Within an eight-year span, scholars will have seen four companion volumes on Roman comedy, including this one, which reflects the high level of interest this genre currently enjoys. Blackwell has published the Companion to Terence (2013), and their Companion to Plautus is due out in 2020. Oxford recently published a Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy (2014). Readers interested in Roman comedy will no doubt want to have access to all four volumes, either in their own collection or through the university library. Crucially, the Cambridge Companion is the one volume of the four that is relatively affordable.

What does the Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy offer that the other volumes do not? As the reader might expect, the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy is more broad in scope, and the individual author companions of Blackwell more narrow. Many chapters of the Cambridge Companion have close analogues in the Blackwell individual author volumes, but there are some unique offerings as well. In the first place, the Cambridge Companion provides an overview of the fabula palliata beyond just Plautus and Terence (Chapter 1), and an in-depth background to native Italian drama (Chapter 2), both useful to any student or scholar who wishes to expand their understanding of the origins of Roman Comedy. It also offers an extensive section on performance itself, including ‘Stage Action’ (Chapter 5), ‘Music and Metre’ (Chapter 6), ‘Comic Technique’ (Chapter 7), ‘Metatheatre’ (Chapter 8) and ‘Language’ (Chapter 9). It shares some of these topics in common with the Plautus Companion (language, metre/music and metatheatre), but the Terence Companion is lacking in this regard. All four volumes offer a section on tradition and/or reception, although the Oxford volume focuses on tradition and reception within antiquity.

In the introduction to the Cambridge Companion A. Sharrock notes that the study of comedy has changed dramatically in the last 200 years: in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, interest lay primarily in studying Plautus’ language, developing a fixed text and speculating wildly about the relationship between Roman adaptations and their so-called Greek originals. The later twentieth century saw growing interest in social and political themes as well as the study of performance aspects. Sharrock does not say, but perhaps should, that the twenty-first century has seen increasing interest in issues of race and class as well as the study of marginalised individuals. This volume begins to address these issues, but could do more. W. Fitzgerald discusses slaves in Chapter 11, and D. Dutsch takes an intersectional look at gender and class in her study of ‘Mothers and Whores’ in Chapter 12. These are two chapters that we would not have seen in a Companion written in the late twentieth century.

The transformation of Roman Comedy studies has accelerated in the last few decades. In Chapter 4, ‘The Politics of Roman Comedy’, R. Germany says, ‘If this book had been written a couple of generations ago, every chapter would have been substantially different in context, methodology, and emphasis, but this chapter would not have existed at all’ (p. 66). Germany argues that Roman comedy is ‘political’ in the modern sense of the word, because it engages in ‘a broader set of discourses pertaining to the mediation of power in society and to the very constitution of social life’ (p. 66). This chapter is an excellent addition for those who are interested in Roman comedy as social history. Germany's proclamation is also true of M. Telò’s Chapter 3, ‘Roman Comedy and the Poetics of Adaptation’, which offers a thoroughly modern look at the act of transforming Greek plays into Roman ones. Gone is speculation on what the Greek ‘original’ looked like, and instead the discussion focuses on Roman playwrights as architects of reception pieces, who use their works to comment on the craft of transposition. Telò argues that, through language and plot choices, Plautus both calls attention to his plays as adaptations and simultaneously positions his models as appropriate targets for iambic invective.

In Part 2, ‘The Fabric of Roman Comedy’, the authors approach the comedies as performance pieces. There was perhaps a time when scholars studied Greek and Roman drama as written, literary works, but now any scholar worth their salt recognises that these works were designed to be performed on stage before an audience, and the written texts that we have are but vestiges of those original performances. The extant versions of Plautus may in fact be more like transcripts of shows in which the troupes of actors practised improvisation (C.W. Marshall, Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy [2014]). Part 2 addresses five issues crucial to the performative aspect of comedy. Marshall (Chapter 5, ‘Stage Action in Roman Comedy’) argues that, through dialogue, actors create and delineate a variety of spaces that span a range of real and imaginary, both onstage and offstage. T.J. Moore (Chapter 6, ‘Music and Metre’) has quite kindly done the very hard work of scansion for us so that we do not have to. As a result of his attention to detail, Moore is able to show how music and metre characterise different individuals and guide the emotions of the audience, using Casina as his sample play. In Chapter 7, ‘Comic Technique’, I. Cardoso explores verbal and non-verbal humour in the plays, the latter of which must be inferred from dialogue or is sometimes postulated based on our knowledge of modern theatre and other genres. No comedy companion would be complete without a chapter on metatheatre, even though D. Christenson (Chapter 8, ‘Metatheatre’) points out that the term may be ‘overused and too inclusive to be meaningful’ (p. 136). As one would expect, the chapter examines Pseudolus, a play that ‘appears to be about virtually nothing, and instead a play about the creation of a Plautine comedy’ (p. 141). But Christenson goes beyond the obvious play, looking also at Rudens and Eunuchus; the former, he argues, uses metatheatre to examine the role of morality in drama, and the latter to interrogate issues of masculinity and hierarchy. E. Karakasis's chapter, ‘The Language of Roman Comedy’ (Chapter 9), offers a useful overview of several topics, with strength in breadth, not depth: archaisms in Plautus and Terence, differences in Plautine and Terentian language, markers of low-level and elevated language, and patterns of speech in stock characters.

In his landmark book, Roman Comedy (1983), D. Konstan views the plays as reflective of ‘social stress and change’ (p. 24), initiating a wave of scholarly interest in the social meaning of the plays. Continuing in the tradition of Konstan, Part 3, ‘The Sociology of Roman Comedy’, considers some of the social relationships of prime interest to scholars today. In Chapter 10, ‘Fathers and Sons’, Dinter connects the exploration of the father–son relationship with discourse on Roman morality, where strict fathers – or some other characters – espouse the traditional Roman morality and disobedient sons represent the laissez faire attitude of the Hellenising Romans. Chapter 11, ‘Slaves and Roman Comedy’ by Fitzgerald, focuses primarily on male slaves, including the servus callidus and the servus currens. Dutsch (Chapter 12, ‘On Mothers and Whores’) argues that Plautus and Terence create complex characters to challenge the traditional mother/whore dichotomy, presenting us with women who pimp their daughters but also show strong maternal affection. A. Clark, in ‘Gods and Roman Comedy’ (Chapter 13), provides a useful survey of how the gods appear in the Comedies, as well as addressing the fact that Comedies were performed at festivals in honour of the gods. A. Bartholomä, in ‘Legal Laughter’ (Chapter 14), tackles the thorny questions of how to differentiate Greek from Roman law in the plays and of how to determine which laws are simply made up for the sake of the plot. This is a very useful chapter for anyone trying to use Comedy to make statements about Greek or Roman law, a pursuit that is quite common lately, as interest in using the plays as social history grows. In ‘Family Finances’ (Chapter 15) E. Fantham uses the intrigues of young lovers, and their fathers, to examine what Roman Comedy has to say about sources of income and available finances.

Part 4 includes a diachronic survey of reception in Europe and North America. (On performances of Plautus in Afrikaans, which is, of course, the language of the European coloniser, see B. van Zyl Smit, ‘Culture, Education, and Politics: Greek and Roman Comedy in Afrikaans’, in S.D. Olsen [ed.], Ancient Comedy and Reception [2014]). This section begins with a discussion of receptions of Plautus and Terence in antiquity, using the evidence of Cicero and Aulus Gellius (Chapter 16, G. Manuwald) and ends with a look at translating Roman Comedy onto the twentieth- and twenty-first-century stage and screen, with special attention to auditory and visual aspects (Chapter 22, C. Candiard). On the way, B. Keefe (Chapter 17) explores the medieval manuscript tradition, with attention to both unique illustrations and illustrations that follow models. She notes that some illustrators gave the Roman characters medieval aspects, such as dressing Chaerea in the clothes of a monk. R.S. Miola (Chapter 19), Candiard (Chapter 20) and F. Hurka (Chapter 21) cover receptions in early modern England, Italy and France, and Germany, respectively. Each of these chapters is broad in scope and provides a satisfying overview of the field of reception. The only narrowly defined chapter is on the much-studied Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, who puts a Christian spin on Terence (Chapter 18, M. Kretschmer).

Because of its affordability and breadth, this is a good book to have on one's bookshelf. Like most companions, it is not designed to provide exciting new research, but there is enough of it to make the volume worth it. Between the ‘Further Reading’ sections and the bibliography, the reader can find both the traditional, nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on comedy as well as the most innovative work of the last couple of decades. The book is suitable for students wishing to learn about the history of the field and to gain an overview of the issues currently under discussion. Specialists, too, may find a few chapters useful to their inquiries.