Plautus and Terence were popular in their own time but not regularly performed afterwards, and comedies of any authorship ceased to be performed by Augustus’ time: such is the conventional wisdom reexamined in this volume. Mathias Hanses claims that New Comedy was consistently revived in public through the Flavian era (this study's limit); Cicero, satirists and love poets alluded to comedy's plots, characters and themes; and elites continued to write comedies and hear private recitals. There is a good case for continued public performance in chapter 1, but the intertextual evidence is less convincing.
The introduction establishes the volume's throughlines: comedy was considered a ‘mirror of life’; as the plays aged, their fandom became increasingly elite; tragedy, comedy and mime were considered three separate genres throughout the period, and comedy specifically was pitted against mime as a matter of not just taste but morality. These throughlines are never adequately connected to the thesis of reperformance. H. then defines ‘New Comedy’ as palliata, togata and Greek comedies.
Ch. 1 outlines the record of reperformances within Plautus’ and Terence's lifetimes and collects the literary and material evidence for revivals at public festivals until at least the late first century c.e., references to private stagings in elite homes and evidence that elite authors continued to write comedies. H.'s parameters are literary and epigraphical references to comoedi, histriones and comoedia. We see evidence of reperformance in the middle Republic in the records of instaurationes, as well as in prologues to Plautus’ Casina and Terence's Hecyra. Epigraphic evidence commemorates comoedi throughout the first century c.e.
Through this survey we learn that, by the first century b.c.e., the palliatae were considered quaintly vintage, with archaic language and plots that look quite tame compared to contemporary mime. As scholarly interest grew, so did elite appreciation. But why, if comedy became an elite hobby, continue to stage it for the public? In ch. 2, H. offers an analysis of dramatic references in Cicero's In Catilinam 1 and 2 and Pro Murena from 63 b.c.e., but finds more tragedy than comedy. He also looks at the interplay of mime and comedy in In Pisonem and Pro Caelio, analysing the use of stock types Cicero's audience would recognise from the stage. H. argues that, if Cicero lifted the ‘mirror of life’ to his opponent and saw mime, his opponent should lose to his client, even if the client was, like Caelius, cast as a silly comic adulescens amans.
The war for Rome's morals continues in ch. 3, where H. argues that satirists felt the gentle foibles of comedy gave way to the degeneracy of mime in the early empire and Flavian periods. In Sat. 9, ‘the pest’, a mime-like character, interferes with Horace's palliata. When the speaker implores Fuscus, an elite writer of comedy, the man begs off: comedy departs, leaving the speaker with only mime for company. H. likewise observes the slide from comedy to mime in Juvenal 3, as Umbricius, a comic parasite, is literally driven out of Rome by a raucous cast: comedy's mirror of life has cracked and all of Rome has sunk into mime. H. finds previously underappreciated intertexts to comedy in Horace's Satires and explores Horace's use of stock types like the durus pater and servus Davus — but the durus pater is recognisably Terentian (which argues more for reading than performance) and Davus is a staple of Menandrian comedy.
Ch. 4 backtracks to late Republican (heteroerotic) love poetry, but here H. limits his inquiry to Eunuchus, especially the opening exclusus amator speech. H. argues for verbal echoes in Aeneid 4 and Catullus 109 but, again, his thesis has been that poets (and their readership) viewed the comedies. The love poets’ interest in this play could easily be explained by Terence's well-attested popularity as a school author. A more convincing argument could be made by focusing on what is Plautine in love poetry, as Plautus was not as revered an author. Catullus’ reliance on comic tropes and characters is clear, but not a new argument (C. Polt, Catuallus and Roman Comedy (2021)). The Conclusion returns to the opposition of comedy and mime in Livy's Bacchanalia tale (39.8–18).
My summary thus far gives the impression that H. has successfully demonstrated that later Latin literature sets comedy and mime in tension — but this was not actually his goal. And the oft-noted interplay of comedy and mime seems to telegraph a losing culture war between elite comedy and popular mime rather than demonstrating the continuous (re)performance of both. Furthermore, the limited selection of authors and genres for the analysis of the literary reception of comedy is not adequately justified. Satire is suitably broad, but oratory is more than Cicero and comedy in love poetry extends much further than Eunuchus. H. offers interesting analyses of possible comic intertexts, but these rarely support his thesis of viewership and reperformance in any systematic way. Intertextual allusion is also highly speculative: sometimes a sparrow is just a sparrow, not a penis or a birdcatcher metaphor. Finally, for a book about comedy, this volume is rather joyless. That may be an unavoidable consequence of comedy becoming the purview of elites, its subversive elements and characters stripped and its faded remains exposed to academic scrutiny. H. has contributed here to the growing body of scholarship on comic intertexts in later Latin literature, but his thesis of sustained reperformance is unlikely to convince.
