Plautus

What pleasures did Plautus' heroic tricksters provide their original audience? How should we understand the compelling mix of rebellion and social conservatism that Plautus offers? Through a close reading of four plays representing the full range of his work (Menaechmi, Casina, Persa, and Captivi), Kathleen McCarthy develops an innovative model of Plautine comedy and its social effects. She concentrates on how the plays are shaped by the interaction of two comic modes: the socially conservative mode of naturalism and the potentially subversive mode of farce. It is precisely this balance of the naturalistic and the farcical that allows everyone in the audience--especially those well placed in the social hierarchy--to identify both with and against the rebel, to feel both the thrill of being a clever underdog and the complacency of being a securely ensconced authority figure.Basing her interpretation on the workings of farce and naturalism in Plautine comedy, McCarthy finds a way to understand the plays' patchwork literary style as well as their protean social effects. Beyond this, she raises important questions about popular literature and performance not only on ancient Roman stages but in cultures far from Plautus' Rome. How and why do people identify with the fictional figures of social subordinates? How do stock characters, happy endings, and other conventions operate? How does comedy simultaneously upset and uphold social hierarchies? Scholars interested in Plautine theater will be rewarded by the detailed analyses of the plays, while those more broadly interested in social and cultural history will find much that is useful in McCarthy's new way of grasping the elusive ideological effects of comedy.

This book surveys Shakespeare's comedies, charting the influence upon them of the ancient playwrights Plautus and Terence. Miola analyzes these sources, and places the comedies in their Renaissance context, as well as in the larger context of European theater. Discovering new indebtedness, and discerning new patterns in previously attested borrowings, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment of the complex interactions of the Classical, Shakesperian, and other Renaissance theaters. Robert Miola's thoroughly researched book ranges over a vast amount of European drama, from Aristophanes to Beckett and Ionesco. It makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of Shakespeare and of his foremost antecedents, but also of his artistry and achievement.

Taking particular plays and poems from Roman comic theatre and the genre of Latin satire, this book finds Rome sending up Roman culture - making a mess of drama, jesting at rustic gaucherie, caricaturing the cult of masculine aggression. Writing Down Rome explores the robust poetic of self-denigration. Henderson's essays celebrate the energetic self-mockery that powers much of Roman poetry. They range widely over comedy, lyric, bucolic, and, in particular, the Roman speciality of satire.