Knights 12

This play was added to the list because it was the chosen book for the book club portion of a homeschooling group I was going to join.

The play is approximately 40 pages long, so there isn't much material to work with for this blog post. The play was written in ancient Greece as an insult to a politician who was oppressing people and censoring things even though the law expressly forbid such censorship. The writer changed some names around and then put on the play with the politician sitting in the front row of the first performance.

Based off the reading itself I had no material to blog on, that little bit of irony hardly constitutes a whole blog post, but at the book club itself I picked up two more things to cover.

The first is that I have to marvel at how much the translation of the play I read and the translation everyone other than me read differed. My translation seemed legitimate and professional, keeping true to what I imagine the original would be like. The other translation was... much less so... to put it nicely. I'm pretty sure that the original play dd not begin with the two characters in Act 1 talking about masturbation, as funny as the translation was I find it unlikely that it was a professional translation.

The other topic to blog about was the origin of the title "Knights." The play was written long before knights actually existed. The idea presented to answer this question was that it was a reference to the Senate practice of the time where if there was a shortage of Senate members they'd send people out to grab random people off the street and make them senators. I'm still not sure why that made the title of the play knights, because the concept of the "knight in shining armor" would still have not existed, since that concept would have come into being AFTER the knights themselves existed, and this play was written BEFORE they existed. Not to mention that concept only loosely applies to the play. However, I can't think of a logical explanation for the title, so I have no substitute for this theory.

That's all I have fore this play, it isn't much, but I think it's pretty good for something that was only 40 pages long.