Plautus and Terence are the two major figures of ancient Roman comedy. They played an essential part in the development of the European comedy of manners, a genre which had been invented by the Greek dramatists of the New Comedy period (roughly 325-250 BC), notably Menander, Diphilus and Philemon. These Greek plays were lost from sight by the end of the classical era, but they served as models for Plautus and Terence, who were themselves used as models by the comic dramatists of Europe from the Renaissance onwards, including such masters as Shakespeare and Molière. Plautus, who was the more boisterous of the two Roman writers, was the more popular in Renaissance Italy and in Elizabethan England; the more refined Terence came into his own in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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Citation: Barsby, John. "Terence". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 October 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4350, accessed 12 December 2024.]