The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Aristophanes' Apology, Including a Transcript from Euripides: Being the Last Adventure of Balaustion
Aristophanes' Apology, Including a Transcript from Euripides: Being the Last Adventure of Balaustion, a long poem in blank verse by
R.
Browning
, published
1875
as a sequel to
Balaustion's Adventure
.
The core of the poem is a protracted argument between
Balaustion
and
Aristophanes
as to the moral, social, and metaphysical value of the different aesthetics they espouse; Balaustion defending the visionary humanism of
Euripides
, Aristophanes his own coarse realism. Part of Balaustion's argument consists in reading Euripides' play Herakles (whose plot, the madness of Herakles and his destruction of his family, constitutes the thematic focus of the poem). The poem is by no means the straightforward defence of Euripides by Browning that it has been taken to be: Balaustion, not
Browning
, is the speaker. The structure—a monologue containing the narrative of a dialogue and the reading of a play—is...
[The entire page is 192 words long]
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