Plautus

The earliest Latin author whose works are preserved, is the father of farce, and his influence upon later playwrights who freely borrowed his characters, plots, and jokes has been immense. His plays, of which twenty-one survive wholly or in part, are all believed to have been based on earlier Greek New Comedy texts by writers such as Menander, Diphilus and Philemon. But instead of translating them directly into Latin, Plautus, as he freely admitted, "transformed" them into his "barbarian" versions, in adapatations that were conditioned by his own abilities and preferences, which in turn undoubtedly directly reflected the taste and pressure of his Roman public.

Plautus took the rather urbane and decorous Greek comedies and injected them with a great deal of vitality, comic fun, and vulgarity. Their generally high-minded and thoughtful characters are in his hands more vigourously drawn and cynically motivated. The language of his own laughable and sometimes grotesque characters is cruder, more ribald and playful, but also much richer in complex and sometimes fantastical imagery. Their intrigues tend to be less plausible than those found in the New Comedy models, but they are more ingeniously and energetically pursued. For the delectation of his Roman holiday audience Plautus greatly increased the amount of song and dance, adding too many references to Roman customs, and often breaking the dramatic illusion entirely to allow his performers to speak directly to the audience about their own function as actors, or the play itself. A fine example is Mercury in the prologue to "Amphitruo", who constantly moves in and out of the world of the play, shifting as he does so from speaking as an actor, to portraying the character. Plautus was fond too of such devices as soliloquies and overheard conversations. His plots abound in trickery and, serving as its mischievous agents (and foils), he greatly increased the role of slaves, eg. Palaestrio in the "Miles Gloriosus", or Pseudolus in what is, as its title indicates, literally his own play.

These slaves are threatened with extreme violence: pain, beatings, threats of torture are not only a source of fun; they become one of the chief motivations of the plot and action. There is also a great deal of verbal violence. Both are evident in the opening scene of the "Casina", in which two rival slaves threaten one another with direst torture, while engaging in elaborately abusive insults. Violence was not prevalent in earlier comedy; Plautus deliberately increased it, perhaps to cater to a taste for violent slapstick in an audience accustomed to earlier unscripted knock-about entertainments. In addition to displaying this violent streak, Plautus' plays also are inclined towards coarse and sometimes indecent humor, and exhibit a fondness for disguises and crude deception, slapstick, a preference for fooling over the development of emotional interest or the advancement of the plot, and a festive conclusion. Less frequently, as in the case of the "Rudens" or the "Captivi" the play is informed by more ethical and philosophical concerns, while still achieving a happy conclusion.

Another likely legacy of earlier forms of popular drama taken up and developed by Plautus may be discerned in his use of music and mastery of a great variety of metrical forms. Plautus strives to create mood and enhance the emotional impact of characters' lauguage through close attention to sound; alliteration, rhyme, assonance, word play are all abundant, and these are presented in a great variety of both spoken and lyric meters. Passages which in his Hellenistic models were prose, are transformed into song, which in performance probably would have been accompanied by heightened gesticulation and dance. In the course of his career this metrical richness and dexterity, unmatched by any other Latin author, increased until his later plays might best be characterised as something akin to modern musical comedy, written in verse. Over a third of his last play, the "Casina" is in lyric meters.

One of the recurrent elements of Plautine drama is that the characters appear to make up the comedy as they go along: they contrive the very plot in which they take a part. Probably this directly reflects the legacy of a more tentative dramatic fare: improvised, non-literay entertainemnts long favoured by his audience, which the actors are thought to have assembled on the basis of stock characters and situations, some well-worn but every-popular bits of comic business, and the barest outline of a scenario. We trace the influence of such performances in Plautus' deliberate choice to "make believe" that his own plays are unscripted; taking shape in the presence of an audience which in turn assists in their formation. The chief agent of this dramaturgical self-consciousness is usually the "clever slave" who fashions the play around him to become simultaneously its author and hero. He fills this role by virtue of his wit and intelligence; triumphing over adversity and the social facts of life in way which no actual Roman slave could ever do. Masters are tricked, freedom is won, and the clever slave enjoys impunity. In the surviving plays nothing dire ever actually happens to him despite circumstances of ever-present danger. Indeed Plautus' protagonists make a point of positively disdaining and mocking the fates which, but for their success in fashioning unlikely, anti-realist plots, would tumble down upon them.

This is one key to his enduring popularity. The audience enjoys the pretense of the "actors" theatrical improvisation, while in the process, admiring and experiencing a mildly subversive "saturnalian" pleasure in the "characters" ability to salvage something redemptive from their dramatic situation and get away with it. Moreover, compounding the pleasure and release of tension and moral restraint, is the awareness that all the plots and characters are notionally set safely and unthreateningly in Greece: in the time-honoured tradition of ethnic and minority humour, a Plautine play is one extended "Greek joke".

Although the changes and innovations which Plautus wrought on his models must surely have helped ensure the success of his plays in performance, they did little to endear him to generations of critical classicists who too often considered him at best a hack translator and adaptor of what (in their absence) were believed to be the sublime comedies of the Greek New Comedy playwrights. Many scholars appeared to be far more concerned with what Plautus might have read, that with what he actually wrote, which they dismissed as sub-literary bufoonery. Only recently has a fresh approach begun to recognise him for what he was: a superbly gifted comic craftsman who mastered and employed every theatrical skill for the benefit and appreciation of an audience which had already acquired an impressive degree of experience and some sophistication in responding to dramaturgical technique. His plays will reward further research, and deserve more frequent performance.