Vindicated by History/Theatre

• Aristophanes is arguably the best-remembered of the ancient Greek comedy writers. 11 of his plays have survived in full, compared to 6 partially-surviving works by Menander and fragments by several others. But there is no sense that he was extraordinarily popular in his time. Like others writers of his time, his theatrical plays competed for awards in festivals. He often lost. That medieval copyists chose to preserve his works is a testament to his continued appeal. Of his surviving plays:
  • The Acharnians (425 BC), The Knights (424 BC), and The Frogs (405 BC) are known to have won the first prize in contests. With the Frogs being popular enough to warrant a repeat performance, extraordinary for its time.
  • The Wasps (422 BC), Peace (421 BC), and The Birds (414 BC) took second place. A testament to Aristophanes having harsh competition in the persons of Cratinus and Eupolis. The later two remained popular to Roman times, and Macrobius (5th century AD) even commented: "Everyone knows Eupolis". Unfortunately, the Medieval copyists chose to ignore these two authors for unknown reasons.
  • The Clouds (423 BC) came last in a contest and was poorly received by the audience. Aristophanes later revised it considerably, adding comments on the unpopularity of the earlier version. Today only the revised version survives.
  • There is no information on whether Lysistrata (411 BC), Thesmophoriazusae (411 BC), Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen) (c. 392 BC), and Plutus (c. 388 BC) were successful or not. For all their modern fame, these plays seem to have been obscure in antiquity, resulting in few comments by later writers.
• From what we can tell, William Shakespeare wasn't thought of as the pre-eminent playwright of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre at the time, although he seems to have been well regarded and reasonably famous. Only in the late 18th century did scholars start to pay serious attention to Shakespeare. Up until then, most of the praise had been for Ben Jonson and the (now largely forgotten except by academics) collaboraters Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher.
  • Two of his plays, The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth, fared particularly poorly when first introduced, with less than a half dozen 17th-century performances on record. Four centuries later they are two of The Bard's most celebrated plays.
  • Othello was also a bomb in the Elizabethan period. Nowadays, it is second only to Hamlet as the most-performed work of Shakespeare.
  • The Tempest, one of the Bard's later plays, also suffered from public disinterest, and its road to recovery was hindered by the closing of English theatres following Cromwell's English Revolution. Its re-evaluation in the 19th century was one of the major indicators that Shakespeare had become the greatest playwright of all time.
• Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore was initially considered a failure when put on in 1887. This verdict is somewhat harsh, since it was run directly following The Mikado. It did actually enjoy a bit of success later on in the run, but it wasn't put in the regular Gilbert and Sullivan cannon until the 1920s where it has remained ever since.
• Anton Chekhov's The Seagull.
• Arthur Miller's The Crucible and A View from the Bridge.

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