One famous quotation by Terence reads: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", or "I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." This appeared in his play Heauton Timorumenos.
He may have been born in or near Carthage or in Greek Italy to a woman taken to Carthage as a slave. Terence's ethnonym Afer suggests he lived in the territory of the Libyan tribe called by the Romans Afri near Carthage prior to being brought to Rome as a slave. This inference is based on the fact that the term was used in two different ways during the republican era: during Terence's lifetime, it was used to refer to non-Carthaginian Libyco-Berbers, with the term Punicus reserved for the Carthaginians. Later, after the destruction of Carthage in 146, it was used to refer to anyone from the land of the Afri (Tunisia and its surroundings). It is therefore most likely that Terence was of Libyan descent, considered ancestors to the modern-day Berber peoples.
In any case, he was sold to P. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, who educated him and later on, impressed by Terence's abilities, freed him. Terence then took the nomen "Terentius," which is the origin of the present form.
When he was 25, Terence left Rome and he never returned, after having exhibited the six comedies which are still in existence. According to some ancient writers, he died at sea.
Terence wrote in a simple conversational Latin, and most students who persevere long enough to be able to read him in the vernacular find his style particularly pleasant and direct. Aelius Donatus, Jerome's teacher, is the earliest surviving commentator on Terence's work. Terence's popularity throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is attested to by the numerous manuscripts containing part or all of his plays; the scholar Claudia Villa has estimated that 650 manuscripts containing Terence's work date from after AD 800. The mediaeval playwright Hroswitha of Gandersheim claims to have written her plays so that learned men had a Christian alternative to reading the pagan plays of Terence, while the reformer Martin Luther not only quoted Terence frequently to tap into his insights into all things human but also recommended his comedies for the instruction of children in school.
Terence's six plays are:
The first printed edition of Terence appeared in Strasbourg in 1470, while the first certain post-antiquity performance of one of Terence's plays, Andria, took place in Florence in 1476. There is evidence, however, that Terence was performed much earlier. The short dialogue Terentius et delusor was probably written to be performed as an introduction to a Terentian performance in the 9th century (possibly earlier).
A phrase by his musical collaborator Flaccus for Terence's comedy Hecyra is all that remains of the entire body of ancient Roman music. This has recently been shown to be inauthentic.
Two of the earliest English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle are thought to parody Terence's plays.
Due to his cognomen Afer Terence has long been identified with Africa and heralded as the first poet of the African diaspora by generations of black writers, including Juan Latino, Phyllis Wheatley, Alexandre Dumas, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou.
American playwright Thornton Wilder based his novel The Woman of Andros on Terence's Andria.
Questions as to whether Terence received assistance in writing or was not the actual author have been debated over the ages, as described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica:
[In a prologue to one of his plays, Terence] meets the charge of receiving assistance in the composition of his plays by claiming as a great honour the favour which he enjoyed with those who were the favorites of the Roman people. But the gossip, not discouraged by Terence, lived and throve; it crops up in Cicero and Quintilian, and the ascription of the plays to Scipio had the honour to be accepted by Montaigne and rejected by Diderot.
Category:Berber people Category:2nd-century BC births Category:159 BC deaths Category:Ancient Roman comic dramatists Category:Latin-language writers Category:Old Latin-language writers Category:Republican era slaves and freedmen Category:Romans from Africa Category:2nd-century BC Romans Category:2nd-century BC writers
ar:ترنتيوس be:Тэрэнцый br:Terentius bg:Теренций ca:Terenci cs:Publius Terentius Afer da:Terents de:Terenz es:Publio Terencio Africano eo:Terentio eu:Terentzio fr:Térence gl:Terencio ko:푸블리우스 테렌티우스 아페르 hy:Տերենտիուս hr:Terencije is:Terentius it:Publio Terenzio Afro he:פובליוס טרנטיוס אפר ka:პუბლიუს ტერენციუსი kk:Публий Теренцийді la:Publius Terentius Afer mk:Теренциј ml:ടെറൻസ് nl:Publius Terentius Afer ja:プビリウス・テレンティウス・アフェル no:Terents pl:Terencjusz pt:Terêncio ro:Terențiu ru:Публий Теренций Афр scn:Pubbliu Tirenziu Afru sk:Terentius sl:Terencij sr:Публије Теренције Афер sh:Publije Terencije Afer fi:Terentius sv:Terentius tr:Terentius uk:Теренцій zh:泰伦提乌斯This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan CBE (10 June 191130 November 1977) was one of England's most popular 20th-century dramatists. His plays are generally set in an upper-middle-class background. He is known for such works as The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952) and Separate Tables (1954), among many others.
Rattigan's birth certificate and his birth announcement in The Times indicate he was born on 9 June 1911. However, most reference books state that he was born the following day; Rattigan himself never publicly disputed this date. There is evidence suggesting that the date on the birth certificate is incorrect. He was given no middle name, but he adopted the middle name "Mervyn" in early adulthood.
During the war, Rattigan served in the Royal Air Force as a tail gunner; his experiences helped inspire Flare Path and he was released from the service to help rewrite it as a film screenplay (which eventually appeared as The Way to the Stars in 1945). After the war, Rattigan alternated between comedies and dramas, establishing himself as a major playwright: the most famous of which were The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954).
He believed in understated emotions, and craftsmanship, which after the overnight success of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 was deemed old fashioned. Rattigan responded to his critical disfavour with some bitterness. His plays Ross, Man and Boy, In Praise of Love, and Cause Célèbre, however show no sign of any decline in his talent. Rattigan explained that he wrote his plays to please a symbolic playgoer, "Aunt Edna", someone from the well-off middle-class who had conventional tastes; his critics frequently used this character as the basis for belittling him. 'Aunt Edna' inspired Joe Orton to create "Edna Welthorpe", a mischievous alter ego stirring up controversy about his own plays.
Rattigan was gay, with numerous lovers but no long-term partners, a possible exception being his 'congenial companion [...] and occasional friend' Michael Franklin. It has been claimed that his work is essentially autobiographical, containing coded references to his sexuality, which he kept secret from all but his closest friends. There is some truth in this, but it risks being crudely reductive; for example, the repeated claim that Rattigan originally wrote The Deep Blue Sea as a play about male lovers, turned at the last minute into a heterosexual play, is unfounded, though Rattigan claimed otherwise. On the other hand, for the Broadway staging of Separate Tables, he wrote an alternative version of the newspaper article in which Major Pollock's indiscretions are revealed to his fellow hotel guests; in this version, the people the Major approached for sex were men rather than young women. However, Rattigan changed his mind about staging it, and the original version proceeded.
Rattigan was fascinated with the life and character of T. E. Lawrence. In 1960 he wrote a play called Ross, based on Lawrence's expoits. Preparations were made to film it, and Dirk Bogarde accepted the role. However, it did not proceed because the Rank Organisation withdrew its support, not wishing to offend David Lean and Sam Spiegel, who had started to film Lawrence of Arabia. Bogarde called Rank's decision "my bitterest disappointment". Also in 1960, a musical version of French Without Tears was staged as Joie de Vivre, with music by Robert Stolz of White Horse Inn fame. It starred Donald Sinden, lasted only four performances, and has never been revived.
He was diagnosed as having leukaemia in 1962 and recovered two years later, but fell ill again in 1968. He disliked the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s and moved abroad, living in Bermuda, where he lived off the proceeds from lucrative screenplays including The V.I.P.s and The Yellow Rolls-Royce. For a time he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world.
In 1964 Rattigan wrote to the playwright Joe Orton congratulating him on the outrageous comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane, to which he had escorted Vivien Leigh in its first week. He then chose to invest £3,000 in getting the play transferred to the West End. Although an unlikely champion of the risqué Orton, Rattigan recognised the younger man's talent and approved of what he considered a very well written piece of theatre. He also acknowledged in retrospect that, 'in a way, I was not Orton's best sponsor. I'm a very unfashionable figure still, and I was then wildly unfashionable critically. My sponsorship rather put critics off, I think.'
Rattigan was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours of June 1971 for services to the theatre, being only the fourth playwright to be knighted in the 20th century (after Sir W. S. Gilbert in 1907, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero in 1909 and Sir Noël Coward in 1970). He had been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 1958. He moved back to Britain, where he experienced a minor revival in his reputation before his death.
Rattigan died in Hamilton, Bermuda from bone cancer in 1977, aged 66. His cremated remains were deposited in the family vault at Kensal Green Cemetery.
Thea Sharrock directed his rarely-seen After the Dance in the summer of 2010 at London's Royal National Theatre. She directed a major new production of Rattigan's final and also rarely seen play Cause Célèbre at The Old Vic in March 2011 as part of The Terence Rattigan Centenary year celebrations. As well as this, Trevor Nunn also marked the occasion with a West End revival of Flare Path at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, between March and June 2011. The latter of these starred Sienna Miller, James Purefoy and Sheridan Smith.
A new screen version of The Deep Blue Sea, directed by Terence Davies is to be released in 2011, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston.
Other works including discussions on Rattigan's theatre:
Category:1911 births Category:1977 deaths Category:Old Harrovians Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Oxford Category:British knights Category:Burials at Kensal Green Cemetery Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:English dramatists and playwrights Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English screenwriters Category:Gay writers Category:Knights Bachelor Category:LGBT writers from the United Kingdom Category:People from Sonning Category:People from South Kensington * Category:Cancer deaths in Bermuda Category:Deaths from bone cancer
ca:Terence Rattigan cy:Terence Rattigan de:Terence Rattigan es:Terence Rattigan fr:Terence Rattigan ko:테렌스 래티건 it:Terence Rattigan nl:Terence Rattigan ja:テレンス・ラティガン pl:Terence Rattigan ru:Реттиген, ТеренсThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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