Slave Theater in the Roman Republic

Roman comedy evolved early in the war-torn 200s BCE. Troupes of lower-class and slave actors traveled through a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved; together the actors made comedy to address mixed-class hybrid multilingual audiences. Surveying the whole of the Plautine corpus where slaves are central figures and the extant fragments of early comedy this book is grounded in the history of slavery and integrates theories of resistant speech humor and performance. Part I shows how actors joked about what people feared - natal alienation beatings sexual abuse hard labor hunger poverty - and how street-theater forms confronted debt violence and war loss. Part II catalogues the onstage expression of what people desired: revenge honor free will legal personhood family marriage sex food free speech; a way home through memory; and manumission or escape - all complicated by the actors'' maleness. Comedy starts with anger.