The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy provides a comprehensive critical introduction to Roman comedy and its reception through more than twenty accessible and up-to-date chapters by leading international scholars. This book defines the fundamentals of Roman comedy by examining its literary and comic technique as well as its stagecraft and music, and then traces the genre's influence through the centuries. Roman comedy has served as a model for writers as well as artists ranging from Shakespeare to Molière and from Martin Luther to Cole Porter. Just as the Middle Ages spawned Christianised versions of Terence's comedies, in which harlots find God rather than a husband and young men become martyrs rather than never-do-well lovers, the twentieth century has also given us its take on Roman comedy with Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and numerous modern versions of Plautus' Amphitryon.
Composed in early imperial Rome by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Stoic philosopher and tutor to the emperor Nero, the tragedy Medea is dominated by the superhuman energy of its protagonist: diva, killer, enc
This is the first volume dedicated to Plautus' perennially popular comedy Casina that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Latin. It launches a much-needed new series o
Launching a much-needed new series discussing each comedy that survives from the ancient world, this volume is a vital companion to Terence's earliest comedy, Andria, highlighting its context, themes,
This is the first volume dedicated to Plautus' perennially popular comedy Casina that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Latin. It launches a much-needed new series o
Launching a much-needed new series discussing each comedy that survives from the ancient world, this volume is a vital companion to Terence's earliest comedy, Andria, highlighting its context, themes,
This book shows the impact of the 1428 rediscovery of Plautus’s plays on the theory and composition of comedy, and sets Plautus’s reception apart from that of the quite different dramatist
Hercules is the best-known character from classical mythology. Seneca's play Hercules Furens presents the hero at a moment of triumph turned to tragedy. Hercules returns from his final labor, his jour
The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed.
This book presents a comprehensive account of features of Latin that emerge from dialogue: commands and requests, command softeners and strengtheners, statement hedges, interruptions, attention-getters, greetings and closings. In analyzing these features, Peter Barrios-Lech employs a quantitative method and draws on all the data from Roman comedy and the fragments of Latin drama. In the first three parts, on commands and requests, particles, attention-getters and interruptions, the driving questions are firstly - what leads the speaker to choose one form over another? And secondly - how do the playwrights use these features to characterize on the linguistic level? Part IV analyzes dialogues among equals and slave speech, and employs data-driven analyses to show how speakers enact roles and construct relationships with each other through conversation. The book will be important to all scholars of Latin, and especially to scholars of Roman drama.
This volume takes a new approach to Roman drama by looking at comic and tragic plays from the Republican and imperial periods in ‘context’. By presenting a number of case studies and considerations of
While Roman statesman, philosopher and writer Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s (c.4 BC-65 AD) tragedies influenced the Roman populace beyond his commanded suicide, ultimately they were eclipsed by the exigenci
Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries, his story has inspired works of epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, opera, a gospel musical and more.
Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. Relati
In their practice of aemulatio, the mimicry of older models of writing, the Augustan poets often looked to the Greeks: Horace drew inspiration from the lyric poets, Virgil from Homer, and Ovid from He
The essays in this collection all illustrate the vitality of Neo-Latin drama in early modern Europe, arising from its productive combination of classical models with deep-rooted vernacular traditions.
