BiblioVault - Books about Latin drama (Comedy)

A Comedy Called Susenbrotus

Connie McQuillen

University of Michigan Press, 1998

The comedy Susenbrotus is a neo-Latin play, written by the students of Trinity College Cambridge and performed before King James I at Royston in March 1615/16. It has never before been edited or translated. This edition contains the Latin text (prepared from a collation of the two extant manuscript copies), an English translation with annotations to classical and contemporary allusions, and an introduction tracing the development of humanist Latin drama in the universities during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Susenbrotus is in many ways representative of later university comedy. It is a rowdy, bawdy farce with roots in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence. The wit and much of the humor in these plays is in the reworking of traditional themes with characters and situations adapted to contemporary types and topical satire. Almost every playwright for the professional stage (with the notable exception of Shakespeare) either wrote or acted in university plays. Moreover, they were popular forms of entertainment and were attended not only by members of the academic community but also by visiting dignitaries, courtiers, foreign ambassadors, and on occasion, the English monarchs.
Susenbrotus is special among later university plays because it was specifically written for King James I. It was meant to flatter the king, who prided himself on his humanist education, with a display of wit and erudition. It was also meant to entertain: the play itself is quite funny. It involves the antics of several contemporary types (the pedant, a poet, a Spanish dandy, and a braggart soldier) vying for the affection of a cross-dressed boy. Much of the wit in Susenbrotus is verbal: scholarly puns, sexual metaphors, classical allusions, and quotations that are explained in annotations. The sustained transvestitism of the character Fortunia distinguishes it from its classical sources as well as from other plays of its type. Unlike Latin texts that were submitted to publishing houses and therefore corrected or stylized by printers, Susenbrotus is an example of Latin as it was written in the seventeenth century.
Connie McQuillen is Associate Professor of Humanities, Southwest State University, Minnesota.

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Humanist Comedies

Edited and translated by Gary R. Grund

Harvard University Press, 2005

The five comedies included in this volume, three of which have never been translated into English, present a characteristic sampling of comic form as it was interpreted by some of the most important Latin humanists of the Quattrocento. Pier Paolo Vergerio's Paulus (ca. 1390), Philodoxeos fabula (1424) by Leon Battista Alberti, Philogenia et Epiphebus (ca. 1440) by Ugolino Pisani, Chrysis (1444) by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), and Tommaso Medio's Epirota (1483) span nearly the entire period and are a valuable gauge of its changing literary tastes, tastes nourished by the ancient comic drama of Plautus and Terence. While the earliest of the humanist comedies seem almost medieval in their moralism, the didacticism of the pulpit is cleverly seasoned with the unabashed realism of the brothel to produce a mixture that looks forward to the more modern, sophisticated comedies written in the vernacular during the Cinquecento.

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The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence

Mathias Hanses

University of Michigan Press, 2020

The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence documents the ongoing popularity of Roman comedies, and shows that they continued to be performed in the late Republic and early Imperial periods of Rome. Playwrights Plautus and Terence impressed audiences with stock characters as the young-man-in-love, the trickster slave, the greedy pimp, the prostitute, and many others. A wide range of spectators visited Roman theaters, including even the most privileged members of Roman society: orators like Cicero, satirists like Horace and Juvenal, and love poets like Catullus and Ovid. They all put comedy’s varied characters to new and creative uses in their own works, as they tried to make sense of their own lives and those of the people around them by suggesting comparisons to the standard personality types of Roman comedy.

Scholars have commonly believed that the plays fell out of favor with theatrical audiences by the end of the first century BCE, but The Life of Comedy demonstrates that performances of these comedies continued at least until the turn of the second century CE. Mathias Hanses traces the plays’ reception in Latin literature from the late first century BCE to the early second century CE, and shines a bright light on the relationships between comic texts and the works of contemporary and later Latin writers.

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The Theater of Plautus

Playing to the Audience

By Timothy J. Moore

University of Texas Press, 1998

The relationship between actors and spectators has been of perennial interest to playwrights. The Roman playwright Plautus (ca. 200 BCE) was particularly adept at manipulating this relationship. Plautus allowed his actors to acknowledge freely the illusion in which they were taking part, to elicit laughter through humorous asides and monologues, and simultaneously to flatter and tease the spectators.

These metatheatrical techniques are the focus of Timothy J. Moore's innovative study of the comedies of Plautus. The first part of the book examines Plautus' techniques in detail, while the second part explores how he used them in the plays Pseudolus, Amphitruo, Curculio, Truculentus, Casina, and Captivi. Moore shows that Plautus employed these dramatic devices not only to entertain his audience but also to satirize aspects of Roman society, such as shady business practices and extravagant spending on prostitutes, and to challenge his spectators' preconceptions about such issues as marriage and slavery. These findings forge new links between Roman comedy and the social and historical context of its performance.

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