ABSTRACT
At the heart of Plautus's Rudens is a fantasy of ownership by a man who doesn't even own himself, a fisherman called Gripus. The only one of Plautus's twenty-seven comedies situated not in the streets of Athens or Corinth but in an exotic locale, Rudens derives its name—The Rope—from the rude aftermath of Gripus's fantasy. In thus taking up a play by a Roman author that is itself about displacement, Ruzante displaces not only Plautus's characters to a contemporary Italian setting, but his own characters, who spend most of the comedy trying to get back, like Nina herself, to the "Pavana." In keeping with this state of affairs, and as with Plautus's Gripus, Bertevelo's excitement about becoming his own man will not last long. Ruzante's decision to rewrite Plautus in dialect is clearly linked with the loss of the "Pavana" and the compensatory desire to claim what has been lost by claiming its language.
