Terence Andria

As the first play of the Terentian corpus, Andria has always attracted a special level of attention. It was the first Roman comedy produced after antiquity (at Florence in 1476) and the first translated into English, and it has inspired writers from Jonson and Dryden to Thornton Wilder. It provides an excellent introduction to Terence 's particular style of comedy, noteworthy for its ambivalence in representing the perspectives of woman and slaves and its experiments with a secondary plot line. The commentary is designed both to help students with the basic linguistic and technical problems confronting inexperienced readers of Roman comedy and to open discussion of essential interpretive questions involving the play and its relation to the wider comic corpus, as well as the utility of comedy for furthering our understanding of the Roman world and its values.

Launching a much-needed new series discussing each comedy that survives from the ancient world, this volume is a vital companion to Terence's earliest comedy, Andria, highlighting its context, themes, staging and legacy. Ideal for students it assumes no knowledge of Latin, but is helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction. This will be the first port of call for anyone studying or researching the play. Though Andria launched Terence's career as a dramatist at Rome, it has attracted comparatively little attention from modern critics. It is nevertheless a play of great interest, not least for the sensitivity with which it portrays family relationships and for its influence on later dramatists. It also presents students of Roman comedy with all the features that came to characterize Terence's particular version of traditional comedy, and it raises all the interpretive questions that have dogged the study of Terence for generations. This volume will use a close reading of the play to explore the central issues in understanding Terence's style of play-making and its legacy.

No Marketing Blurb