COMEDY

42 COMIC IDENTITYwalks of life to attend the theatre disappeared, a more resolutelymiddle-class audience came to dominate. Their taste, suggests GeoffreyArnott, was escapist, interested less in the ‘recurring disasters of life’and more in stories in which problems ‘always resolved in the inevitablehappy ending which celebrated and cemented family unity’ (quoted inKonstan, 1995:167). Just as its characterization was formulaic, so wereplots, featuring variations on familiar themes. Roman comedy dealsrepeatedly with the forbidden love of a young man for a prostitute,slave, or otherwise ineligible woman, and the complications of theirromance in the face of fierce parental disapproval before finally,through some contortion of the plot, a recognition scene reveals her trueidentity as a citizen. ‘With this device, the conflicting claims of privatepassion and social responsibility are neatly reconciled, for thewaywardness of desire proves to be illusory. The impulse that aspires tothe forbidden is domesticated, gratified without danger to publicconvention, and thus the threat to the city-state ideal of a closedconjugal group is averted’ (Konstan, 1983:24–25). Given that thesenarratives tend towards the reinforcement of family ties and themaintenance of dynastic status, supporting the privilege of a raciallyhomogenous group in an ethnically diverse empire, stereotypicalcharacterization might be seen as a reassuring ploy that confirms ahegemonic view of the world, and appeals to the comprehensivesystems of taxonomy and categorization that existed in Romanintellectual life. As Maurice Charney writes: ‘Comic conventionpostulates a society that is rigidly hierarchical. By the laws of decorum,carefully formulated by such Roman rhetoricians as Cicero andQuintilian, different social classes have their prescribed styles, both ofmanners and of speech’ (Charney, 1978:51). Representing a range ofclearly delineated social types supports a concept of order that assertsits totality by claiming to predict, know, and catalogue the behaviour ofall kinds and types of people. Watching a parade of stereotypes,therefore, affords the comfort of confirming an audience’s prejudices.As previously discussed, the reputations of Terence and Plautus wereupheld during the medieval and renaissance periods by scholars whovalued them primarily as examples of good style. The basic structure ofNew Comedy had been preserved in the Italian renaissance form knownas the commedia erudita, or ‘learned’ comedy, of which Niccolò deiMachiavelli’s La Mandragola (c. 1520) is an example. Italian dramahas some influence on the structure of English playwriting throughoutthe 1580s and 1590s, combined with a group of plays known as‘prodigal son’ dramas, another fashionable continental model that