De Gruyter (2016) h/b 625pp £112.99 (ISBN 9783110455571)
Roman drama as such has at times struggled to be taken seriously as a coherent area of interest. Subsections of the genre—comedy and tragedy most obviously—tend to be studied in isolation both from each other and also from the context in which they were produced. Studies of Roman comedy of the republic, for instance, rarely look at the imperial tragedians (and vice versa), and this book shows that this myopic approach is missing out on a lot of good things. There has also been a prevailing view that Roman drama (comic and tragic) was merely a pale copy of the greater Greek drama and so did not merit much attention anyway beyond the efforts to reconstruct the ‘original’ lurking behind the Roman palimpsest. One would never dare to say this about Horace’s Odes, for all that they proudly bring the songs of Greece to Italy, but somehow drama has not been accorded the authenticity it displays.
Until now. This book will go a long way to put Roman drama on the intellectual map of Roman achievements, and the very size of the book is a good indication of the determination of its editors and contributors to show that this immense field can be seen as a single tradition. The book emerged after a conference in Thessaloniki in 2014 and contains thirty-three essays, all in English and all offering fresh insights into the works under scrutiny. All Latin and Greek quotations are well translated, and the book is immaculately produced and proof-read in the best De Gruyter tradition.
Of the essays, seventeen are devoted to republican comedy, seven to tragedy, and nine further pieces examine the reception of Roman drama; and the texts studied go from Plautus right up to Caryl Churchill. In the space available it is not possible even to summarise each of the thirty-three papers, and it seems invidious to select a few out of so many for special attention, but the topics covered include both the dramaturgy of the Roman theatre (and there are especially good pieces on the elements of pantomime (by Bernhard Zimmermann) and the place of music in tragedy (by Timothy J. Moore)). There are also analyses of the value-systems behind the text and the way drama both questions and reinforces issues of social class—Alison Sharrock is especially good on this. The prologues and epilogues come under scrutiny in two papers from (respectively) Kathleen McCarthy and David Christenson: these dramatic conventions are seen as framing the play and breaking the dramatic illusion, but their relationship to the putative moral framework is arguable and worth looking at. Old moralistic readings of the comedies as little more than exercises in conservative stock characters with stereotypical views are properly questioned and rebutted—the Plautine matrona is accorded more comic independence (by David Christenson) and the pimp in Curculio gets more sympathy (from T.H.M. Gellar-Goad) than he has enjoyed before.
Literary contexts are well explored, and there are some excellent links established between Terence and the satires of Lucilius (by Ruth Caston). Another piece (by Cedric Littlewood) shows how the lyric poetry of Horace resurfaces in the choral lyrics in Seneca’s tragedies. It would be odd if playwrights were not in touch with the wider literary landscape, and it is salutary to be reminded of this. Seneca was a philosopher as well as a dramatist, and the Stoic themes in his plays are well brought out by David Konstan, just as Gesine Manuwald examines the polymathic interests manifest in the dramas of Ennius. The retrospective historical reading behind tragedy (making use of Virgil and Lucan along the way) is well adduced by Lauren Donovan Ginsberg in a very interesting piece on the pseudo-Senecan Octavia.
Drama was also performed in a specific time and place, and political context has to be of huge interest both then and now: remember the moment when in 59 BC a Roman theatrical performance became something of a political demo as the actor’s recitation of the line nostra miseria tu es magnus was picked up by the crowd as a reference to Pompey (Cicero ad Atticum 2.19.3), and the actor Diphilus had to repeat the line over and over again. The political context and use of the theatre as a quasi-political gathering could perhaps have been developed more fully in this volume.
There are, then, some gloriously successful close readings of Roman drama and the world which produced it in this fine book. The final two chapters on the way Roman drama continues to be translated and produced on the stage and in print by modern writers of immense stature such as Ted Hughes and Caryl Churchill is itself testimony to the strength and the value of this literary genre.
John Godwin