Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence

by Alison Sharrock

Overview

For many years the domain of specialists in early Latin, in complex metres, and in the reconstruction of texts, Roman comedy is now established in the mainstream of Classical literary criticism. Where most books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance. The texts are treated, and celebrated, as literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends, and intertexts. All the extant plays of Plautus and Terence have at least a bit part in this book, which seeks to expose the authors' fabulous artificiality and artifice, while playing along with their differing but interrelated poses of generic humility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521761819
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2009
Series:	The W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alison Sharrock is Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester. She is also the author of Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2 (1994) and Fifty Key Classical Authors (with Rhiannon Ash, 2002), and co-editor of Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (with Helen Morales, 2000) and The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (with Roy Gibson and Steven Green, 2006).

Table of Contents

1. Art and artifice; 2. Beginnings; 3. Plotting and playwrights; 4. Repeat performance; 5. Endings.

Editorial Reviews

"...consistently illuminating. ...this study will be accessible to any reader with a strong interest in the subtleties of Roman comedy." —Choice

"If this book helps to open the eyes of non-specialists to the richness of Roman comedy, it will have performed a great service." —Phoenix

From the Publisher