This pleasant volume, dedicated to Plautusʼ Pseudolus, has much to offer anyone interested in this play, be it a student or an expert.

R. translates the acrostic plot summary found in the Palatine manuscripts and provides a summary of his own, showing what the late-antique argumentum tells us and what it fails to tell (pp. 9–11).

Daneseʼs piece is about the Pseudolus as a perfectly constructed comedy. Not only does he re-examine the structure of the play, he also compares Pseudolus and the pimp Ballio. The two characters are similar in their ruthlessness, and each makes a stipulatio and holds a triumph; but while Ballio is thoroughly evil, Pseudolus is a rascal on the side of good. His strategy is to announce his plans and to forewarn his enemies, but to have these plans executed by someone else, so that he can still have the element of surprise on his side.

Arbizzoni presents a typology of adaptations of Plautus for the Renaissance stage. The Pseudolus was first rendered with few modifications by Guarrini in Ferrara; later, Della Portaʼs Trappolaria and Cecchiʼs I contrasegni are freer and based on more than one Plautine comedy, just as Roman comedy often adapts more than one Greek play (contaminatio).

De Piccoli examines Spallicciʼs Trapulòn, an adaptation of the Pseudolus in the dialect of Romagna, the area of Italy that Plautus hailed from, even though he himself wrote his comedies in the Latin of Rome. The piece is followed by a reproduction of the music for this play written by Balilla Pratella.

Bungard looks at immo and improvisation. He notes that immo corrects a statement and is used very commonly by slaves (56 out of 206 tokens). The first finding was well known before, and the second is not surprising if we bear in mind that the total number of lines spoken by slaves is very large. Bungard argues that Pseudolus uses immo improvisationally, when presented with an unexpected opportunity, whereas Ballio uses immo to insist on the validity of his own version of events. However, these are not different functions of immo. Immo remains a corrective particle, but corrections can be made in different circumstances. It is futile to attach such great significance to such a small word.

Monda examines the scene in which Calidorus and Pseudolus chase after Ballio and his servant (lines 241–64). All chasing scenes are in sung metres, with little progress in the action, but this one is beautifully constructed, with metrical boundaries coinciding with syntactic and semantic ones.

Tontini examines the Codex Holkham 298, a late manuscript indirectly derived from D. H has a curious mixture of Poenulus and Pseudolus on fourteen folios. If an ancestor of H had 26–7 lines per page instead of the 32 found in H, we can explain the mix straightforwardly: in the ancestor manuscript, the text occupied two quaternions (four bifolios each). The first and fourth bifolio of the first quaternion were divided into halves, and folios 1 and 5 were turned into folios 1 and 8 of the second quaternion. The first bifolio of the second quaternion was also divided, and its folios 1 and 8 were used to fill the gaps of the first quaternion.