is strengthened by the fact that, since Pheidippides is sleeping under five blankets, the weather is cool, which would make it even less likely that this was mean as an outdoor scene. The method of presenting the scholarly activities that go on inside the Thinkery is by no means certain. K. J. Dover (Aristophanic Comedy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 19 72, 107) suggests two possibilities. The students could come out of the door of the skene carrying their apparatus with them, which they could leave behind when they go back inside. Another possibility is that a screen made of canvas and wood with a door, held from behind by stagehands, could conceal the students until Strepsiades asks that the door be opened. The stagehands then could remove this screen revealing the students and their equipment. When the students are ordered to go back inside, they could go through a door of the skene which then would become the door of the Thinkery for the rest of the play. One other aspect of production needs to be mentioned. Socrates first appears in the play suspended in air. The means of his suspension is undoubtedly the mechane, which in tragedy is mostly used for gods, but in comedy is used for any character who needs to travel or just be in the air. Aristophaness Comic Portrait of SocratesAlthough there is something of the real Socrates1 in the character of the same name in the Clouds, it is clear that Aristophaness characterization of Socrates in the Clouds is in good part a comic distortion. Socrates was a well-known figure in Athens who was popularly perceived as an intellectual. Aristophanes, pickings advantage of this popular perception, arbitrarily places him at the head of the Thinkery, in which subjects such as rhetoric and astronomy are taught.