ABSTRACT

The earliest known reference to reading a play for pleasure occurs in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, first presented in 405 bce, where Dionysus says that he was sitting on the deck of a ship one day, “reading once more that dear Andromeda,” a (now lost) play by Euripides. Assuming that what he was doing was not unusual at the time, we can conclude that people have been reading plays for at least 2,400 years. Indeed, public demand from readers has long driven the publication of scripts—legitimate and pirated—in the Western world.