Did he himself occasionally wander away from this actual, solid world, one wonders, and was it his audience that held his plays so fast down to it?
A good-humored crowd, those people who filled the Roman theatre in its first days of popularity, easily appealed to by any sentimental interest, eager to have the wicked punished—but not too severely—and the good live happily ever after. No occasions wanted for intellectual exertion, no wit or deft malice; fun such as could be passively enjoyed, broad with a flavor of obscenity. Most marked characteristic of all, a love of mediocrity, a complete satisfaction with the average. The people who applauded these plays wanted nothing bigger than their own small selves. They were democratic.
That audience of two thousand one hundred years ago looks oddly familiar. The reflection shown in the mirror of Plautus and Terence has “nothing alien” to us as we watch it. The close family life and the masterful lady of the house and the elderly-man-in-search-of-a-mistress and the nice young lovers—we know them all only too well and we cannot feel ourselves strangers to the theatre-crowd that flocked to see them in Rome of the Republic.
A Roman comedy 200 B.C., a Broadway musical comedy, 1932 A.D.—the gulf between can be passed without exertion. Save in respect of time only, it is neither wide nor deep. This swiftly changing world we must all run so hard to keep up with suddenly looks strangely static.
* In the following translation, as in all others, the text has been condensed. Very few plays lend themselves to quotation. The actors are essential, and rightly so, to any real appreciation of them. But even more than most, Roman comedy would be wronged by a word for word rendering. These plays afford excellent scope for an actor, but they move slowly for a reader. To give the passages as they stand would mean to lose the point completely in any citation brief enough to be included here. In each case the metre of the original has been reproduced.
III
The Comic Spirit in Plautus and Terence
Plautus and Terence, as has been pointed out, are the founders of our theatre. Their influence has been incalculable. The two main divisions of comedy under which all comic plays except Aristophanes’ can be grouped, go back to the two Roman playwrights. Plautus is the source for one, Terence for the other. The fact is another and a vivid illustration of how little the material of literature matters, and how much the way the material is treated. Both dramatists deal with exactly the same sort of life and exactly the same sort of people. The characters in the plays of the one are duplicated in the plays of the other, and in both the background is the family life of the day, and yet Plautus’ world of comedy is another place from Terence’s world. The two men were completely unlike, so much so that it is difficult to conceive of either viewing a play of the other with any complacency. Plautus would have been bored by Terence, Terence offended by Plautus. Precisely the same material, but a totally different point of view, and the result, two distinct types of comedy.
Plautus was the older by a generation. His life fell during a restless period when Rome was fighting even more than usual. He could have taken part in the Second Punic War and the wars in the east which followed it, but whether he did or not is pure conjecture. All that is actually known about him is that he was the son of a poor Umbrian farmer, that he worked once in a mill and wrote three of his plays there, and that he was an old man when he died in 184 B.C. But it is impossible to read him without getting a vivid impression of the man himself. A picture emerges, done in bold strokes and unshaded colors, of a jovial, devil-may-care vagabond, a Latin Villon; a soldier of fortune who had roamed the world hobnobbing with all manner of men, and had no illusions about any of them; a man of careless good humor, keen to see and delighting to laugh at follies, but with a large and indulgent tolerance for every kind of fool.
Terence was a man of quite another order. He was born a slave in one of Rome’s African colonies and brought up in a great Roman house where they recognized his talents, educated and freed him. These talents, too, found him a place in a little circle of young men who were the intelligentsia and the gilded youth of Rome combined. The leader was the young Scipio, but the elegant Laelius, no mean poet, and the brilliant Lucilius, the inventor of satire, were close seconds, and it was an astonishing triumph that the former slave, once admitted, proved inferior to none of them. It requires no imagination to realize his pride and happiness at being made one of their number. When envious people declared that his grand friends wrote his plays for him, he answered proudly that he boasted of their help.
It was a very youthful company. Terence is said to have died before he was twenty-six and they were all much of an age. The plays show nothing more clearly than that the audience they were primarily written for was this little band of close friends and not the vulgar crowd. Every one is laid in the Utopia of a young man about town in Republican Rome. Undoubtedly the members of the group in their bringing up had had a great deal required of them in the way of the antique Roman virtues. The father and mother of the day, as Plautus shows them, were not given to over-indulgence, and Scipio Africanus Maior, the young Scipio’s grandfather by adoption, must have been a man very much to be reckoned with in the family circle, while the ladies of the Scipio household were notable for their practice of the domestic virtues. The redoubtable Cornelia herself was his aunt and her jewels were his cousins. No doubt at all he and his friends had had to walk a narrow path with watchful guardians on either side.
But under Terence’s guidance, art, the liberator, set them free. He took them away to an enchanted world where fathers were what they ought to be and young men had their proper position in the world. Plautus’ fathers were hard on their sons and—more intolerable still—the young fellows were held up to ridicule. Terence altered all this delightfully. For the most part his fathers are of an amiability not to be surpassed. “Does my darling son want that pretty flute girl? The dear boy—I’ll buy her for him at once.” “Extravagant do you call him? Well, all young men are like that. I was myself. I’ll gladly pay his debts.” There is never any joking at that sort of thing. Such sentiments are the part of a right-minded man. Indeed, there are no jokes at all where the young men are concerned. They are all wonderfully serious and completely noble and accorded the deepest respect. Plautus’ young lover on his knees before the door that shuts in his lady-love, undoubtedly moved the audience to laughter when he declaimed:
Hear me, ye bolts, ye bolts. Gladly I greet you, I love you.
Humbly I pray you, beseech you, kneel here before you to beg you,
Grant to a lover his longing, sweetest bolts, fairest and kindest.
Spring now like ballet-girls dancing, lift yourselves up from the door-post.
Open, oh open and send her, send her to me ere my life blood
Drains from me wasting with waiting.
But who would laugh at Terence’s estimable young man, so admirably concerned for his love:
I treat her so? And she through me be wronged, made wretched,
She who has trusted love and life, her all, to me?
So will I never do.
They are all like that. Whatever the audience thought of them, they were certainly not amused. But whereas Plautus was out to get a laugh by any and every means possible, Terence had an entirely different object in view. Plautus talked directly to the spectators when the action failed to get a response, calling out to the man in the back row not to be so slow to see a joke, or to the women in front to stop chattering and let their husbands listen, or making an actor warn another,
Softly now, speak softly.
Don’t disturb the pleasant slumbers of the audience
I beg.
His object was to amuse. But Terence’s mind was bent upon the approval of what he thought the most fastidious, polished people that ever there had been, and he worshipped where they did, at the shrine ever dearest to youth, good taste, as laid down by the canons of each youthful circle, “the thing,” which is and isn’t “done.” Plautus makes fun of everyone, gods
included. Terence has few comic characters, and they are in general confined to the lower classes. One catches a glimpse of an English public-school feeling for good form in that little circle of serious young men of which he was so proud a member. Making gentlemen ridiculous was simply not “done.” Fortunately, in the circumstances, Terence’s sense of humor was such that it could be perfectly controlled. No doubt to him Plautus was a terrible bounder—Plautus, the comedian pure and simple, who when he is not funny, is nothing at all. Terence is a serious dramatist, able to write an amusing scene; but seldom choosing to do so. His interest is in his nice people, above all his nice young men, and in their very well-bred-man-of-the-world doings. It is not to be presumed that Plautus knew anything about well-bred men, and no one ever had less concern for good taste. His quality is Rabelaisian—diluted—and certainly he would have been as much disconcerted by Terence’s fine friends as they would have been uncomfortable with him.
With dissimilarities so marked it is not surprising that they disagreed about the whole business of drama-making. The fundamental question of how to secure dramatic interest each solved in his own way, completely unlike the other’s. They constructed their plays differently and two forms of comedy, widely divergent from each other, were the result.
There are only two main sources for dramatic interest in a comedy. The first is the method of suspense and surprise, depending upon plot or upon the reaction of character to character, or to situation. But the second method is precisely the reverse: it acts by eliminating suspense and making surprise impossible. The dramatic interest depends upon the spectators knowing everything beforehand. They know what the actor does not. It is a method found in both tragedy and comedy; it is common ground to the sublime and the ridiculous. The Greeks who made great use of it, called it irony. Nothing in tragedy is more tragic. Œdipus invokes an awful curse upon the murderer of his wife’s first husband:
I charge you all: Let no one of this land
Give shelter to him. Bar him from your homes,
A thing defiled, companioned by pollution.
And solemnly I pray, may he who killed,
Wear out his life in evil, being evil.
And we know it is he himself he is cursing, he is the murderer; he killed his father, he married his mother. This is tragic irony. It lies at the very foundation of Greek tragedy. The audience knew beforehand what the action of each play would be. They sat as beings from another world, foreseeing all the dire results of every deed as it took place, but perceiving also that thus it must be and not otherwise. The feeling of the inevitability of what is being done and suffered upon the stage, of men’s helplessness to avert their destiny, which is the peculiar power of Greek tragedy, depends in the last analysis upon irony, upon the spectators’ awareness and the actors’ unconsciousness of what is really happening. The darkness that envelops mortal life, our utter ignorance of what confronts us and our blinded eyes that cannot see the ruin we are bringing down upon ourselves, is driven home so dramatically and with such intensity as is possible to no other method.
The use of it may be as comic as it is tragic. We, the audience, are in the secret that there are two men who look exactly alike. The poor, stupid actors do not dream that it is so. How absurdly unable they are to escape their ridiculous mishaps, and what a delightfully superior position our omniscience assures to us.
We cannot trace back the use of the suspense method. Plot is as old as the very first story-teller and the interest of what the effect will be of a situation or of one character upon another is at least as old as Homer and the Bible. But irony begins with Greek tragedy, and, as far as our evidence goes, comic irony begins with Roman comedy. Among the fragments we have of Menander there are two in which irony is evident, but in neither passage is it used humorously. It is found so used for the first time in Plautus. If he was indeed the originator of it, if it was he who perceived to what comic uses tragic irony could be turned, he deserves a place in literature far higher than that now given him. Irony is his chief source of dramatic interest and he is a master of it. It follows, of course, that he offers nothing notable in plots. Suspense is automatically shut out when irony is used. Plautus’ plots, when he has one, are extremely poor, and there is a distressing similarity between them. But no one ever put irony to better comic use. His usual way is to explain the action of the piece in a very long and exceedingly tiresome prologue, but the result of the detailed explanation is that the spectators are free to give their entire attention to the absurdities they are now in a position to see through.
In the Amphitryon, it will be remembered, Jupiter is in love with Amphitryon’s wife, Alcumena. When Amphitryon is away at war Jupiter assumes his form to gain access to Alcumena. Mercury, who guards the house whenever Jupiter is in it, under the form of Amphitryon’s slave, Sosia, absent with his master, speaks the prologue, and explains in minutest detail all that is going to take place throughout the play. Jupiter and Amphitryon will look exactly alike, he warns the audience, and so will he and Sosia, but in order that they may have no bother as to which is which, Jupiter will have a bright gold tassel hanging from his hat and
I shall wear this little plume on mine,
Note well: the other two are unadorned.
With this the play begins. The scene is a street at night before Amphitryon’s house where Mercury stands on guard. To him enters his duplicate, Sosia, sent ahead by Amphitryon to prepare his wife for his unexpected return. It is too dark for Sosia to see how Mercury looks. As he goes up to the door the latter stops him.
MERCURY: May I know where you come from, who you are, and why you’re here? Just you tell me.
SOSIA: Well, I’m going in there. I’m the master’s slave. Do you know it all now? Just you tell me.
MERCURY: Is that your house?
SOSIA:Haven’t I said so?
MERCURY:Then who is the man that owns you?
SOSIA: Amphitryon. General commanding the troops. He’s got a wife—name Alcumena.
MERCURY: What stuff are you giving me? What’s your name?
SOSIA:It’s Sosia. My father was Davus.
MERCURY: Well, you’ve got your cheek. You’re Sosia? You?
What’s your game? Didn’t know I was he? Eh? (Strikes him.)
SOSIA: Oh, you’ll kill me!
MERCURY:You’ll find if you keep this up there are things a whole lot worse than dying.
Now, say who you are.
SOSIA:I’m Sosia, please—
MERCURY:He’s mad.
SOSIA:I’m not. Why, you rascal.
Didn’t a ship bring me in from the battlefield this very night? Didn’t my master
Send me here to our house? And you say I’m not—Well, I’ll go straight in to my mistress.
MERCURY: Every word a lie—I’m Amphitryon’s slave. We stormed the enemy’s city,
Killed the king—cut his head off, Amphitryon did.
SOSIA: (awestruck) He knows it all. (pause, then recovering) Just you tell me
If you are me, when the fight was on, where were you? What were you doing?
MERCURY: A cask full of wine in the tent and my own pocket flask.
What d’you think I’d be doing?
SOSIA: (overwhelmed) It’s the truth. Wretched man that I am.
(shakes head, then suddenly holds lantern up so that the light falls on MERCURY)
Well, well. He’s as like me as I myself was.
Oh, immortal gods! When was I changed? Did I die? Have I lost my memory?
Did they leave me behind in foreign parts? I’m going straight back to my master.
(Runs off, and re-enters following AMPHITRYON who is completely nonplussed at the report of what has happened.)
AMPHITRYON: (angrily) The boy’s drunk. You, speak up. Tell the truth, where you got the stuff.
SOSIA:But I didn’t.
AMPHITRYON: (uneasiness getting the better of his anger) Who’s that man you saw?
SOSIA:I’ve told you ten times. I’m t
here at the house and I’m here, too.
That’s the straight truth.
AMPHITRYON: (trying to persuade himself it’s all nonsense, but uncomfortable)Get out. Take yourself off. You’re sick.
SOSIA:I’m just as well as you are.
AMPHITRYON: Ah, I’ll see that you aren’t. If you’re not mad, you’re bad.
SOSIA: (tearfully)I tell the truth. You won’t hear me.
I was standing there in front of the house before I got there.
AMPHITRYON:You’re dreaming.
That’s the cause of this nonsense. Wake up.
SOSIA:No, no. I don’t sleep when you give me an order.
I was wide awake then—I’m wide awake now. I was wide awake when he beat me.
He was wide awake too. I’ll tell you that.
AMPHITRYON: (gruffly)It’ll bear looking into. Come on then.
This is the way Plautus handles comic irony. Molière follows him closely. In his Amphitryon the dialogue between Mercure and Sosie is essentially a reproduction of the Latin and no one can say that the great master of comedy used the device at any point more skillfully than the Latin poet.
Playwright after playwright took it over from him. Shakespeare’s ironical play, The Comedy of Errors, is not as close a parallel to Plautus’ Menaechmi as Molière’s is to the Amphitryon, but the entire play is only a variation on Plautus’ theme. Scenes in Shakespeare and Molière where the comedy depends upon irony are so many, to run through them would mean making a résumé of a large part of their comedies. The basis of the fun in Much Ado About Nothing is the spectators’ knowledge of the plot against Beatrice and Benedick. The great scene in L’Avare is funny because we know the miser is talking about his money box and the young man about his lady-love, while each supposes the other has the same object in mind. Here, too, Molière drew directly from Plautus. Whether the latter first employed the method or whether he got it from the Greek New Comedy, it is certain that its use upon our own stage goes directly back to him.
The Roman Way Page 4