Strepsiades: Tricked

To me, the entire play seems to play on the trickster’s quality of constructing and eluding traps. Strepsiades’ whole purpose in the play is to learn how to avoid the “trap” of loans that his son has brought upon him. In order to do this, he wishes to learn how to construct a sort of counter-trap with words from the sophists at the Thinkery. While he is in the Thinkery, he strives to come up with clever ruses but only ends up with buffoonish solutions like burning the court records with a magnifying glass, hanging himself, and getting a witch to bring down the moon.

However, it seems that some of the other characters are better tricksters than Strep in this area. Socrates is introduced with a story about how he caught (trapped?) a queer to steal his cloak and then, later, does the same thing to Strep. Pheidippides is eventually the one to learn the ways of the sophists and uses this knowledge to lure his father into agreeing with his own beating. Furthermore, at the end of the play, the Cloud/Chorus leader tells Strep “You’re the one responsible for this./ you turned yourself toward these felonies.” And “That’s what we do each time we see someone/ who falls in love with evil strategies,/ until we hurl him into misery,/ so he may learn to fear the gods.” These lines lead me to believe that the entire play is a clever trap set for Strep by the Clouds (who are gorgeous women-a stereotype about women’s deceiving nature perhaps?). They didn’t like his avoidance of his debts through dishonesty and therefore taught him a lesson by letting him think his scheme would succeed (for the Clouds seemed to agree with his ideas up until this point) only to have him end up in a worse position, with debts going to court and a son who beats him. This line is also interesting because, here, the Clouds acknowledge the presence of the gods and their superiority when earlier Socrates had touted the Clouds themselves as the only gods.

The play ends with the one trap Strep succeeds in setting. After his plans fall apart and he his left with nothing, Hermes, the ultimate trickster and trap artist “tells” Strep to burn down the Thinkery with Socrates, all his students, and perhaps even his son inside. Strep does this to punish them for their impiety, which makes me think that the trap set by the gods was for the sophists as well. This would make sense considering that Socrates and his students not only deny the existence of the gods (a big no-no) but Socrates even commits an act of hubris when he makes his entrance in a way reminiscent of the divine (an even bigger no-no).