This elegant and provocative edited volume focuses on the rôles, representations and diction of female characters in Roman comedy, featuring new work by many leading international scholars in this field. Dorota Dutsch, Sharon James and David Konstan's introduction situates this volume within the current lively state of scholarship on Roman drama. Somewhat more support is needed for the claim that there is ‘indeed little doubt’ (5) about the ‘Romanness’ of gender relations in Republican drama. While the editors' points are highly plausible, the relative originality of Roman comedy remains a matter of active dispute (for example, E. Lefèvre, E. Stärk and G. Vogt-Spira, Plautus barbarus. Sechs Kapitel zur Originalität des Plautus (1991); W. S. Anderson, Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy (1993); G. Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre (2011)). The editors defend their decision to describe their subject as ‘Roman Republican Drama’, due to their avoidance of Senecan tragedy, but the volume remains heavily weighted towards comedy.

The first section of the book, ‘Females in Performance’, focuses on the staging of women in Roman comedy. Dutsch addresses the embodiment of female characters by male actors. She offers a compelling analysis of Plautus' and Terence's metatheatrical commentary regarding the representation and desirability of these ‘female’ bodies. Dutsch proposes a contrast between the ‘outside’, deceptive feminine costume and mask of these characters and the more truthful naked male body of the actor inside the mask.

Amy Richlin's article on female slaves, especially ancillae, in comedy is one of the highlights of this volume. In contrast to Dutsch's argument that prostitute characters are identifiable by costume, Richlin notes that the playwrights themselves play with questions of respectable appearance and social status, invoking larger social anxieties about the muddled distinctions between slave and free in Roman society. Richlin analyses the portrayal of female social networks in the comedies, representations of slave motherhood and Plautus' reference to the presence of slave nurses in the theatrical audience. Slave women were thus able to receive and interpret these messages about social mobility. Richlin's article should be required reading for any course addressing the representation of slaves in Roman antiquity.

The second section of the volume addresses the relationship between women in Roman drama and their larger social and historical context. Elaine Fantham's ‘Women in control’ briefly examines the comic trope of the uxor dotata before turning to the larger question of female solidarity, especially among underprivileged women acting as single parents or as the heads of households. Her examples provide glimpses at support networks among Roman women who did not belong to conventional patriarchal family structures. Fantham's article seems to be the welcome beginning of a larger discussion about the representation of untraditional families in Roman literature. In a later chapter, Anne Feltovich returns to Fantham's discussion of female bonds by emphasizing positive sororal relationships and the inborn nature of pudicitia.

Sharon James next offers a fascinating study of maternal speech in Roman comedies. In contrast to Dutsch's more theoretical approach to feminine discourse (Feminine Discourses in Roman Comedy: On Echoes and Voices (2008)), James closely analyses the diction of mothers in Roman comedies as a means of potentially discovering the ‘lived experience’ of historical Roman women. As she points out, maternal characters use more ‘feminine’ speech markers and deference when speaking to free men than when conversing with other women. Uxores dotatae and the mothers of sons speak more boldly than the mothers of daughters, for instance. While such language may not accurately reflect Roman female–female conversation, it at least imagines it for a largely male audience.

Jarrett Welsh's chapter on the fragmentary evidence for women in the fabula togata suggests that such characters, particularly widows, may have possessed more freedom and agency than comedic women. These fabulae seem often to have focused on postmarital conflicts and to have sometimes featured divorced women, relatively unknown outside this genre. Welsh might benefit from comparing these texts to more modern comedies of remarriage (S. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981)). Gesine Manuwald also suffers from the problem of fragmentary evidence in her treatment of women in Roman Republican tragedy and its relationship to Greek originals.

The final section, ‘Receptions’, treats later works of drama that drew on Roman comedies for inspiration. Valeria Cinaglia and David Konstan's piece on Machiavelli's Mandragola discusses how Machiavelli adapts some of the tropes of Plautus while creating an entirely new character type in the knowingly adulterous wife or seduced woman. Ariana Traill's chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare adapts the ‘theatergrams’ of the Plautine wicked prostitute (meretrix mala) character for an early modern British audience that did not generally condone the presence of actual prostitute characters on stage. While not all of the correspondences Traill suggests are equally convincing, the overall argument highlights how Shakespeare adapted his predecessors in order to better suit his own social mores.

This volume contains a number of excellent articles that will likely become standard reading for courses in Roman comedy, as well as an opportunity to examine some relatively unknown texts such as the fabulae togatae. If there is a weakness, it lies in the lack of conversation between the individual chapters, some of which directly contradict each other. Some authors address gender theory very explicitly, while others examine females as simply one particular subset of characters. The lack of any discussion of historical female actresses or mimes is unfortunate; recent work by John Starks and C. W. Marshall on this front has significantly deepened our understanding of the rôles of actual women in the Roman theatre. The reader is left in the hope that many of these chapters are merely the beginning of deeper explorations into the complexities of gender representation in Roman drama.