Letters in Plautus : Writing between the lines

by: Barbiero, E.A.

Letters in Plautus
Writing Between the Lines

Author: Emilia A. Barbiero, New York University

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.

Uses textual evidence to elucidate the origins of Plautine comedy
Sheds light on Plautine translation
Provides a deeper understanding of the epistolary medium in antiquity

Table of Contents
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.

Author
Emilia A. Barbiero , New York University

The Mycenaean World

by: Chadwick, J.

• ISBN-13: 9780521290371 / 978-0-521-29037-1
• ISBN-03: 0521290376 / 0-521-29037-6
• Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007

Letters in Plautus : Writing between the lines

by: Barbiero, E.A.

• ISBN-13: 9781009168526 / 978-1-009-16852-6
• ISBN-03: 1009168525 / 1-00-916852-5
• Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2024