ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Translating Classical Plays on Business as Usual. The plays were consciously and confessedly 'adapted' or 'translated' from the Greek originals of such as Diphilus, Philemon and, in the case of Menaechmi, probably Poseidippus. Plautus and Terence, in consequence, can offer a sort of template by which to evaluate the difference between translations of fabulae palliatae into English from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, and what may be regarded as 'creative adaptations'. There was little need for Tytler to return to Echard. By 1790 the Bonnell Thornton/Richard Warner translations of Plautus were well established. Many of the translations of Menaechmi, from the past hundred years, too numerous to mention individually, have successfully walked the comic tightrope where the word becomes subordinate to 'the atmosphere of the word'. Plautus is still with Paul Nixon, a professor from Iowa who died in 1956. His Menaechmi dates from 1917 though reprinted many times.
