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Although Aristophanes was well known, in name at least, from the Renaissance onward, his work did not enjoy a very active reception in France before the very end of the eighteenth century. The sidelining of Aristophanic Old Comedy, with its bawdy and political ad hominem attacks, is easily accounted for by the triumph of a competing model. New Comedy, instantiated by the plays of Terence and Plautus, was used by theoreticians and practitioners alike to redefine comedy in France after the demise of medieval farce. Its predominance remained remarkably constant in theory and practice from Sebillet's Art poétique françois (1548) and Jodelle's Eugène (1553), to d'Aubignac La Pratique du Théâtre (1657) and Molière's L'Avare (1668). Half-way through the seventeenth century, tragic playwrights such as Corneille and Racine turned to Greek models --in particular Sophocles and Euripides --to redefine neoclassical tragedy in opposition to tragicomedy and earlier Seneca-inspired plays. There was, however, no shift of this kind for comedy, and Aristophanes' influence remained all but negligible. Throughout the period, only two extant comedies, written at an interval of ninety years, took one of Aristophanes' plays as a source of inspiration: Le Loyer's Néphélococugie (1579) and Racine's Les Plaideurs (1668). Nothing could be more different than the circumstances and times in which the two plays were composed, their dramatic structure, or their tone. On the face of it, the only common factor between the two texts is that they were written by Hellenists who decided to draw their inspiration from Aristophanes' Birds and Wasps, respectively. Yet, drawn into sharp relief by the differences between the plays, there is a commonality of technique. Neither play can be considered a translation, but in each case, translated fragments of the ancient play were fitted in the new. In other words, translated old material was broken up and interspersed with new plot twists and topical references, so that in both cases Aristophanes' text is much more than a general source of inspiration; it is a definite presence. This chapter first endeavors to compare Le Loyer's and Racine's attitude towards Aristophanes as it is expressed in the forewords to their plays, before exploring this fragmented reception at work first in Le Loyer's La Nephelococugie and then in Racine's Les Plaideurs.
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