A comedy about tragedy and a play about playmaking, Aristophanes' Frogs (405 BCE) is perhaps the most popular of ancient comedies. This new introduction guides students through the play, its themes and contemporary contexts, and its reception history. Frogs offers sustained engagement with the Athenian literary scene, with the politics of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and with the religious understanding of the fifth-century city. It presents the earliest direct criticism of theatre and a detailed description of the Underworld, and also dramatizes the place of Mystery cults in the religious life of Athens and shows the political concerns that galvanized the citizens. It is also genuinely funny, showcasing a range of comic techniques, including literary and musical parody, political invective, grotesque distortion, wordplay, prop comedy, and funny costumes. Frogs has inspired literary works by Henry Fielding, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. This book explores all of these features in a series of short chapters designed to be accessible to a new reader of ancient comedy. It proceeds linearly through the play, addressing a range of issues, but paying particular attention to stagecraft and performance. It also offers a bold new interpretation of the play, suggesting that the action of Frogs was not the first time Euripides and Aeschylus had competed against each other.
Using Euripides' play Helen as the main point of reference, C. W. Marshall's detailed study expands our understanding of Athenian tragedy and provides new interpretations of how Euripides created meaning in performance. Marshall focuses on dramatic structure to show how assumptions held by the ancient audience shaped meaning in Helen and to demonstrate how Euripides' play draws extensively on the satyr play Proteus, which was part of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Structure is presented not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a crucial component of the experience of performance, working with music, the chorus and the other plays in the tetralogy. Euripides' Andromeda in particular is shown to have resonances with Helen not previously described. Arguing that the role of the director is key, Marshall shows that the choices that a director can make about role doubling, gestures, blocking, humour, and masks play a crucial part in forming the meaning of Helen.
In virtually all types of experiments in which a response is analyzed as a function of frequency (e. g. , a spectrum), transform techniques can significantly improve data acquisition and/or data reduct ion. Research-level nuclear magnet ic resonance and infra-red spectra are already obtained almost exclusively by Fourier transform methods, because Fourier transform NMR and IR spectrometers have been commercially available since the late 1960·s. Similar transform techniques are equally valuable (but less well-known) for a wide range of other chemical applications for which commercial instruments are only now becoming available: for example, the first corrmercial Fourier transform mass spectrometer was introduced this year (1981) by Nicolet Instrument Corporation. The purpose of this volume is to acquaint practicing chemists with the basis, advantages, and applica of Fourier, Hadamard, and Hilbert transforms in chemistry. For tions almost all chapters, the author is the investigator who was the first to apply such methods in that field. The basis and advantages of transform techniques are described in Chapter 1. Many of these aspects were understood and first applied by infrared astronomers in the 1950·s, in order to improve the otherwise unacceptably poor signal-to-noise ratio of their spec tra. However, the computations required to reduce the data were painfully slow, and required a 1 arge computer.
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