The Clouds

An indebted father, desperate to escape creditors caused by his son's lavish habits, seeks out a school of new thinkers who promise techniques to argue any position and evade responsibility. Pupils are taught rhetorical tricks and moral inversion so that wrong can be defended as right, and lessons are enacted through debates and rehearsed disputation. A chorus representing the heavens frames the action and embodies the intellectual fashion being lampooned. Personified figures of Just and Unjust Causes confront one another in mock-legal contests, and the play satirically traces how sophistical education unsettles traditional values and produces comic social disorder.