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Translations in English: The Plays of Menander, edited and translated by Lionel Casson (New York: New York University Press, 1971); Menander. Plays and Fragments, translated, with an introduction, by Norma Miller (London: Penguin, 1987). Commentaries: E. W. Handley, ed., The Dyskolos of Menander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander, A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
The comedy of fourth-century Athens, which inspired the Roman plays of Plautus and Terence and, through their own revival in the Renaissance, modern traditions of comedy from William Shakespeare and Moliere to Georges Feydeau and George Bernard Shaw, has itself been conspicuously absent from critical consciousness —and for good reason. Whereas Aristophanes continued to be read—albeit with increasing difficulty—from classical times to the present day, the so-called New Comedy of the next century gradually vanished from sight. Plutarch may have preferred Menander, greatest practitioner of the genre, to Aristophanes, but by the eighth century A.D.
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