Unless you have read Roman comedy before, Plautus is likely to be the most difficult text to read this semester, if only because the language is archaic and the vocabulary unfamiliar. The meter is also not easy. On all these topics, Christenson's commentary is very good, and you should use it as needed. And although I will not ask you to sing Sosia's great canticum, you should attempt to understand the meter of this and of the regular spoken meter, the iambic senarius.

Amphitruo is, as Plautus himself makes clear in the prologue, not a typical comedy; indeed, Mercury calls it tragicomoedia. Why? what does he mean? What is the effect of a comedy of mistaken identity (a common plot; compare Menaechmi) in which one of the pairs is god/king and the other is god/slave?

Roman comedy is generally (and rightly) said to be based on Greek New Comedy, and one of the major strands of Plautine criticism until recently has been to try to detect what is "Plautine" or "Roman" in Plautus (see Fraenkel and Handley, below). How can you tell what is "Greek" and what is "Roman"--and does it matter?

Putting it another way, how does Plautus make his plays at home in Rome? to what extent is he commenting on his own society (see Gruen and Konstan below)? Are allusions to Roman social situations (e.g. the torture of slaves) meant to be social criticism, or simply funny? Is Sosia's great speech on the battle meant to evoke Roman experience? If so, to what effect?

Christenson makes a great deal of Amphitruo as "metatheater" (see Slater, below), and it is indeed important to recognize that Plautus' plays are not realistic theater, and do indeed draw attention to their own theatricality. But how much difference does that make to the interpretation of the play? Does it make the same sense as a text as it would have on the stage?

One other main strand of recent Plautine criticism (see Segal, below) is to look at Plautine character and scene as a function of festival: the world turned upside down. Does that work for this play?

Some bibliography:

E. Fraenkel, Elementi plautini in Plauto (Rome 1960)

E. Gruen, Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Leiden 1990)

E. Handley, Menander and Plautus: a study in comparison (London 1968)

D. Konstan, Roman Comedy (Ithaca 1983)

E. Segal, Roman Laughter (ed. 2, Oxford 1987)

N. Slater, Plautus in Performance (Princeton 1985)

For general introductions to Roman comedy, the chapters by Gratwick in Cambridge History are very good. See also R. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge 1985).