Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence. By ALISON SHARROCK. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 321. Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–76181–9. Order this text for $90.73 from Amazon.com using this link and benefit CAMWS and the Classical Journal: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/classjourn-20 This and previously published CJ Online reviews are at http://classicaljournal.org/reviews.php CJ Online 2010.06.01 After an autobiographical preface Sharrock (S.) offers five chapters that intermittently discuss the 26 extant comedies of Plautus and Terence “as literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends and intertexts” (p. i): “Art and artifice” (pp. 1–21), “Beginnings” (pp. 22–95), “Plotting and playwrights” (pp. 96–162), “Repeat performance” (pp. 163–249) and “Endings” (pp. 250–89). The chapters’ huge length generally obscures their origin as a set of lectures given in Dublin in 1999. A bibliography and jejune index precede an index locorum in which Amphitryo, Andria, Bacchides, Epidicus, Eunuchus, Pseudylus and Rudens predominate, where Apollodorus, Diphilus, Menander and Philemon are not mentioned at all, but where Aristophanes, Callimachus, Euripides and Sappho are. These biases reflect S.’s stated pathway to Roman comedy from prior study of Augustan elegy, intertextual theory and (presumably) the contemporary canon— i.e. via having studied Latin poetry rather than the Greek or Hellenistic antecedents of the genre (she never mentions, for instance, the technitai of Dionysus). Her interpretations are commensurate with these biases. She finds the ideals of Callimachean and Augustan poetics alive in the comedians, scores of “programmatic” ideas, words, characters, and signifiers, and numerous layers of subtle irony and meta-characterization. Playwrights are metaphors for characters, characters for playwrights or the play, and speech of all kinds reflects the process of creative writing. Internal complots are programmatic metaphors for dramatic performance, power relationships abound, and to begin, end or even read something is deemed tendentiously problematic. The book is a vitrine of “New Latin” ideas (for this term see Don Fowler in Arachnion 2, 1995 [http://tinyurl.com/DFowler]). Whether you accept these interpretations will depend on your own experience. On p. ix S. announces her book is meant primarily for “[t]he less-than-avid readers of Plautus and Terence,” i.e. those classicists who like herself find themselves forced to read or teach it, rather than specialists in the field, though she also hopes “to amuse, if not inform” those of us who find the genre intrinsically appealing, too. Since her discussion of actual texts is unpredictably organized and sparsely mapped out, in the following remarks I isolate what seem to me to be the principal themes. In Chapter 1, Roman comedy is theorized in its complex totality as deception (actually an a priori assumption, we later learn: p. 229 n. 170) that is typically controlled by an “architectus,” i.e. a prominent character who “writes the plot with, for or against the playwright” (p. 17). Hence the first theme (Chapter 2), that there is an archetypal prologue in Roman comedy that is pure exposition of requisite information (p. 64 n. 110, etc.). Any departure from this ideal that reader-response criticism can detect—superfluous details, jokes, tangential background information, banter with the audience—is due to “Plautine mess(ing),” meaning that Plautus relies on our earlier experiences to constantly tease and misdirect us about the trajectory of the plot that follows. This pseudo-expository prologic “pose” of Plautus’ (p. 31) is then refined by Terence to its fullest form, viz. the literary “quarrel with the critics” over issues of style and plagiarism. In what is by far the most original and ingenious idea in the book, these six prologues are considered to be actively inspired by Callimachus’ Aetia prologue, with Terence’s unnamed critic both the Telchines and the ear-twitting Apollo. In Chapter 3 S. argues that complots are central to Roman comedy, with all extant specimens reducible in more or less procrustean fashion to a schema involving tricks of identity; the purpose is therapeutic, soothing our identity-anxieties (pp. 98–9). In a series of extended readings on this premise of varying depth, focus and originality, S. then traces the “self-conscious comic playfulness about the control of vision and its connection with personal identity” (p. 101) in Mostellaria, Miles, Amphitryo, Epidicus and Andria, and cursorily in other plays, isolating a number of perceived instances of the primacy of her theme. Chapter 4 continues in this vein with extended intertextual readings of Aulularia as paranoia-play, Rudens as paratragedy, Eunuchus as para-Bacchae-Catullo-Sapphic intertext, and Hecyra as instauratio-inspired, i.e. ritually interrupted, comedy. Some of these readings rely on her suggestion that intertextuality is a fruitful model for interpreting Roman comedy’s relationship to its ‘originals’ (pp. 201–4; the inverted commas are hers, p. 203). By this S. refers not just to the Roman plays’ announced source texts (Kleroumenoi, Adelphoi, etc.) but to such non-source Greek comedies as Dyskolos or Epitrepontes that share thematic similarities with Roman plays. Chapter 5 focuses on the closure of comedies. S. attributes to each plaudite-speaker (whose identity is sometimes disputed) either “pro-comic” or “anti-comic” characteristics and concomitant power to control the drama, while the comedies as a whole “dance” toward inclusive, farcical endings that “honour the comic spirit” (p. 279). Plautus likes “closural farce,” and so does Terence (p. 279). Even the moralizing occasionally found at the end of such plays as Captivi is insincere: “…underneath this pompous exterior, the signals are still there which tell us that this is all a joke, that we are to take the moralizing with a pinch of irony…” (p. 262). Thus will the axiom ridicula res est explain much. Throughout the chapter discussion rushes from one play to the next with little warning. The book then ends abruptly, with no general conclusion. What have we gained? On p. i the blurb announces, “Where[as] most recent books stress the original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance.” Though tortuously expressed—the style is typical, the square brackets mine—this, the advertised novelty of S.’s approach, seems both interesting and original. Her “primary interest is in a reader of a text, whether ancient or modern,” who “is a member of an audience only by projection and imagination” (pp. 19, 18). This suggests in principle a narrow sort of res publica comoediarum: if not the Palatine Hill of 191 BC or Aemilius Paullus’ funeral in Rome in 160, then certainly Caesar’s schoolroom, Roscius’ greenroom, Varro’s study, Flavian Beirut, Gellius’ nightstand, the Carolingian scriptorium, 1850s Bonn, Manchester 2009, your coffee table, mine…. A good idea, but in her execution S. is not committed to it. In fact she does worry how the play was originally staged (e.g. pp. 208, 211 n. 117) and how alert its audience was (pp. 54 n. 81, 228 n. 165). This impinges on her related aim of applying intertextual theory to “the plays as they stand” (p. 19), particularly in her belief that allusion “is in the eye of the beholder” (p. 205), i.e. that it is reader-generated rather than author-imposed, which she doesn’t really believe, either. In fact she frequently worries about the intentionality of allusions (pp. 78 n. 140–79, 167, 288, etc.) and the related questions of relative chronology of the plays (e.g. pp. 190, 206 n. 100, 236 n. 191, 269), authors’ knowledge of predecessors, avenues and evidence of transmission, content of the models, “Plautine elements” vs. reflexes of the Greek source texts, direct parody, interpolation, etc.—that is, all the concerns of the traditional philologist, which ought to be totally irrelevant for her stated aim and beliefs. Meanwhile, her (unannounced) decision to ignore G.B. Conte’s insightful notion of “code-modeling” and its refinements in S. Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext (Cambridge, 1998) is hard to understand. Take for instance her argument (pp. 79–80) that Andria 1ff. alludes to Callimachus’ Aetia prologue. On its own the relation is at best topos (poetic quarrel), at worst impossible to see (because Terence’s prologues seem to evoke the Roman courtroom). But set it explicitly in the code-model approach (a poet’s rebuttal of unnamed, carping critics; early in a poem; outside intervention that alters an incipient poetic program, etc.), and you really can start to see it. But when S. underplays this approach and instead foregrounds counting rare words and the like to argue her contentions, it seems like an uphill battle. At the same time, where she does adhere more closely to her announced program I find much of the analysis excessively fuzzy-associative and reductive. The various totalizations and taxonomies of perceived “doubles” of characters, plots, genre, etc., strike me as of dubious utility. Perhaps this is due to my reluctance to accept that, being more than 50% musicalized, Roman comedy is actually “mimetic” (and correspondingly “deceptive”) in the sense S. supposes it is, for if by “mimetic” we mean “a mirror of life,” then the difference between trimeter-based Greek comedies and Roman musicalizations of them will resemble that between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story—the latter in varying degrees necessarily more abstract and more cartoonish than the former. I am equally skeptical that, despite its obvious appeal, intertextuality really is the appropriate model to apply. [[1]] But even so, how do these patterns help us to better appreciate the plays? Space taken up by potted accounts of verbal style (pp. 167–83) or numerous footnotes of the “on x see y” type could have been devoted to answering this question. Still, quot homines, tot sententiae: I am not one of the less-than-avid readers of Roman comedy that S. hopes for, so this book was not written for me. The above remarks should be taken accordingly. MICHAEL FONTAINE Cornell University [[1]] Adaptation theory is the better model; on this and the relationship between mimetic and musical comedy, see “The Reception of Greek Comedy in Rome,” in M. Revermann (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (forthcoming). If you have been forwarded this review, you may subscribe to the listserv by sending an email to: [log in to unmask] Leave the subject line blank, and in the first line of the message write: SUBSCRIBE CJ-Online You may remove yourself from the CJ-Online listserv by sending an email to: [log in to unmask] Leave the subject line blank, and in the first line of the message write: UNSUBSCRIBE CJ-Online