Plautus: Poenulus

from its unique andstrikingly self-aware prologue to the actors' call for applause in the final line.The longest chapter examines the play's afterlives in the Renaissance and earlymodern period, including little-known revivals and adaptations in Ferrara, Rome,and Cambridge. Over the centuries, people have found in Poenulus a script wellsuited to active learning in the Latin classroom, a text capable of supportingnew political ideologies, and a dramatized vision of the world that accordedwith processes of racialization in Europe as reengagement with the classical pastcoincided with the expansion of the slave trade and the objectification of BlackAfricans. That one play has been seen to support and subvert the same outlooksand practices is a testament to its complexity and to the enduring power of all Plautine verse from the third century BCE to the present. [Publisher's text]

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