One of George Barbier’s costume designs for a 1919 reproduction of Maurice Donnay’s Lysistrata (1892) at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. Fittingly enough, the Lysistrata was printed in 1911 by The Women’s Press, founded in 1907 to promote female suffrage. In this instance, Laurence was glad to evade the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, who had that same year forbade Pains and Penalties, his period drama about the marriage troubles of George IV and Queen Caroline, from being staged. The translation, billed as “A Modern Paraphrase from the Greek of Aristophanes,” was produced by Laurence Housman, younger brother – and regular provocateur – of the Classicist A.E. The result, according to one reviewer, was a “tame and school-girlish affair” that had little connection to the original script. In 1910, when Gertrude Kingston established the London Little Theatre, the city’s censors gave her permission to produce a “severely bowdlerized version” of the play, in which she starred as the title character. The text of the play can be explored in Greek and English here. Over the years, the comedy has been sanitized and censored more for this reason than for any other. More than any other Ancient Greek play, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BCE) conjures up images of the prurient and licentious.
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