In Reading Roman Comedy Alison Sharrock makes a compelling case for a new kind of reader-oriented approach to Plautus and Terence, which she juxtaposes to the recent surge of interest in the audience and performance of the palliata (20). The aesthetical premise of her project is that Roman comedy is profoundly concerned with appearances and identities, and that these concerns inform all the diverse manifestations of the literary artistry of Roman comedy, from its alliterative language to elements of parody. The book has the playful (quasi Ovidian) agenda of an ars legendi and is divided into chapters that evoke elements of a palliata playscript. In her programmatic prologue, S. analyses the aesthetics of comedy as ‘pretence of deceit’, stressing that acute awareness of the gap between the signifier and the signified is an essential feature of the genre (ch. 1). S. follows this preface with a chapter on beginnings (ch. 2) and substitutes a chapter on endings (ch. 5) for the usual scholarly conclusion. The remaining chapters explore plots and intrigues (ch. 3) as well as repetition as the fundamental comic mechanism (ch. 4). All the chapters draw from both dramatic corpora, and analyse Terence's own (subversive) treatment of the Plautine techniques. In keeping with her self-conscious literary agenda (2), S.'s own writing masterfully enacts some of the literary sleight-of-hand that she discusses. She begins, for example, by exaggerating provocatively both the unreadability of the earlier work on Roman comedy and the distance that separates her work from earlier scholarship. In doing so she fashions her own critical Telchines, wooing her reader with a prefatory device that she later brilliantly analyses in her discussion of Terentian prologues (78–81).

Chs 2 and 5 formulate the rules for the games that comic playwrights play with their readers when beginning and ending their scripts. Classifications and taxonomies serve as backdrops against which various nuances (such as the subtle ironies in the ending of the Captivi) come to the fore. While these chapters are useful, it is in the middle chapters that S. proves her mettle as a truly original and engaging thinker. Ch. 3, for instance, features a scintillating analysis of naturalism and illusion in the aesthetics of the palliata as a genre in which ‘truth-bearing lies’ prefigure reality. Ch. 4, on repetitions, represents the first large-scale attempt to tackle the question of Plautine humour since Segal's Roman Laughter (1969). In keeping with her focus on art and artifice, S. proposes the Bergsonian thesis that artful repetition is the essential ingredient of comedy. She analyses diverse forms of repetition in Plautus and Terence, from the phonetic and morphological through the jack-in-the-box effect of irrelevant interruptions, to parody and intertextuality. One might wish, however, that S. had discussed at greater length forms of iteration that are unique to comedy, such as the use of stock characters and situations, and that she had devoted less time to alliteration, a phenomenon widespread in archaic Latin.

A few comments on the relationship between S.'s approach and the earlier work on comedy are in order. S. describes her reader-centered project as apposite to both performance criticism (Lefèvre, Slater) and the efforts to restore the original texts (e.g., Zwierlein) (18–21). She proposes instead to re-introduce to the study of comedy the notion of its literariness. This may first give readers a sense of déjà-vu; it was against such literary readings of comedy that Slater protested in Plautus in Performance (1985/2000). S.'s new model differs, however, from these earlier literary approaches in two important ways. First, she celebrates self-conscious literariness as programmatic to comedy, arguing that the self-referential vocabulary of intrigue and trickery in Plautus and Terence (dolus, consilium, architectus, etc.) deliberately calls the reader's/audience's attention to the themes of literary planning and plotting as central to the aesthetics of Roman comedy (9–17). Second, performance and audience — as imaginative dimensions — are actually a part of S.'s programme for reading drama (20). Additionally, she incorporates into her programme of literary criticism several of the concepts and tools proposed by performance critics, such as play-within-play (146–9) or the focus on the plays as they stand — without regard for their philological intricacies or dependence on Greek models (18–19). S.'s interest in texts-as-they-stand includes their relationships with other texts, which are in fact crucial to her discussions of intertextuality and parody (in ch. 4), but she always envisions such relationships as elements of literary games rather than stages in the evolution of the genre. The works of Ennius, Menander, and Euripides are, consequently, evoked as intertexts, not as models.

On account of S.'s synchronic perspective on Plautus' engagement with other texts, she is able to outline a transparent cross-section of the palliata and its literary mechanisms at play. Presented with skill and panache, S.'s cogent reading will no doubt convert some of the ‘less-than-avid readers’ of Plautus and Terence, whom she claims to have desired to reach in the first place (ix). Finally — and despite the author's humble disclaimer — S.'s reading has the potential to complicate and enrich the current scholarly debates on the language (ch. 4), performance (especially chs 2 and 5), and the ideological context of the palliata (ch. 3), and as such deserves to be welcomed by specialists as well as the fresh ‘converts’.