Leon P. Grek M.St., M.A.

Forschungsprojekt

Translations of Comedy, Comedies of Translation: the fabula palliata in Republican Rome and Early-Modern England.

My dissertation is concerned with the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence and their reception in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature. The project takes the form of a comparative study of cultural and literary implications of comic translation in second-century BC Rome and Renaissance London. I argue that Roman comedy’s self-referential concern with its own origins in translation from the Greek constituted an important model for the reception and vernacularization of the classical tradition in early-modern English drama. Individual chapters of the dissertation will treat subjects including translation and migration, translation and authorship and the relationship between comedy and urbanism in the works of Plautus, Terence, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, among others. With this project I hope to build upon and contribute not only to Classical Reception Studies, but also to recent scholarly discussions of cultural interchange in the worlds of both ancient and early-modern theatre.