This investigation was prompted by the abiding conviction that Plautus as
a dramatic artist has been from time immemorial misunderstood. In his
progress through the ages he has been like a merry clown rollicking
amongst people with a hearty invitation to laughter, and has been rewarded
by commendation for his services to morality and condemnation for his
buffoonery. The majority of Plautine critics have evinced too serious an
attitude of mind in dealing with a comic poet. However portentous and
profound his scholarship, no one deficient in a sense of humor should
venture to approach a comic poet in a spirit of criticism. For criticism
means appreciation.
Furthermore, the various estimates of our poet's worth have been as
diversified as they have been in the main unfair. Alternately lauded as a
master dramatic craftsman and vilified as a scurrilous purveyor of
unsavory humor, he has been buffeted from the top to the bottom of the
dramatic scale. More recent writers have been approaching a saner
evaluation of his true worth, but never, we believe, has his real position
in that dramatic scale been definitely and finally fixed; because
heretofore no attempt has been made at a complete analysis of his
dramatic, particularly his comic, methods. It is the aim of the present
dissertation to accomplish this.
I doubt not that from the inception of our acquaintance with the pages of
Plautus we have all passed through a similar experience. In the beginning
we have been vastly diverted by the quips and cranks and merry wiles of
the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of
the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's
belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at
meeting our new-found friends in other plays, clothed in different names
to be sure and supplied in part with a fresh stock of jests, but still
engaged in the frustration of villainous panders, the cheating of harsh
fathers, until all ends with virtue triumphant in the establishment of the
undoubted respectability of a hitherto somewhat dubious female
character.[1]
Our astonishment waxes as we observe further the close correspondence of
dialogue, situation and dramatic machinery. We are bewildered by the
innumerable asides of hidden eavesdroppers, the inevitable recurrence of
soliloquy and speech familiarly directed at the audience, while every once
in so often a slave, desperately bent on finding someone actually under
his nose, careens wildly cross the stage or rouses the echoes by
unmerciful battering of doors, meanwhile unburdening himself of lengthy
solo tirades with great gusto;[2] and all this dished up with a sauce of
humor often too racy and piquant for our delicate twentieth-century
palate, which has acquired a refined taste for suggestive innuendo, but
never relishes calling a spade by its own name.
If we have sought an explanation of our poet's gentle foibles in the
commentaries to our college texts, we have assuredly been disappointed.
Even to the seminarian in Plautus little satisfaction has been vouchsafed.
We are often greeted by the enthusiastic comments of German critics, which
run riot in elaborate analyses of plot and character and inform us that we
are reading _Meisterwerke_ of comic drama.[3] Our perplexity has perhaps
become focused upon two leading questions; first: "What manner of drama is
this after all? Is it comedy, farce, opera bouffe or mere extravaganza?"
Second: "How was it done? What was the technique of acting employed to
represent in particular the peculiarly extravagant scenes?"[4]
There is an interesting contrast between the published editions of Plautus
and Bernard Shaw. Shaw's plays we find interlaced with an elaborate
network of stage direction that enables us to visualize the movements of
the characters even to extreme minutiae. In the text of Plautus we find
nothing but the dialogue, and in the college editions only such
editorially-inserted "stage-business" as is fairly evident from the spoken
lines. The answer then to our second question: "How was it done?", at
least does not lie on the surface of the text.
For an adequate answer to both our questions the following elements are
necessary; first: a digest of Plautine criticism; second: a rA(C)sumA(C) of the
evidence as to original performances of the plays, including a
consideration of the audience, the actors and of the gestures and
stage-business employed by the latter; third: a critical analysis of the
plays themselves, with a view to cataloguing Plautus' dramatic methods. We
hope by these means to obtain a conclusive reply to both our leading
questions.