At Play with Writing: Letters and Readers in Plautus

Abstract

The essay takes its cue from Sharrock's CQ article on Plautus and "the nature of reading." In Sharrock's definition all interaction with a text constitutes a reading. My article examines Plautine reading in a narrower sense: the instances in four plays (Ps., Trin., Bac., Cur.) in which characters read or write, the only times in these plays that the underlying text is presented "as written." The article then offers some general remarks about the reading of Plautus: how do the hermeneutics of writing play out in Plautus' dramas, and how do they affect our reading of his texts as written?