Customer Reviews

Plautus: Rudens (BCP Latin Texts)

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This is a review of H.C. Fay's commentary on Plautus' Rudens published by Bristol Classical Press. This commentary seems to be geared towards students who are reading Plautus and possibly Roman Comedy for the first time, so the introductory material is quite basic and elementary. There is however a notable section of the introduction titled "Staging Latin Comedy To-Day" that consists of practical advice about how to put on a performance of Plautus, including a lengthy series of instructions about how to construct a mask from paste-soaked newspaper and a balloon. There is only very limited discussion of secondary literature anywhere in the commentary.

The book as a whole is 221 pages long, but the commentary only runs to 68 pages. The notes are generally helpful and do a good job of elucidating idioms, colloquialisms, and obscure grammar. Too often, though, the explanations have a very terse and allusive character, and I am not sure that a reader who does not already know Latin quite well would be able to interpret them correctly without additional help and guidance from an instructor or tutor. This book does have one very important redeeming feature, however, and that is that it includes a very well-formulated and comprehensive glossary in the back. So, if one is in the market for an edition of Plautus that could be read easily and efficiently on a bus or airplane, this commentary would work admirably.

Finally, to say something of the play itself, I was ultimately left feeling somewhat disappointed. The play is quite long (just over 1420 lines), and unlike, say, Casina, Mostellaria, or Pseudolus, the humor of it does not, to my taste, work as well in silent reading as it might have done on stage. The plot moves quite slowly, and none of the characters struck me as particularly likeable or interesting with the exception of the fishermen, who are rarely depicted in such detail in ancient literature. The play's most striking feature is its unusual and exotic locale, namely, a North African seashore, but except for the fishermen and the plot device of a shipwreck there is little in the play that one could not also find in some form or other in a normal Athenian setting of one of these comedies.

All that being said, this is a serviceable commentary of a more than decent play, and I do think it would be worth the investment to read Rudens using this edition rather than foregoing a commentary to read it out of the OCT.