Author Description

The Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence gained popularity by adapting Greek comedies of an earlier era for the contemporary Roman stage. The resulting dramas are comedies of error and intrigue, of mistaken identity and farcical situations, peopled by stock characters drawn both from the respectable middle class, but often cruelly satirised--foolish young lovers, dirty old men and their nagging wives--and from the disreputable lower class--scheming slaves and scroungers, prostitutes, pimps and bawds--and featuring other colourful comic characters such as blustering soldiers. But these characters and scenarios bear a remarkable similarity to works of a much later period: picaresque literature of the Spanish Golden Age--in which tawdry characters such as the pícaro (rogue) also hatch plots and skulk around brothels. The similarities between the world of Roman comedy and that of picaresque Spain are so remarkable that it is surprising to find that none of the scholarship on the classical dramas up to now has used the term 'picaresque' to describe them.But why should we be fascinated by tales of tricksters, thieves and down-and-outs, when most people would run a mile if confronted by a real-life exemplar of the type? The answer can be found in research drawn on here, such as Ulrich Wicks' study of the trickster as archetype, Erich Segal's comments about 'Man's inner urge to "misbehave", the psychological tension between restraint and release', and William Scovil Anderson's concept of 'heroic badness'. So, this innovative study employs the concept of the 'picaresque' taken from Spanish Golden Age literature to take a fresh look at certain characters, scenarios and themes in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence. All of the Latin quoted from the comedies has been translated into English, much of it playfully translated into rhyming verse to recreate the ludic ambience of the original works, while the original texts are included for the scholar.