Actors in the Audience

Harvard University Press has partnered with De Gruyter to make available for sale worldwide virtually all in-copyright HUP books that had become unavailable since their original publication. The 2,800 titles in the “e-ditions” program can be purchased individually as PDF eBooks or as hardcover reprint (“print-on-demand”) editions via the “Available from De Gruyter” link above. They are also available to institutions in ten separate subject-area packages that reflect the entire spectrum of the Press’s catalog. More about the E-ditions Program »

“I heartily recommend this book to readers who have an interest in Roman historiography and literature of the early empire and more generally to any reader who has an interest in how language may be shaped by its response to the suppression of freedom… The beauty of [Bartsch’s] presentation is that she invites us to reconsider familiar texts and historical episodes in a new and interesting light.”—Frederick Schauer, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

“Shadi Bartsch examines the changes that took place in the relationship between Roman audiences and the emperor from the reign of Nero to that of Hadrian. Carefully documenting her work through contemporary sources—e.g., Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, Juvenal, Martial, Pliny—she focuses on the theater and the gladiatorial games as a most appropriate place to analyze this interaction through the time of Nero; she draws on dramatic works as well for her analysis in the post-Nero period… Bartsch has taken an unusual and original approach to her material, and her book has much to recommend it. Her work should be of interest to both students and scholars of theater, history, classics, and sociology.”—M.K. Thornton, Contemporary Drama

“Classicists will find in this engagingly written survey a stimulating synthesis… Students of rhetoric and literary theory unfamiliar with the classical material should find in the book an incentive to take a more serious interest in the darkly self-concealing literary and social culture of imperial Rome.”—J.A. Farrell, Jr., Choice