From the Introduction                            

My desire to translate Plautus initially grew out of my dissatisfaction with the translations I had used in Latin literature in translation courses. These seemed either ineptly stilted or too far removed from Plautus’ Latin and his culture. A primary challenge of translating Plautus, or any ancient author, is to strike a satisfactory balance between accuracy and liveliness. This applies not just to linguistic style and idiom, but also to cultural beliefs, values, assumptions, ideologies, etc. So far as language is concerned, I have tried to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of slavish literalism on the one side, and the temptation to over-indulge in contemporary slang and other imminently doomed, ephemeral references on the other. It seems impossible to capture the rich vitality of Plautus’ festival of words—the puns, assonance and alliteration, for example—without creating something that sounds very odd, if not altogether mad, to our ears. But I have nonetheless tried to preserve something of Plautus’ extraordinarily playful style, as also his sometimes bizarre imagery and conceits (most of which were meant to sound bizarre to their original audience as well), while at the same time producing, I hope, smooth prose dialogue. In a similar attempt not to obliterate or over-familiarize the distant and strange culture behind the Latin text, I have preserved much of its foreignness by not modernizing the names of the characters and by mostly leaving in references to Roman (and Greek) places, deities, institutions, etc. These are explained in the notes at the bottom of the page, which assume a readership with no prior experience of Plautus or ancient literature and culture.

As a reflection of my wish to stay as close as possible to Plautus, I have mostly translated line by line. The majority of Plautus is written in spoken (i.e., iambic) and chanted or recitative (i.e., chiefly trochaic) verse based on the quantity of syllables or, more precisely, the relative time it took to pronounce them (i.e., "long" vs. "short"). These early Latin verse forms were relatively free and allowed for many (metrical) licenses, so that it is difficult for English ears to follow the rhythm of Latin verse without artificially imposing stress accents at regular intervals—which by translating Plautus into prose I have not done. The rest of Plautus is in sung meters, about which we know virtually nothing. Sung sections are so marked at the beginnings of scenes in the translations and the lines are arranged so as to (mostly) follow how they appear in modern Latin editions.

The plays are not here divided into acts and scenes, as this was not done until the Renaissance. There likewise are no stage directions in the manuscripts in which Plautus is preserved, and I have added these sparingly only where it seemed necessary in order to avoid possible confusion. The Latin texts themselves overwhelmingly explain what is taking place onstage.

I have most closely translated the Latin text of Lindsay (Oxford 1910), and also frequently followed that of Leo (Berlin 1895-6). For the individual plays, I have made extensive use of the following texts and commentaries: for Casina, MacCary and Willcock (Cambridge 1976); Amphitryon, Christenson (Cambridge 2000), Captivi, Lindsay (Oxford 1900); Pseudolus, Willcock (London 1987).

It is my hope that these translations will be of use to students and teachers in literature in translation courses, as well as to the general reader. While they are not primarily designed to serve as scripts for performance, it is also my hope that they could be adapted for use on the stage with relative ease.