SOURCE: Prager, Carolyn. “Heywood's Adaptation of Plautus' Rudens: The Problem of Slavery in The Captives.” Comparative Drama 9, no. 2 (summer 1975): 116-24.

In the following essay, Prager maintains that Heywood's play has been underestimated by critics because of the difficulty of dealing with the the subject of slavery issue in dramatic form.

Scholarly inability to localize the problem of slavery outside of anachronistic translation from the classics has resulted in a critical underestimation of Thomas Heywood's adaptation of Plautus' Rudens in The Captives (1624). Transported by Heywood to a contemporary European terrain, the slave elements of the play trouble the modern judgment of those prepared to accept the normalcy of chattel bondage in the world of antique Roman comedy but not in English Renaissance drama. The absence of informed perspective on the relationship of institutional slavery to the slave figure in the drama is apparent from a review of the critical...