My 20 favourite plays not by Shakespeare

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. Then I got into Shakespeare and my favourite plays a couple of years ago were all by Shakespeare. 

But now I have got a better grasp of drama, especially classical drama, so here’s a list of favourites that aren’t by Shakespeare (listed chronologically by the dramatist’s birth year, and grouped by country): 

• The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which is actually three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides 
• Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus 
• Oedipus the King 
• Antigone 
• Electra by Sophocles 
• Hippolytus 
• Hecabe 
• The Bacchae by Euripides 
• Lysistrata 
• The Frogs by Aristophanes 
• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe 
• The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster 
• The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley 
• The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur 
• Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca 
• Tartuffe 
• Don Juan 
• The Misanthrope by Molière 
• Phèdre by Jean Racine 
• The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen 

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What can we see here? My tastes are predominantly Greek (and Shakespearean): 10 out of 20 plays are by the Athenian playwrights (or 12 out of 22 if you don’t count the Oresteia as one). Molière is another favourite. 

Only one play from the 19th century. No Goethe. No Chekhov—is that a surprise?—I struggled with his plays, having read only two, and much prefer him as a short story writer. No Oscar Wilde, simply because I haven’t read him—if “allowed” to include plays I’ve seen onscreen, I would name The Importance of Being Earnest (though it’s hard to say which play I would remove to make place for it). 

No Tennessee Williams, whom I liked at university. No one contemporary, but then the only one I know is Tom Stoppard—one day I’m going to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I would probably like. 

Now this list is a bit of a cheat—a list of favourite plays, by Shakespeare and other dramatists, would be much, much harder. 

Name your favourite plays. 

The Frogs by Aristophanes

1/ Could anyone love ancient Greek drama and not love The Frogs? 

The premise is this: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are all dead; the Athenian stage is now devoid of talent (“I defy you to find a genuine poet among the whole lot of them: one who can coin a memorable line,” Dionysus says to Heracles); so the god of drama, Dionysus, decides to go to the underworld to bring back one of the dramatists. 

The first half of the play is the journey of Dionysus, in disguise as Heracles, to Hades. The second half is the battle between the traditional Aeschylus and the innovative Euripides. 

When Aristophanes wrote the play, Aeschylus had been dead for some time (456 or 455 BC), Euripides had recently died (ca 406 BC), but Sophocles was still alive; Sophocles died before the play was performed in 405 BC but Aristophanes didn’t have enough time to rewrite the whole play and incorporate him into it, so he only rewrote some lines to allude to Sophocles’s departure to the underworld. 

If you’re familiar with ancient Greek drama, The Frogs is invaluable because it offers insights into contemporary reception of these dramatists—the three tragedians who survive are indeed the three greatest—it’s also fascinating as one of the earliest pieces of literary criticism, long before Aristotle’s Poetics. As its own thing, it’s also a very funny play. Some of the jokes are over my head, naturally—there are local references, some of the plays mentioned don’t survive, and above all, I cannot read ancient Greek and missed all the jokes about metre and language—but I have read enough to see the contrast between Aeschylus and Euripides and it’s still a very funny play. 

Like Shakespeare, Aristophanes mixes the high and the low, the serious and the ridiculous. 

I read the translation by David Barrett, revised by Shomit Dutta. 

2/ Dionysus goes to Hades with his slave Xanthias. 

“CHARON I don’t take slaves. Not unless they fought in the sea-battle.

XANTHIAS I was exempted on medical grounds: eye trouble.” 

The relationship between the two is hilarious. 

“DIONYSUS I feel faint. Give me a sponge.

[XANTHIAS extracts a sponge from one of the bags.]

Press it on my heart, there’s a good chap.

XANTHIAS There you go.

DIONYSUS No, here. That’s it.

XANTHIAS The heart’s slipped a bit, hasn’t it?

DIONYSUS What? Oh, yes – the sudden shock. It’s taken refuge in my… lower intestine.” 

The introduction by Shomit Dutta also makes me think about the question of actors. As the playwrights were allowed first 2 actors, then increased to 3 by Sophocles, and the chorus, the actors had to do quite a lot of doubling. In The Frogs, the main actor would play Dionysus, who I think was onstage the entire time; the second actor would play Xanthias and Euripides or Aeschylus. 

3/ Why is the play called The Frogs? I have no idea. But there’s a chorus of frogs when Dionysus is on the way to see the dead playwrights. 

“FROGS

Brekekekex, koax, koax,

Brekekekex, koax, koax!

Oh we are the musical Frogs!

We live in the marshes and bogs!

Sweet, sweet is the hymn

We sing as we swim,

And our voices are known

For their beautiful tone…”

4/ Even though Aristophanes’s Aeschylus and Euripides are probably not much like the actual Aeschylus and Euripides, the same way Aristophanes’s Socrates is not much like the real Socrates, the duel between the two characters is amusing. 

“EURIPIDES But is a cock suitable material for a tragedy?

AESCHYLUS And you, you blasphemer, what did you put into your plays?”

Euripides is, as always, accused of bringing all sorts of characters into his plays. 

“AESCHYLUS […] No one can say I ever put a lustful woman into a play.

EURIPIDES How could you? You’ve never even met one.

AESCHYLUS And thank heaven for that…” 

5/ The Penguin edition of Alcestis and Other Plays (translated by John Davie) has an excellent introduction by Richard Rutherford, in which he compares the three Greek tragedians. 

“Whereas Aeschylus’ characters (the Prometheus apart) are above all members of a family or of a larger community, Sophocles tends to focus on individuals set apart from their society or at odds with those who care for them: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Philoctetes, the aged Oedipus. With him, more than with the other two tragedians, it makes sense to speak of tragic heroes and heroines. […] The role of the chorus is somewhat reduced, though some of the odes which reflect on human achievement and its smallness in relation to the timeless power of the gods have a poetic splendour to match almost anything in Aeschylus. The characters have more depth and subtlety…” 

That is probably why Sophocles is my favourite, even though I love all three. They’re all different: Aeschylus is monumental, full of grandeur, but he’s more distant; Sophocles and Euripides focus more on individual characters, though Sophocles has a tragic hero or heroine at the centre for the entire play whereas Euripides tends to shift the focus from one character in half of the play to another in the latter half. 

“The plays of Euripides, although they still work within the traditional range of myths, do not generally dramatize heroic initiatives and triumphant achievements. His are tragedies of suffering rather than action (the Medea again is a special case, a partial exception).” 

Rutherford makes an important point though: 

“In some ways Euripides can be seen as a more self-consciously literary dramatist than his fellow tragedians. […] He seems regularly to modify the conventions of his genre and adapt the work of his predecessors, sometimes even drawing attention to the changes he has made. […] Aeschylus and Sophocles are also experienced in reshaping and adapting traditional motifs, but Euripides goes far beyond them in playing with conventions and exploiting the spectator’s awareness of the dramatic situation. While shocked and moved by the events on stage, we are nevertheless frequently reminded that this is ‘only’ a play.” 

I would probably have to think more about the last sentence, but that passage has a good point. If I have to choose between Euripides and Aeschylus, I would probably go for Euripides for the variety and inventiveness and the various interesting things he does in his plays, though the Oresteia is magnificent.

To go back to Aristophanes—after all this blog post is meant to be about him and The Frogs (which, by the way, Richard Rutherford does mention in his introduction)—he is also a great dramatist and very inventive. The five plays I’ve read so far are all different: Lysistrata is a farce about a sex strike; Women at Thesmophoria Festival includes Euripides as a character and parodies multiple of his plays; The Clouds is the most intellectual of the plays, satirising the Sophists; The Birds is a fantasy, about the utopia of Cloudcuckooland; and now The Frogs is something different altogether. 

It is fascinating that these great dramatists were alive and working in the same place around the same time. 

The Birds by Aristophanes

1/ The premise is simple: two Athenian men Peisetairus and Euelpides, fed up with the world in which they live, go to the land of the birds and set up a utopia in the sky called Cloudcuckooland. 

The Birds, performed in 414 BC, is the longest Aristophanes play that survives. 

2/ This is an interesting speech from the birds, addressing humans: 

“LEADER Listen, you mortals, you half-alive pests, 

you bundle of leaves, you clay, 

Race of shadows, wingless and weak 

suffering things of a day. 

You shades of a dream, poor mortals attend us, 

us the truly immortal. 

Us everlasting, ageless and always, 

us the only eternal…” 

That comes from the translation by Paul Roche. Here are the same lines as translated by Ian Johnston: 

“CHORUS LEADER Come now, you men out there, who live such dark, sad lives—

you’re frail, just like a race of leaves—you’re shaped from clay,

you tribes of insubstantial shadows without wings,

you creatures of a day, unhappy mortal men,

you figures from a dream, now turn your minds to us,

the eternal, deathless, air-borne, ageless birds,

whose wisdom never dies, so you may hear from us…” 

3/ Peisetairus doesn’t just reject the world of humans; he rejects gods. 

“PEISETAIRUS It follows then 

that if the birds were born before 

Mother Earth 

and before the gods, they are 

heirs of royalty.” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

He becomes a bird. 

“PEISETAIRUS But if they accept you as their god, as their Zeus, 

as their Mother Earth, their Poseidon, their Cronus, 

then let every blessing be theirs.” 

Peisetairus persuades the birds to take control of the sky and wage war against the gods: 

“PEISETAIRUS […] And just as we have to ask for visas from the Boeotians

when we want to visit Delphi, so will humans 

when they sacrifice to the gods have to get visas 

from you for the savory smell of fried bacon 

to reach heaven.” 

He rejects the gods and at the end becomes a god himself. That is quite blasphemous—no? I wonder what the audience thought. 

Wikipedia tells me The Birds has been much analysed. What is its meaning? Is it a satire? An allegory? Or escapist entertainment? I don’t know. But the main thing is that the play is funny, and full of funny lines. 

“SERVANT Not that. It’s simply that when my master 

turned into a hoopoe, he prayed 

that I should turn bird, too, 

so’s he’d still have a valet and a butler.” 

Or: 

“LEADER [to the audience] 

For sheer enjoyment nothing can beat 

putting on wings. 

If for instance one of you had 

a pair of the things 

And became hungry and terribly bored 

with a tragic play, 

He could simply up it from here 

and fly away…” 

On a side note, I wish we had some plays of the fourth and fifth greatest Greek tragedians, just to see the gap between Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and them (the same way we can’t fully appreciate how extraordinary Shakespeare was till we read his contemporaries). 

If you look on Wikipedia, you can see that the play is filled with references to places and writers and politicians and historical figures and mythical figures and other people. However, The Birds is not about a “current issue” in the way that The Clouds is. Some of the characters are recognisable types: fraud, father beater, inspector, informer, and so on. 

“METON I’ve come to survey the air for you 

and partition it into lots.” 

I do love it though when I get the reference:  

“PROMETHEUS […] That’s the reason I hurried here, to put you in the know. 

I always was a friend to man.

PEISETAIRUS Indeed, you are. Without you, we couldn’t even 

barbecue.” 

The play is funny from beginning to end—from Peisetairus and Euelpides’s conversation with the birds, to Peisetairus’s responses to the frauds and other annoying types trying to enter the kingdom, to his negotiations with the gods Poseidon, Heracles, and Triballus. He wants not only Zeus’s sceptre but also the princess (“who takes care of Zeus’s thunderbolts/ and other paraphernalia such as/ foreign affairs, law and order, harbor dues, the shipping plan,/ paymasters, jury fees, and vituperating dolts”): 

“HERACLES […] Are we going to go to war over a single woman?”  

That line must have tickled Aristophanes’s audience. 

The Birds has a light touch and joyful ending that I didn’t see in The Clouds. It’s fun. 

The Clouds by Aristophanes

1/ Strepsiades is an old farmer who runs into debt because of his son Pheidippides’s love of horses. Hearing about the Thinkery and the new thinkers, Strepsiades decides to send his son there to be trained to argue his way out of paying the money back. 

The head of the Thinkery is Socrates, a stand-in for the Sophists. My friend Tom (Wuthering Expectations) however told me “The Clouds has very little to do with the actual Socrates. Or anyway with Plato’s recurring character Socrates. The Aristophanes Socrates is more of, well, an influencer. A self-help influencer. We have those today!” 

For this play, I switched back and forth between the translations by Alan H. Sommerstein and Paul Roche. 

2/ There are some very funny bits at the beginning of the play. 

“FIRST PUPIL And see, here is a map of the entire world—look, there’s Athens. 

[…]

STREPSIADES […] But where is Sparta? 

FIRST PUPIL Oh… er?... Right here. 

STREPSIADES Far too close! Think again! Get it away from us!” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

That’s how I feel about France. 

“SOCRATES […] Do you have a good memory? 

STREPSIADES Yes and no. Very good if somebody owes me something—very bad if I owe it to someone else.” 

(translated by Alan H. Sommerstein) 

Relatable. 

I also like it when someone from the Chorus speaks as Aristophanes: 

“LEADER [addressing the audience] 

[…] I thought that you an audience intelligent would be 

And also thought I’d never written a play so witty 

As this—and that is why I first produced it in this city. 

A lot of toil went into it—and yet my play retreated 

By vulgar works of vulgar men unworthily defeated.

For your sake I took all these pains, and this was all your gratitude!...” 

(translated by Sommerstein)

That reminds me of John Webster’s preface to The White Devil. 

The Clouds was a flop when first performed; the text we have is the revised version that was never produced. 

3/ My problem with The Clouds is that I didn’t find it particularly funny—in fact, it was quite tough to read. Part of it is probably that one should be more familiar with the Sophists, the same way Women at Thesmophoria Festival wouldn’t be very funny if one never read Euripides. But it’s not just that. The Clouds is thick with references to Greek mythology, contemporary figures, local incidents, trendy ideas, and so on—my translators kindly explain all the puns, all the parodies and references, but jokes are not particularly funny when you hear them explained, are they? 

This is the difference between The Alchemist (perhaps Ben Jonson’s comedies in general) and Shakespeare’s comedies: The Alchemist is thick with local and contemporary references that now mean nothing to us, Shakespeare’s plays are not. Shakespeare’s comedies still suffer to some extent, because of slang (now obsolete) and puns (if read in translation), but much of the comedy is in characters, situations, and witty dialogue rather than parody, satire, or references to contemporary issues. 

Compared to Lysistrata and Women at Thesmophoria Festival, The Clouds didn’t make me laugh all that much. It’s too sour, I think. 

Women at Thesmophoria Festival by Aristophanes

Also known as Thesmophoriazusae, this play was first performed in 411 BC, the same year as Lysistrata, another play about the battle of the sexes. 

I read the translation by Paul Roche. 

1/ Euripides is one of the main characters in the play: 

“EURIPIDES The women plan to do away with me today 

at the Thesmophoria. 

I speak ill of them, they say.

AGATHON How can we help you, then?

EURIPIDES In every possible way. 

If only you’d infiltrate among the women as a woman 

and speak up for me, you’d save my life 

because only you can represent me well.” 

That’s the premise. The play later has a scene in which the women complain about Euripides’s depiction of women in his plays—do they not notice the way he depicts men?—so the female-only festival of Thesmophoria is where they decide what to do with him.

We no longer have Agathon’s plays but it doesn’t matter, as Agathon refuses to help, so Euripides gets his relative Mnesilochus to dress up as a woman and infiltrate the women’s meeting. The poor man however is exposed, so Euripides rescues him by reenacting scenes from his own plays Helen and Andromeda—Andromeda and some other plays Aristophanes parodies don’t survive but Helen does—it’s a great pleasure to catch the references to not only Helen but also Hippolytus, Ion, and Alcestis. 

2/ Aristophanes is crude:  

“SERVANT For Agathon, our peerless poet, prepareth to—

MNESILOCHUS Get himself buggered.

SERVANT —to lay the keel of a vessel for drama. 

He bendeth the beams, and planeth the planks, 

Riveteth verse with phrase and symbol…” 

Imagine these lines in the tragedies of Aeschylus! Or Euripides! Reading other playwrights, especially the Greeks, makes me fully appreciate how unusual it is that Shakespeare mixes the tragic and the comic, the high and the low. 

Aristophanes also makes me realise how “clean” the plays of Molière are—this is not a complaint—Aristophanes is very funny and Women at Thesmophoria Festival is a light-hearted farce. 

3/ Like the Elizabethans, the ancient Greeks only had male actors playing all the roles, so Mnesilochus pretending to be a woman or even reenacting Helen reuniting with Menelaus is, when we think about it, not that different from what the Greeks were doing with the female roles in the tragedies. 

There is also another layer of comedy: when Cleisthenes appears and says there’s a spy at the meeting, the women all look at each other and try to find out which one is the man, but to Aristophanes’s audience, they were all men. 

4/ This makes me curious: 

“WREATH SELLER […] My husband died in Cyprus, leaving me with five small children whom I struggled to maintain by weaving wreaths of myrtle for the market and have kept them all alive—at least half and half. But now this fellow in his tragedies has made people believe that the gods don’t exist and my sales in consequence have halved…” 

Euripides tends to depict the gods as capricious and cruel; in some cases, such as Electra, he removes the gods except as deus ex machina at the end, Electra and Orestes themselves choose to kill Clytemnestra without an order or oracle from Apollo; so I’m quite curious about the Greeks’ reception of that. 

Another thing is that in The Bacchae, Dionysus persuades Pentheus to dress up as a woman to spy on the women, only for him to be brutally killed and torn limb from limb by the women in frenzy, including his own mother. I can’t help thinking if Euripides simply borrows the idea because “all this female frippery reveals/ to passersby the depths of your depravity”, or there is some deeper meaning that I have missed, considering that Women at Thesmophoria Festival has an appearance of Euripides as a character and Dionysus in his play is the god of drama. 

Lysistrata by Aristophanes, a play about war and sex

Now that I have read the greatest plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, it’s natural to get to the comedian and fourth great playwright of ancient Greece: Aristophanes. According to my copy, Lysistrata was performed in 411 BC. 

1/ The premise is simple: there is a war dragging on between the Spartans and the Athenians, a war that doesn’t seem to stop, so Lysistrata decides to do something about it and holds a meeting with women from both sides. 

“LYSISTRATA All right, 

what we’re going to have to forgo is—penis.

ALL Oh no!”

Hahaha. A sex strike. 

The translation I read is by Paul Roche. The same lines in Alan H. Sommerstein’s prose translation are: 

“LYSISTRATA Very well then. We must renounce—sex. [Strong murmurs of approval, gestures of dissent, etc. Several of the company seem on the point of leaving.]…” 

Roche’s choice is funnier.  

2/ I first picked up The Acharnians, Aristophanes’s third play and the earliest among the ones that survive. It didn’t seem to go very well, so I switched to Lysistrata, one of his best plays. Compared to the tragedies, his plays are much harder to read, full of parody and references. 

In this play, Aristophanes mentions the whole trio. 

“LAMPITO What sort of oath are we going to swear?

LYSISTRATA What sort? One like Aeschylus’s, 

with the victim slaughtered over a shield.”

And: 

“LYSISTRATA Oh, what a low-down randy lot we are! 

No wonder we’re the subject of tragedies, 

like Poseidon and the Tub of Sophocles:

have fun with a god, then dump the brats.”

(That play doesn’t survive). 

“MEN’S LEADER Yes, I was fierce and that’s the way I dealt with this fellow. We camped before the gates in ranks of seventeen. And now will I simply stand and watch these brazen women, Enemies of Euripides and of heaven? Oh, I might as well wipe out the glories of Marathon.”

Now these references I enjoy, as I know the playwrights, but there are lots of references and jokes I don’t understand. 

“MEN’S LEADER Euripides got it right. “No beast’s so bloody as a woman,” he said.” 

Euripides appears as a character in 3 of Aristophanes’s 11 surviving plays, and is mentioned in some others—Aristophanes seems… obsessed? I have to read a few to see how weird it is. 

3/ Lysistrata is very funny. 

“LYSISTRATA I know, but some things are more pressing.

CALONICE Like what you’ve summoned us to hear? 

Well, I hope what’s pressing is something really big, 

Lysistrata dear.

LYSISTRATA It’s huge.

CALONICE And weighty?

LYSISTRATA God, it’s huge, and God, it’s weighty.

CALONICE Then why aren’t they all here?

LYSISTRATA Oh, it’s not that; if it were 

there’d be a stampede. No, 

it’s something that sticks in my mind hard as a shaft

and keeps me from sleeping, though I tease it and tease it 

night after night.

CALONICE By now the poor thing must be floppy.” 

Aristophanes is not above a cheap laugh, which is something he shares with Shakespeare.

But once in a while, he sneaks in a serious point: 

“LYSISTRATA […] when we are in our prime and ought to be enjoying life, 

we sleep alone because of the war. 

And I’m not just talking about 

us married ones. . . . It pains me even more 

to think of the young girls 

growing into lonely spinsters in their rooms.

MAGISTRATE Men grow old, too, don’t you know!

LYSISTRATA Hell’s bells! It’s not the same. 

When a man comes home, 

even if he’s old and gray, he can find a girl to marry in no time, 

but a woman enjoys a very short-lived prime, 

and once that’s gone, she won’t be wed by anyone. 

She mopes at home 

full of thwarted dreams.” 

He clearly does have sympathy for women, in such a male-dominated society. 

4/ The thing I like about Lysistrata is that the whole thing is ridiculous. 

“[SECOND WIFE runs out from the Acropolis.]

SECOND WIFE Heavens above! I forgot to shuck my flax 

when I left the house.

LYSISTRATA So you’re off to shuck your flax? Get back inside.

SECOND WIFE By Our Lady of Light, I’ll return in a trice. 

All I want is a little f . . . I mean, shucking.” 

Both the women and the men are horny, and going nuts. 

“HERALD That there’s a Spartan cipher rod.

CINESIAS I’ve got a Spartan cipher rod as well.”

The whole thing is ridiculous and everyone is absurd—but aren’t we all? We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. 

5/ One thing that particularly intrigues me is how this play was staged at the time. It seems more complicated than the tragedies, yes? There are more characters and the chorus is split in two, the men’s side and the women’s side. But I’m more curious about how they dealt with the female characters acting sexy in see-through dresses—consider that the actors were all male—and the men exposing their “Spartan cipher rods”—what did they do?

I guess we’ll never know.