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Plautus, at last!
This is his Casina, one of his many...well, romantic comedies. I suppose I could just call it a “comedy”, given that as with Shakespeare that pretty much means people will be getting married at the end, and there’ll be a lot of wacky coincidences along the way. In fact, if you want a good taste of Roman comedy done in English, go read A Comedy of Errors; from the hilarious coincidences to the dirty jokes to the tricky slaves (or “servants”, I guess) to a lot of things being resolved by determining where lost children got to, it’s very Roman.
Which also means “very Greek,” because--especially at this period--Roman comedy is pretty directly imitating Greek comedy, in a manner we’d outright call plagiarism these days. But that is tradition!
A lot of the dialogue is fast and fragmentary and a little hard to make grammatical, a lot of the vocabulary is colloquial and hard to render in its most accurate English sense, and some of the jokes are puns. I’ll do what I can.
( Behold the thrill of the cast list )
This is his Casina, one of his many...well, romantic comedies. I suppose I could just call it a “comedy”, given that as with Shakespeare that pretty much means people will be getting married at the end, and there’ll be a lot of wacky coincidences along the way. In fact, if you want a good taste of Roman comedy done in English, go read A Comedy of Errors; from the hilarious coincidences to the dirty jokes to the tricky slaves (or “servants”, I guess) to a lot of things being resolved by determining where lost children got to, it’s very Roman.
Which also means “very Greek,” because--especially at this period--Roman comedy is pretty directly imitating Greek comedy, in a manner we’d outright call plagiarism these days. But that is tradition!
A lot of the dialogue is fast and fragmentary and a little hard to make grammatical, a lot of the vocabulary is colloquial and hard to render in its most accurate English sense, and some of the jokes are puns. I’ll do what I can.
( Behold the thrill of the cast list )