Liverpool University Press (2025) h/b 473pp £120 (ISBN 9781835535646)
This edition of one of Plautus’ finest and funniest plays is on a large scale. The highly readable introduction takes up a full 100 pages and covers everything the reader could wish for, starting with Plautus’s life and times, the nature of Roman comedy, the setting of the play in its era and the analysis of the play: all this is well done, although more might have been written about the social status (and the gender) of the actors. The language of Plautus may be less familiar to the reader brought up on Cicero—and the metres are also new to those who grew up with elegiac couplets—and so B-L devotes a lot of space to both these elements, before ending his introduction with sections on text, transmission and reception.
The play throws up a lot of interesting questions, many of which are addressed in the introduction. The play is clearly based on the now-lost comedy Klēroumenoi of Diphilus, but the original ending—which sees Casina turn out to be an Athenian citizen and daughter of the chap next door—is relegated to a throwaway pair of lines in Pardalisca’s epilogue (1012-3). The ‘recognition’ scene (which is such a feature of these plays (from Greek New comedy to Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw) is thus jettisoned in favour of a heavy focus on the central (and surprisingly complex) character of the Old Man, whose come-uppance is the play’s focus and climax. In this play the Old Man displays a lot of the comic material of the ‘besotted youth’ of other plays (such as Phaedromus in Curculio) and even tries to be the ‘clever slave’ of his own household—while also being a randy old goat with an oddly effeminate penchant for perfume (226n.). He fails to exert any sort of paterfamilias authority over his slaves, and none whatsoever over his ‘termagant wife’ (p.34) Cleostrata and is ultimately the slave of his own libido, as B-L well demonstrates (p.49). He is obviously the driving force behind the plot and the other characters are essentially satellites to his blazing ardour. All this is well brought out by B-L in the introduction (pp.39-49) and throughout the commentary. The exposure of unwanted infants is also explained in broad terms (40-1n.) but I was left slightly baffled by the issue of how her adoption into the household would have worked: she was presumably brought up as a household slave, and yet B-L suggests that Casina enjoys a filial relationship with Cleostrata (46n.) and even (bizarrely) with her would-be seducer Senex (p.320). This lends itself well to Freudian interpretation: but more evidence from other texts to back up the incest theme would have helped to support the argument.
The editor is highly informed and motivated in all matters metrical, and is (rightly) keen that we read the Latin correctly. The text is accordingly marked up, with long and short vowels often indicated and elisions always shown. This is excellent for conveying to the reader how the text would have sounded, but can look daunting on the page with lines such as this one (393):
OL. Pěrĭist(ī)! S.ănĭm(um)͜ aduortĭt(e)͜ ambō OL. Tăcěō. S. Nunc tū Cle͡ostrătă
The antilabe here adds an extra layer of complexity and it might have been easier to read if a change of speaker had created a new line, especially as that is exactly what the facing translation does. Some of the text pages (e.g. p. 150) leave acres of white space below the Latin to allow the translation to catch up. The translation is adequate to convey the meaning of the text but does not always come over as a performable script. Look for instance at B-L’s version of 874ff:
‘I don’t know where to run
don’t know where to hide
Don’t know how to cover up the crime.
That’s how much we have,
Both master and me,
Stood out in scandal on our wedding night.’
Christopher Stace’s 1981 translation of the same passage runs far better: ‘Where can I run? Where can I hide? I’ll never live this down, never. My god, we’re really in disgrace now, my master and I, with this ‘marriage’ of ours! The shame of it!’
This (of course) highlights the difficulty of producing a translation of a comic text which can be used to help the reader elucidate the Latin without killing the humour. The translator does a good job of updating Plautus’ slang, so that we have ‘a pile of shit’ (for sterculino at 114) ‘hookers’ (585), a ‘twerp’ (592: with a good note explaining the word) and he even slips into Spanish with ¡Guácala! (727) where the Latin slips into Greek (φῦ φῦ).
The commentary is aimed both at Latinists and also at non-Latinists. Where the note is concerned solely with the Latin text, the lemmata are from the Latin, but where the comment elucidates the action or the translation it cites the relevant phrase in English: see e.g. 362n. for both in action.
The commentary is generous with its information: so we have excellent explanations of marriage (pp.287-90) and lot-drawing in antiquity (p. 319-20), as well as lengthy and coherent analysis of the dramaturgical and thematic significance of major sections of the play and individual characters: see for instance his wonderful account of Pardalisca at pp. 363-6. B-L is far less coy than MacCary and Willcock were (in their 1976 Cambridge edition of the play) about the dirty jokes, and unpacks them with scholarly precision but without prurience: see e.g. his notes on 326-7, 462 and 994-5. There are however some repetitions (such as sanun (=sanusne) being explained twice on the same page (300)), and some of the supporting detail seems extraneous to the matter of the play (such as the disquisition on malaria at 414-5n).
The book has 23 pages of bibliography and a general index, as well as a glossary of terms, although this last is less helpful than I had hoped and could have done with cross-references to the relevant pages of the introduction: the ‘Jacobsohnian place’ is glossed as ‘the normally long D set as d’ which only makes sense if one has mastered pp. 70-1 on the alphabetic way of analysing Plautine metre.
The blurb describes Casina as ‘Plautus’ most … uproarious farce’ and it is certainly a hugely entertaining way to spend an evening in the theatre if you are lucky enough to catch a production. The Latin sparkles and the plot never drags: and the poet’s use of dramatic irony (especially in the Chalinus-as-bride scene) and verbal invention make this a remarkable text to study. With the help of B-L more people can enjoy this play, and we owe him a great debt of gratitude for helping us to do so.
John Godwin