Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

LIGHT DRAMA
Carthaginian' = Karchedonios 'The Carthaginian') and another from the
otherwise unknown Demophilus (Asinaria 'The ass comedy' = Onagos 'The
muleteer'). Plautus' taste in authors centred on the three who dominated the
Artists' repertoire, but was evidently catholic. These plays have a uniform
surface-style in which wildly hyperbolical comparisons, nonce-formations,
bizarre identifications, asyndetic riddles, military imagery, jokes exploiting
formulae and concepts of Roman law, and mythological comparisons are
prominent. 1 None of these is particularly characteristic of any New Comedy
writer, nor of Terence, and it is rightly inferred that they are specially Plautine
traits, though one would like to know how markedly Plautus differed here
from Naevius. The plots of all Plautus' plays are distorted considerably by the
re-casting of their musical and metrical form and by the running together of
act-divisions of the originals; this allowed, the two Philemon plays preserve
their plots relatively intact. Other plays like this are Aulularia ' The jar comedy'
(possibly from Menander), Captivi' Prisoners', and Menaechmi (from unknown
authors). It is significant that Cicero actually quotes only from Aulularia (once)
and Trinummus (several times), that Menaechmi was particularly popular in
the Renaissance, and that Lessing thought so highly of the Captivi that he
called it the best play ever written. In these cases Plautus happens to have kept
well-wrought New Comedy plots more or less intact, and the dramatic critic
familiar with the theory of comedy as a 'mirror of life' has therefore felt more
at home with these plays than with others. Plautus is sometimes praised for the
characterization of Euclio in Aulularia and for having preserved the well-oiled
plot of the Menaechmi. This praise is in fact misplaced, for his adjustments of
the Euclio-figure were such as to simplify and categorize a complex character,
and in the Menaechmi he has gone out of his way to upset the formal balance
of the original. These plays, which are not necessarily to be associated in
date, 2 perhaps represent a treatment of plot more characteristic of Caecilius
Statius, whom Varro praises for his argumenta, but whom nonetheless Gellius
found very wanting by Menandrian standards (Gell. 2.23).
Plautus is usually more actively disruptive. The Stichus (from Menander;
200 B.C.) begins with a delicate musical vignette depicting two sisters whose
father wishes to have them divorced from their absent husbands. The spectator
is invited to expect a complex and various family-drama, and that no doubt was
the main theme of the original. He might two or three years earlier have seen
the Cistellaria (also from Menander), which began with a technically similar
operatic tableau for female characters. Plautus was already fully himself in the
Cistellaria; the story-line was prominent, though stretched here, telescoped
1 A comprehensive account of Plautine style in English remains a desideratum. See Lejay (1925),
Haffter (1935), Fraenkel (i960), Wright (1974).
1 Among dating-studies Schutter's (1952) is the best.
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