Roman Drama and its Contexts

Description

Roman plays have been well studied individually (even including fragmentary or spurious ones more recently). However, they have not always been placed into their ‘context’, though plays (just like items in other literary genres) benefit from being seen in context. This edited collection aims to address this issue: it includes 33 contributions by an international team of scholars, discussing single plays or Roman dramatic genres (including comedy, tragedy and praetexta, from both the Republican and imperial periods) in contexts such as the literary tradition, the relationship to works in other literary genres, the historical and social situation, the intellectual background or the later reception. Overall, they offer a rich panorama of the role of Roman drama or individual plays in Roman society and literary history. The insights gained thereby will be of relevance to everyone interested in Roman drama or literature more generally, comparative literature or drama and theatre studies. This contextual approach has the potential of changing the way in which Roman drama is viewed.  Preface Table of Contents Introduction: Roman Drama and its Contexts Part I: Roman Comedy Some Dramatic Terminology Bacchus in Roman Drama Speculating in Unreal Estate: Locution, Locution, Locution The Kings of Comedy Genre and Social Class, or Comedy and the Rhetoric of Self-aggrandisement and Self-deprecation Sententiousness in Roman Comedy – A Moralising Reading Plautus’ Aulularia and Popular Narrative Tradition Plautus Undoing Himself – What is Funny and What is Plautine in Stichus and Trinummus? Prologues between Performance and Fiction All’s Well That Ends Well? Old Fools, Morality, and Epilogues in Plautus Plautus’ Curculio and the Case of the Pious Pimp The Young Man in Plautus’ Asinaria 127–248 Civic Reassignment of Space in the Truculentus Nothing to do with Fides? The Speaker of the Prologue and the Reproduction of Citizenship in Plautus’ Casina Symmetrical Recognitions in Plautus’ Epidicus Basket Case: Material Girl and Animate Object in Plautus’s Cistellaria Elements of Pantomime in Plautus’ Comedies Part II: Roman Tragedy History and Philosophy in Roman Republican Drama and Beyond Music in Roman Tragedy Seneca, Horace and the Poetics of Transgression Tragic Translatio: Epistle 107 and Senecan Tragedy Seneca’s Agamemnon: Mycenaean Becoming Trojan When Reason Surrenders its Authority: Thyestes’ Approach to Atreus’ Palace History as Intertext and Intertext as History in the Octavia Part III: Reception of Comedy and Tragedy Terence and Satire How to Do Things with Words – and Pictures: Text and Image in the Parisian Terence Is the Story of Susanna and the Elders Based on a Greek New Comedy? Terence’s Comedies in the Terentius Christianus: The Case of Naaman Petronian Spectacles: The Widow of Ephesus Generically Revisited Furor and Kin(g)ship in Seneca’s Thyestes and Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica (1.700–850) Noises Off: The Thyestes Theme in Tacitus’ Dialogus Seneca’s Ted Hughes Seneca’s Thyestes: Three Female Translators into English Notes on Contributors General Index Index locorum