The 2006 Latin play was performed by students from the Advanced Latin course in the Department of History. Aulularia (‘The Pot of Gold') by Vitalis of Blois, was staged in the Chapel, Strand Campus on Friday 24 March.

Aulularia was the second comedy composed by Vitalis, about whom little is known other than that he lived and wrote in the first half of the 12th century. He was probably a cleric and his two plays Geta and Aulularia were most likely written during the period 1125-1145. From the mid-12th century his works were read in the schools and cited in the writings of other authors.

Vitalis is superior to many other poets of his age in that he wrote in a correct and elegant Latin, which, in Aulularia, especially, has the capability of transforming rhetorical artifice, through the use of irony, into humour.

Aulularia follows a classical plot, while at the same time satirising the medieval philosophical schools. Much of the wit derives from the elevated language of the philosophical schools being put in the mouth of fools and slaves who bungle the complex terminology, a situation that would have appealed to a medieval audience.

Seven King's MA students, one King's PhD student, and one UCL PhD student performed a dramatised reading of the play. Liisa Smith, on the MA Text & Performance programme, run jointly with RADA, directed the production.

The performance was based on the original Latin text edited by Feruccio Bertini (Commedie latine del xii e xiii secolo, I, Genova, 1976) and the translation by Alison Goddard Elliott (Seven Medieval Latin Comedies, New York, 1984).