In both classical antiquity and the European Renaissance, dramatic comedy was the literary genre most closely associated with the city, and with the everyday lives of its urban audiences. It was also among the most mobile of cultural forms. Festival-goers in Republican Rome watched Latin translations of Greek comedies set in Athens, Ephesus, and Cyrene; sixteenth-century Ferrarese nobles had a taste for Italian adaptations of Roman comedies with local settings; and audiences at London’s Globe Theater enjoyed English imitations of classicizing Italian comedies, set in Florence, Venice, and Padua. This talk will consider the interactions between these two dynamics—comic urbanism on the one hand, comic translation on the other—in Rome at the beginning of the second century BCE, and in London at the end of the sixteenth century CE. In both cases, Leon Grek will suggest, comic translation played an important role in helping to define the status of the rapidly expanding, but still peripheral imperial metropolis in relation to its broader Mediterranean cultural world.

Grek is the Paul Mellon/Frank Brown Rome Prize Fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in New Jersey.

The shoptalk will be held in English. You can watch this event live at https://livestream.com/aarome.