William S. Anderson

Barbarian Play. Plautus' Roman Comedy

University of Toronto Press 1996

Stron X+184

'[Anderson's] Plautus ingeniously and willfully subverts the Greek's more romantic or serious messages, directing attention away from the affirmation of family values and toward rebellious slaves and meretricious courtesans whose triumphs mock society's most precious moral principles.'

M. Damen, Choice

'[Anderson's] ability to sense and appreciate complexity comes through in the details of his observations in a way that is not evident in the argument trying to separate Plautus from his Greek predecessors. Barbarian Play is at its best in observing and describing the comic techniques of individual plays or of specific themes across the corpus. The richness of Anderson's observations on Plautine comedy could well support a more complex theory of this literary form.'

Contents

FOREWORD vii
PREFACE ix
1 Plautus and the Deconstruction of Menander 3
2 si amicus Diphilo aut Philemoni es: Plautus' Exploitation of Other Writers and Features of the Greek Comic Tradition 30

3 Plautus' Plotting: The Lover Upstaged 60

4 Heroic Badness [malitia): Plautus' Characters and Themes 88

5 Words, Numbers, Movement: Plautus' Mastery of Comic Language, Metre, and Staging 107

6 Plautus and His Audience: The Roman Connection 133

NOTES 153

BIBLIOGRAPHY 171

INDEX 179