Black Comedy: Shakespeare, Terence, and Titus Andronicus

It's a simple fact but it bears repeating: one of the great classical playwrights whom William Shakespeare read, admired, and imitated was an African. Publius Terentius Afer (Terence the African) was born in Carthage and taken as a slave to Rome, where, after being freed and educated, he wrote the comedies that would place him alongside Seneca and Plautus in the triumvirate of celebrated Roman dramatists whose works shaped early modern literary culture.¹ Terence's six extant plays—Andria, Hecyra, Eunuchus, Phormio, Heauton Timorumenos, and Adelphoe—were read throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. By the sixteenth century the demand for printed editions was enormous: one modern census lists 650 separate editions of Terence's works published in Europe before 1600, not including translations.² Besides the texts of the plays themselves, the accompanying commentaries, with their detailed analysis of dramatic narrative structure and characterization, provided an invaluable resource for aspiring playwrights.³ "As a result," Colin Burrow writes, "the influence of Terence on Renaissance dramatic theory can scarcely be overstated."⁴ Indeed, among all the classical dramatists, Terence was primus inter pares: as Howard B. Norland observes, "Plautus, Seneca, Euripides, and Aristophanes were occasionally taught and editions of the works were published, but Terence held the position as a dramatist in sixteenth-century Europe that Shakespeare holds in the English-speaking world today."⁵

However, despite the well-studied phenomenon of the influence of Terence's comedies on early modern drama, little attention has been paid to the reception of Terence's biography.⁶ This is not because the story of his life was unknown. In fact, nearly every early modern edition of Terence's works included the Latin biography of the playwright by Suetonius, which informed Renaissance readers of Terence's birth in Carthage and his enslavement under the Roman senator Terentius Lucanus, along with the description of the famous playwright as colore fusco (of a dark color). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the same well-known facts of Terence's life would prove an important resource for African-American writers such as Phillis Wheatley, who invoked the playwright as a precursor of her own poetic achievements:

The happier Terence* all the choir inspir'd,His soul replenish'd and his bosom fir'd;But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace,To one alone of Afric's sable race;From age to age transmitting thus his nameWith the first glory in the rolls of fame?⁷

For Wheatley, herself a former slave from Africa, the "sable" Terence was the European literary tradition's pioneering black poet, and to cite him as a precedent for herself was a deeply political act. But how did early modern European readers understand the African origins of this most important of classical dramatists at a historical moment when emerging ideas of race were being shaped by the nascent institutions of colonialism and slavery? The present essay attempts to address this question by tracking the Renaissance reception of Terence's biography and considering its implications for one of Shakespeare's plays. In the first part, I outline the accessibility of Terence's biography in sixteenth-century editions and reconstruct how his African background would have been understood by early modern English readers, including those who struggled to reconcile it with their assumptions about classical literature. In the second part, I argue that Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, written around 1589 in collaboration with George Peele, registers this tension and responds to it.⁸

While the play has long served as a critical cynosure for discussions both of Shakespeare's adaptation of classical literature and of early modern conceptions of race, I propose that reading Titus Andronicus in relation to the Terentian debates of the sixteenth century allows us to put these two fields into conversation and cast them both in a new light.

I. terence the african

Ben Jonson offers us a glimpse of how Shakespeare might first have encountered Terence. In the Induction to The Magnetic Lady, a young boy recognizes a quotation from Terence's Andria and finishes it in the original Latin, explaining: "I understand...