Wilton W. Blancké

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Plautine character is never a consistent human character. He is rather a personified trait, a broad caricature on magnified foibles of some type of mankind. There is never any character development, no chastening. We leave our friends as we found them. They may exhibit the outward manifestation of grief, joy, love, anger, but their marionette nature cannot be affected thereby. That we should find inconsistencies in character portrayal under these circumstances, is not only to be expected, but is a mathematical certainty. The poet cares not; they must only dance, dance, dance! ”

“ 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?" ”

“ As to the second question, we have examined briefly the extant evidence regarding the actor's employment of gesture and business, his delivery of the dialogue, make-up and character delineation, and found a disappointing paucity, but a general and irresistible trend towards liveliness, vivacity and broad undiluted comedy that must have been the sort of dramatic fare demanded by the primeval appetite of the Plautine audience. But again we find ourselves falling short of a satisfying answer to our question. ”

“ The stage whisper and aside, too, we accept with benevolent indulgence; but it is worth noting that in the attempted verisimilitude of the modern "legitimate" drama, the aside has well nigh vanished. As we go down the scale through light comedy and broad farce these conventions multiply rapidly.
With the introduction of music come further absurdities. Melodious voicing of our thoughts is in itself essentially unnatural, to say the least. Grand opera, great art form as it may be, is hopelessly artificial. ”

“ We say only "in large measure," because it is part of our endeavor to settle accurately the position of our author in the dramatic scale, considered of necessity from the modern viewpoint. We cannot believe that he had any pretensions to refined art in play building, or rather rebuilding, or to any superficial elegance of style, or to any moralizing pose. We believe him an entertainer pure and simple, who never restricted himself in his means except by the outer conventions and form of the Greek New Comedy and the Roman stage, provided his single aim, that of affording amusement, was attained. ”

“ And when we reach musical comedy and vaudeville, all thought of drama, technically speaking, is abandoned in watching the capers of the "merry-merry" or the outrageous "Dutch" comedian wielding his deadly newspaper.
It is important for our immediate purposes to note: first, (as aforesaid) , that the amount of license allowed author and actor increases immeasurably as we go down the scale; second, that the degree of familiarity with the audience and cognizance of the spectator's existence varies inversely as the degree of dramatic value. ”

“ To establish this belief, and at the same time to interpret accurately the nature of his plays and the means and effect of their production, is our thesis.
If then we run the gamut of the dramatic scale, we observe that as we descend from the higher forms, such as tragedy, psychological drama and "straight comedy," to the lower, such as musical comedy and burlesque, the license allowed playwright and actor increases so radically that we have a difference of kind rather than of degree. Certain conventions of course are common to all types. ”

“ We conclude then that the prevalence of inherent defects of composition and the lack of serious motive, coupled with the author's constant and conscious employment of the implements of broad farce and extravagant burlesque, impel us inevitably to the conclusion that we have before us a species of composition which, while following a dramatic form, is not inherently drama, but a variety of entertainment that may be described as a compound of comedy, farce and burlesque ”

“ In the course of it we have insensibly encroached upon the next topic: the relation of public and actor. Who after all is the chief factor in the success or failure of a drama, in spite of the oft misquoted adage, "The play's the thing?" The actor! The actor, who can mouth and tear a passion to tatters, or swing a piece of trumpery into popular favor by the brute force of his dash and personality. That this was true in Plautus' day, no less than in our own, is plainly indicated by the personal allusion inserted in the Bac. ”

“ Men such as Becker, Weise, Lorenz and Langrehr have proceeded upon a distinctly exaggerated ideal of Plautus' eminence as a master dramatic craftsman and literary artist and therefore have amputated with the cry of "Spurious!" everything that offends their ideal. Lessing is obsessed with too high an estimate of the Captivi. Lamarre, Naudet and Ritschl commit the error of imputing to our poet a moral purpose. ”

“ Frequently the soliloquy takes the form of a long solo passage directed at the audience, while the action halts for a whole scene to allow the actor to regale his public with the poet's views on the sins of society, economic topics of the day, or topics of the by-gone days in Athens, and the like. The resemblance to the interpolated song and dance of musical comedy is most striking. ”

“ Langen, Mommsen, Korting and LeGrand approach a keen estimate of his inconsistencies and his single-minded purpose of entertainment, but Korting accuses him of attempting to create an illusion of life while aiming solely at provoking laughter.
From this heterogeneous mass of diversified criticism we glean the prevailing idea that Plautus is lauded or condemned according to his conformity or non-conformity to some preconceived standard of comedy situate in the critic's mind, without a consideration of the poet's original purpose. ”

“ In our citation of opinions we must not overlook that impressive mile-stone in the history of criticism, the discredited but still great Lessing. In his "Abhandlung von dem Leben und den Werken des M. Accius Plautus" Lessing deprecates the harsh judgment of Horace and later detractors of our poet in modern times. Lessing idealizes him as the matchless comic poet. That the Captivi is "das vortrefflichste Stück, welches jemals auf den Schauplatz gekommen ist," as Lessing declares in the Preface to his translation of the play, is an utterance that leaves us gasping. ”

“ When Menaechmus Sosicles sees fit "to put an antic disposition on," we have a scene which, while eminently farcical, is signally clever and dramatically effective. Witness the imitation by Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors, IV. 4, and in spirit by modern farce; for instance, in A Night Off, when the staid old Professor feels the recrudescence of his youthful aspirations to attend a prize-fight, he simulates madness as a prelude to dashing wildly away.
The following from Rud. (160 ff.) is theatrical but tremendously effective and worthy of the highest type of drama. ”

“ It is understood, we presume, that the modern farce occupies no exalted position in the comic scale, is distinguished by the grotesquerie of its characters, incidents and dialogue, and is indulgently permitted to stray far from the paths of realism. Even in Shakespearian farce, note the exaggerated antics of the two Dromios in "The Comedy of Errors." ”

“ He says of the authors of New Comedy, "They wrote not like Eupolis and Aristophanes for a great nation; but rather for a cultivated society which spent its time ... in guessing riddles and playing at charades.... Even in the dim Latin copy, through which we chiefly know it, the grace of the original is not wholly obliterated. persons and incidents seem capriciously or carelessly shuffled as in a game of cards; in the original a picture from life, it became in the reproduction a caricature." ”

“ The servile status of the ancient actor is an index to the energy of his performance, if to nothing else. Failure meant a beating, success a drink at least.56 Augustus humanely abrogated the whipping of actors, but an attempt was made in Tiberius' time to renew the practice.57 On the other hand, there seem to have been prizes awarded to successful actors,58 as well as to the poet;59 but this practice surely arose after Plautus' lifetime. ”

“ As it is perfectly patent that every practical playwright must cater to his public, the audience is an essential feature in our discussion. The audience of Plautus was not of a high class. Terence, even in later times, when education had materially progressed, often failed to reach them by over-finesse. ”

“ The appearance of the Fishermen's Chorus (Rud. 290 ff.) is wholly adventitious and seems designed to intensify the atmosphere of the seacoast, if indeed it has any purpose at all. In this category also belong the revels of the drunken Pseudolus with his song and dance155, and the final scene of the St.156, where, the action of the slender plot over, the comedy slaves royster and dance with the harlot. When Ballio drives his herd before him, as he berates them merrily to the tune of a whip, we have an energetic and effective scene157. ”

“ In the whole panorama of Plautine personae the portrayal of Alcmena in the Amph. is unique, for she is drawn with absolute sincerity and speaks nothing out of character. Certainly no parody can be made out of the nobly spoken lines 633-52, which lend a genuine air of tragedy to the professed tragi (co) comoedia (59, 63) ; unless we think of the lady's unwitting compromising condition (surely too subtle a thought for the original audience) . ”

“ That it is often on the actor's initial appearance that he sings his song or speaks his piece, strengthens the resemblance. But this is a natural growth under the influence of two publics, the Greek and the Roman, notably fond of declamation and oratory. LeGrand believes this a characteristic directly derived from a narrative form of Middle Comedy embodied in certain extant fragments.139
The slave class is the topic of many of these monodies: either the virtues of the loyal slave are extolled140, or the knavery of the cunning slave141. ”

“ And we can instance scene upon scene where the self-evident padding can either furnish an excuse for agile histrionism, or become merely tiresome in its iteration161. The danger of the latter was even recognized by our poet, when, at the end of much word-fencing, Acanthio asks Charinus if his desire to talk quietly is prompted by fear of waking "the sleeping spectators" (Mer. 160) . This was probably no exaggeration.
When the padding takes the form of mutual "spoofing," the scene assumes an uncanny likeness to the usual lines of a modern "high-class vaudeville duo." ”

“ That the seven months of Most. 470 miraculously change into six months in 954 is the sort of mistake possible to any writer. In the Amph. 1053 ff., Alcmena is in labor apparently a few minutes after consorting with Jupiter; but the change of acts may account for the lapse of time, here as in Cas. 530 ff.
But after the exhaustive work of Langen, we need linger no longer in this well-ploughed field. We repeat, the evidence all points irresistibly to the conclusion that Plautus is wholly careless of his dramatic machinery so long as it moves. The laugh's the thing! ”