Plautus

Plautus a Roman comic playwright of the late third and early second centuries BC (c. 254-184 BC) whose boisterous adaptations of Greek New Comedy shaped the comic theatre of Europe and inspired playwrights from Shakespeare to Moliere.

Life and Background

Titus Maccius Plautus was born around 254 BC, probably in the town of Sarsina in Umbria, in central Italy. His name, with its comic associations, may not have been his original one, and the details of his life are obscure; the ancient traditions about him are late, uncertain and often invented from his own jokes. Tradition holds that he came to Rome in his youth, worked in the theatre in some capacity, and perhaps lost money in trade before turning to writing plays.

He is said to have composed for the stage in his later years and to have died in 184 BC, the same year as the elder Cato, an emblem of the age in which Roman literature was forming under Greek influence. He was remarkably prolific: some one hundred and thirty plays were circulating under his name in antiquity, and the scholar Varro judged that twenty-one of them were genuine. Those twenty-one survive, making Plautus the earliest Latin author whose complete works have come down to us.

Adaptation of Greek Comedy

Plautus wrote in an era when Roman drama was being created out of Greek models. His plays adapt Greek New Comedy, especially the work of Menander and his contemporaries, but the borrowing is free and thoroughly Romanised: he sets the action in Greek towns while filling it with Latin wordplay, Italian customs and the noises of Roman street life. He took plots of mistaken identity, clever slaves, lost children and young lovers, and shaped them into fast-moving and frequently farcical entertainments.

Whereas Greek comedy prized restraint and character, he prized energy, song, dance and the immediate delight of the audience, and he transformed the relatively sedate originals into raucous popular theatre. He also introduced elements foreign to Greek comedy, including a taste for burlesque, parody and topical allusion, and he frequently breaks the theatrical illusion by addressing the audience directly. His prologues often warn, tease and bargain with the spectators, revealing a performer's instinct for holding a crowd.

Plots, Characters and Comedy

The typical Plautine plot turns on a young man in love with a girl he cannot have, opposed by a severe father, a boastful soldier or a greedy pimp, and aided by a cunning slave who schemes his way to a happy ending. Thematic variations abound, but the machinery is recognisable across the corpus and became the foundation of European comic plotting. The clever slave is his great creation, and figures like Pseudolus and Epidicus delight in trickery and spin elaborate lies.

Their improvisation is at once a source of comedy and a reflection on power in the Roman household; slaves and dependants, not the freeborn, are given the wit and the initiative. Other recurring types include the boastful soldier, the miser, the parasite and the clever courtesan, along with a gallery of dupes and swindlers. Plautus drew these masks from the tradition but animated them with a vitality of language and gesture that made them his own, and his verbal invention, pun and alliteration is a central part of the pleasure of the plays.

Language, Metre and Theatrical Craft

Plautus wrote in a rich and varied Latin, ranging from the colloquial speech of the marketplace to elaborate lyrical passages set to music. His comedies are largely cantica and deverbia, sung and spoken portions in a variety of metres, and the musical element gave the plays a flexibility and tempo that modern readers often miss in translation. His style is exuberant to the point of excess, and the puns, jokes and crowd-pleasing asides belong to a performance conceived as a celebration of the festival.

The plays were staged at the public games in the open air, to large and unruly crowds, and this performative character explains much about their structure: short scenes, sudden reversals, direct appeals to the spectators and an openness to improvisation within the fixed frame of the story. The result is a theatre of delight rather than of refined reflection, closer in spirit to the popular comic traditions of many later ages than to the literary comedy of the Greeks.

Influence and Legacy

Plautus exercised enormous influence on the later history of comedy. He was read and imitated in Rome, and in the Renaissance his plays were rediscovered, staged and savoured by humanist scholars and popular audiences alike. The Mostellaria, The Menaechmi, Amphitryon and The Pot of Gold became famous throughout Europe, and his plots were plundered and transformed by later playwrights in every generation.

Shakespeare modelled The Comedy of Errors on The Menaechmi, and Moliere derived The Miser from The Pot of Gold and reworked Amphitryon, while the tradition of the clever servant and mistaken identity descends in large part from Plautus. He is valued today both as a master of theatrical craft and as a window onto Roman popular culture and its Latin. His vigorous language preserves the speech of ordinary people, and his plays remain stageworthy, as frequent modern revivals show.

See also

• The Menaechmi
• Amphitryon
• The Pot of Gold
• Roman comedy