Letters in Plautus
Writing Between the Lines

Uses embedded letters to illuminate two vexed questions, the origins of Plautine comedy and the mode of Plautus' translation.

Emilia A. Barbiero (Author)

9781009168519, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2022

300 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

The letters in Plautus are potent tools for making and thinking about Plautine comedy inside Plautine comedy. Emilia Barbiero demonstrates that Plautus' embedded letters reify the internal performance and evince its theatricality by means of the epistolary medium's script-like ability to precipitate presence in absence. These missives thus serve as emblems of the dramatic script, and in their onstage composition and recitation they cast a portrait of the plays' textual origins into the plays themselves. But by virtue of their inscription with a premise which is identical to that of the comedies they inhabit, the Plautine letters also reproduce the relationship between the playwright's Greek models and his Latin translations: the mirror effect created by a dramatic text inscribed, read and realized within a dramatic text whose plot it also duplicates generates a mise-en-abyme which ultimately serves to contemplate problems of novelty and literary ownership that beset Plautus' literary endeavor.

List of Critical Editions
Note on the Text
Introduction
1. Bacchides: A Scene of Writing
2. Persa: Whose Play Is It Anyway?
3. Pseudolus: Fake It Till You Make it
4. Curculio: The Ring Is a/the Thing
5. Epidicus and Trinummus: The Roads Not Taken
Postscripts
Appendix: Text, Reading and Writing in Plautus
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literature & literary studies [D]