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Rome and the Mysterious Orient

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ISBN-10: 0520242750

ISBN-13: 9780520242753

Edition: 2005

Authors: Titus Maccius Plautus, Amy Richlin

List price: $25.95
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Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays--originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens--tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, always a productive source of comedy. These current, accessible, and accurate translations have replaced terms meaningful only to their original audience, such as references to Roman gods, with a…    
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Book details

List price: $25.95
Copyright year: 2005
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 12/12/2005
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 302
Weight: 0.946
Language: English

Plautus and Terence used stock characters (the young lovers, the clever slave, the irate father) and devices (mistaken identity), but each handled these conventions in his own distinct manner. Plautus was the son of a poor Umbrian farmer who may have fought in the Second Punic War. The playwright Plautus is said to have been a popular actor, true comedian, jovial, tolerant, rough of humor. He not only modeled his plays on the Greek New Comedy, but unhesitatingly inserted long passages translated from the Greek originals. He was the master of comic irony and, as its originator, copied by Moliere, Corneille, Jonson, Dryden and Fielding. Shakespeare based his Comedy of Errors on Plautus's…    

List of Illustrations
Why This Book
Why Translate This Way
Conventions of Reference and Abbreviations
How These Plays Got from Plautus to Us
Other Translations
Historical Background
Translation Issues
Performance Issues
Suggestions for Further Reading
Weevil (Curculio)
Iran Man (Persa)
Towelheads (Poenulus)
General References
Translations, Commentaries, and Special Studies
Historical Background