I have Betty Radice’s translation. This is a prime example of what the Penguin Classics were doing back in the ‘60s. Just three or four one line notes per play, mostly on the original staging. The translation is in prose with most of the rhetoric stripped out. I suspect this may have altered the character of the plays somewhat, but there’s no denying the writing is lively and enjoyable. Perhaps not the best edition if you’re studying the plays, but great if you’re reading for fun.

I’ve read all the surviving European plays up to this point in time and I’ve noticed that each playwright adds some feature or another that we have retained in modern drama. At the start of Andria, instead of some god or whoever delivering the prologue and explaining the plot, Terence uses this to settle some literary scores and the opening scene is two characters engaging in actual expository dialogue. It’s clunky exposition by modern standards, but exposition it is. There are lots of features to the plays which seem old-fashioned now, like asides and monologues etc, but I got the feeling that with these Terence was breaking the fourth wall. Plautus always gave me the impression that there was no fourth wall. I sometimes got the sense that the characters were actual personalities trapped inside stock characters, rather than (with Plautus) stock characters waiting for an actor to bring them to life. These are the first plays which feel modern in some sense.

Terence’s structuring is excellent and all the plays are good, Phormio especially, with two exceptions. The Self-Tormentor is a total mess. Really quite shocking that anyone would have the gall to stage something like that. I have knocked off a rating star.

At the other end of the scale is The Eunuch. I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest this is a masterpiece and a classic for all time. Excellent construction and pacing. Some scenes comic, some shocking. It takes a very conventional Greco-Roman plot, spins it, transcends it, and manages to say something about the human condition. All the characters are compromised in some way, whether it be morally, socially etc etc. Some of these compromises are imposed by living in a society riven by enormous social problems like slavery and oligarchy, but all the main characters compromise themselves in some way, and are thus become morally low. The whole comedy is a kind of inverse tragedy. I would suggest that the main character is Pamphila, who appears only once on stage and never speaks a word. Abducted as a toddler, repeatedly bought and sold as a slave, used by the one woman she should have been able to trust, raped, and finally married to her rapist as no-one else will have her. She’s basically the tragic figure that suffers, not because of her own flaws, but because of the flaws of those around her. Hilarious. ( )

It's been so long since I read this that I can't really remember the details.

various

the Frank O. Copley translation of all six plays by Terence