My dissertation explores the role of translation and displacement in shaping the poetics of Republican Roman comedy and its reception by professional English dramatists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Focusing on plays by the second-century BC Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence, and on English comedies by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, I show how English dramatists drew on Roman comedy’s highly self-conscious interest in its translated Greek origins in order to negotiate their own intertextual relationships with both classical and Continental vernacular comedy, and to think through larger problems of vernacularity, authorship, and politics. Displacing their audiences from Rome to Athens and from London to the urban centers of Renaissance Italy, these comedies of translation played an important role in both second-century BC Rome and sixteenth-century London in defining the cultural identity of the rapidly expanding, but still peripheral imperial metropolis.