The Clouds Literary Elements

Comedy

The original play was written in Ancient Greek but then translated to various other languages.

The action of the play takes place in Athens, around 424 B.C.

Because this is a play, there is no narrator and no point of view.

The tone and mood used in the play is a coming and critic one. Through this combination, the narrator criticizes a philosophical movement which he does not agree with.

The protagonist in the play is Strepsiades and the antagonist is Socrates.

The major conflict is presented as being between Strepsiades and his adult son, a young man who doesn’t know how to take care of money and how to be an adult. Because of this, the family accumulated a lot of debt and so Strepsiades, now towards the end of his life, tries to do something and remediate the situation so his son will have a good life after his death and will know how to manage the money he has.

The play reaches its climax when Strepsiades returns home and tries to put into practice everything he learned while he was with Socrates.

The way Socrates is described in the beginning of the play, in a basket above everyone and considering himself as being superior, foreshadows the way in which Socrates will treat those around him in a demeaning and superior manner.

When Strepsiades wakes up his son and asks him if he is ready to do something for his father, the son responds almost immediately affirmatively, claiming he will do everything he can. A few moments later, when his father tells him how he wishes for him to give up the passion he has for horses and to focus instead on more serious matters, the son refuses immediately and even leaves the house. This action thus makes his first statement to be labeled as being an understatement.

In the beginning of the play, Strepsiades talks about his wife, a woman who was born in the city and thus lived her life very differently from the way her husband was used to. Strepsiades mentions how his wife used to weave cloaks for him and how they were ‘’too closely woven’’. This is an allusion made to the wife’s inability not spend above her means.

One of the most important imageries is the way in which Socrates is presented in the beginning of the play. When Strepsiades sees him for the first time, he is suspended in a basket and addresses Strepsiades with ‘’mortal man’’. This has the purpose of portraying Socrates as a less than rational man, a person who considers himself as being above everyone and who treats them as such. Socrates sees himself in this play as being superior but the author portrays him as being silly and deranged.

One of the paradoxical elements in the play is the idea that Strepsiades went to Socrates in order to learn how to be a better person and instead he was thought how to be someone who cheats and who lives by fooling others and profiting from them.

At one point in the play, Socrates describes a group of people who benefit from the teachings of the Clouds and who lived a happy and carefree life because of this. A parallel could be drawn between the people described there and the politicians of the day, mainly because allusions are made towards the wretchedness and also the corruption of both groups.

We find a personification in the lines "my mind spread out its wings; it burns to babble about trifles,’’ uttered by Strepsiades.

There are no dramatic devices used in this play, making it hard in some instances to understand the plot and to imagine the characters as they would have been on stage. The dramatic devices are replaced in this play with the vivid descriptions made by the characters, descriptions which help both the reader and the actor to understand the play better.