Plautus: The Darker Comedies. Bacchides, Casina, and Truculentus / Edition 1

by David R. Slavitt, Palmer Bovie, T. Maccius Plautus

Overview

The plays translated in this volume represent everything one would not expect either from the third-century B.C. playwright Plautus or from Roman comedy in general.

A common theme in all three comedies is the triumph of women over men. In Truculentus, prostitutes snare all of the men in the play; in Bacchides, the victims include fathers and sons. In Casina, Plautus creates a fantasy that turns traditional social and sexual roles upside down. The plays' mordant, cynical treatment of the normal plots and casts of Roman comedy, their dark humor rooted in homosexuality, oedipal encounters, cruelty, larceny, and prostitution, and their pervasive lack of romance or sentimentality have alternately puzzled and offended the few audiences that have seen them since the Renaissance.

Now these unusual plays have been rescued from obscurity in the best possible way—through performance. James Tatum's translations, revised from actual productions, demonstrate that these are among the most entertaining and theatrically effective of Plautus's comedies. The speakable, performable scripts, along with Tatum's introduction, notes, and critical essays summarizing his own experiences in producing them, make this a gold mine for troupes wishing to produce these classics on the contemporary stage as well as for students of classical drama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801829017
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1983
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.52(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David R. Slavitt is a poet, translator, novelist, critic, and journalist. He is author of more than seventy works of fiction, poetry, and poetry and drama in translation.

Palmer Bovie has published many translations of classical Roman literature, including The Georgics of Virgil, The Satires and Epistles of Horace, Cicero: Nine Orations, Epigrams of Martial, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, and Terence: The Comedies.

What People are Saying About This

Douglass Parker

This is an excellent text for students of Roman antiquity. More important, it supplies the standard dramatic repertoire with three remarkable, offbeat comedies, capable of successful production by companies of all degrees of competence. It also enables Plautus (perhaps forces him) to be taken seriously by drama critics and theorists. These are no small achievements—this volume is some considerable cuts above your basic anthology.

Editorial Reviews

This is an excellent text for students of Roman antiquity. More important, it supplies the standard dramatic repertoire with three remarkable, offbeat comedies, capable of successful production by companies of all degrees of competence. It also enables Plautus (perhaps forces him) to be taken seriously by drama critics and theorists. These are no small achievements—this volume is some considerable cuts above your basic anthology.
—Douglass Parker

From the Publisher

"This is an excellent text for students of Roman antiquity. More important, it supplies the standard dramatic repertoire with three remarkable, offbeat comedies, capable of successful production by companies of all degrees of competence. It also enables Plautus (perhaps forces him) to be taken seriously by drama critics and theorists. These are no small achievements—this volume is some considerable cuts above your basic anthology."

Douglass Parker