Plautus

Plautus was a Roman comic playwright whose adaptations of Greek New Comedy became distinctive for energetic wordplay, musicality, and broad farce.

New Comedy: A Greek dramatic genre centered on domestic plots, social relationships, and recurring character types. Its plots and stock figures supplied much of Plautus’s dramatic material.
Cantica: Musical passages in Roman comedy, often involving song or rhythmic speech. Their prominence gives Plautine comedy much of its distinctive musicality.
Pseudolus: A comedy by Plautus about a clever slave who schemes to free a young woman for his master’s son. Its title character embodies the resourceful schemer driving many Plautine plots.
Menander: An influential Greek New Comedy playwright whose surviving works include domestic comedies and social plots. Plautus adapted Greek comic material associated with Menander and his tradition.
Terence: A Roman comic playwright whose Latin adaptations are generally more restrained in style than Plautus’s. Their contrasting comic voices shaped Roman comedy’s later reputation.
Fabula palliata: A Roman comedy set in Greece and performed by actors wearing Greek-style cloaks. Plautus wrote within this Roman genre of Greek-set comedy.
Tibicen: A Roman flute player who accompanied performances of sung or spoken drama. Flute accompaniment helped give Plautus’s dialogue a varied musical texture.
Miles Gloriosus: A Plautine comedy about a boastful soldier tricked by a clever slave and his allies. The play gives a celebrated form to the braggart-soldier character.
Diphilus: A Greek New Comedy playwright whose works provided plots for Roman adaptations. Plautus’s Rudens is associated with adaptation from Diphilus.
William Shakespeare: An English playwright and poet whose comedies draw on classical dramatic traditions. The Comedy of Errors reworks the twin-confusion plot associated with Plautus’s Menaechmi.

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