Plautus

Roman playwright

• Born: c. 254 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Sarsina, Umbria (now in Italy)
• Died: 184 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Plautus’s action-packed, middle-class comedies, built from a contrived structure of disguises, mistaken identities, and the obligatory revelatory scene, were sensationally popular in his time and influenced future comedic dramatists William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Molière, and Jean Giraudoux.

Early Life

The sparse biographical details on Titus Maccius Plautus (PLAW-tuhs) are drawn from historians and writers such as Livy and Cicero. From his birthplace, Sarsina, a mountainous rural region of Italy, where the native tongue was Umbrian, Plautus escaped, joining a traveling group of players (probably as an actor). He learned the technical intricacies of the profession, acquired a mastery of Latin—and perhaps some Greek—and became the unequaled practitioner of his comedic craft.

In Rome, Plautus worked in the theater, lost money in trade, and eventually became a mill worker, writing in his leisure moments. No record remains of his life except the plays that he wrote, and even some of these claim authenticity only on the basis of ascription. Plautus became so popular that dramas by other writers were attributed to him in order to gain production and popular reception. In his time, it was enough merely that a play bore his name; a generation later, it was enough that the prologue to the playMenaechmi (The Twin Menaechmi, 1595) contain the words “I bring you Plautus”—words that remain in that prologue forever as guarantors of laughter.

Life’s Work

Although he may have written more than fifty plays, only twenty-one manuscripts of works attributable to Plautus survive, the oldest of these dating to the fourth or fifth century c.e. Only twenty of these are complete plays. In an age when records were shoddily kept, or not kept at all, and when aspiring contemporary playwrights did not hesitate to attach Plautus’s name to their plays, a large number of comedies were attributed to him.

In an attempt to clear up the chaos of authorship, Marcus Terentius Varro, a contemporary of Cicero, compiled three lists of plays: those given universal recognition as being written by Plautus, those identified by Varro as plays by Plautus, and those recognized as Plautus’s work by others but not by Varro. The first list, labeled by scholars the “Varronianae fabulae,” contains the twenty-one plays that succeeding generations of scholars have agreed on as belonging to Plautus. Other plays remain outside the canon.

The dates of Plautus’s plays are as speculative as are the details of his life. Only two of them—Pseudolus (191 b.c.e.; English translation, 1774) and Stichus (200 b.c.e.; English translation, 1774)—are attached to specific dates. About half the remainder are unidentified chronologically, and the rest are qualified with terms such as “probably early” or “late.” Like William Shakespeare nearly fifteen hundred years later, Plautus borrowed his plots and reworked Greek originals; some sources have been identified, but others remain unknown.

Among the most famous stock situations and character types associated with Plautine comedy are the vain soldier-braggart (miles gloriosus), which finds its most complex realization in Shakespeare’s Falstaff; the farcical chaos caused by mistaken identity, a chaos to which order is eventually restored; the servant who, wiser than his superiors, extricates them from a web of near-impossible entanglements, sometimes of the master’s making; and finally, a happy ending. The plays, whether serious— such as Amphitruo (Amphitryon, 1694)—or farcical—such as The Twin Menaechmi—are always comic in the Aristotelian definition of comedy as a play that begins in an unfortunate situation and ends fortunately.

Like the commercial playwright of modern times, Plautus wrote for a broad audience, basing his appeal on laughter and a good story, love and money forming an integral part of the story. Preceding his plays, as was the custom, with a prologue devoted to a summary of the borrowed story, he then developed his plot by highly improbable complications, witty native dialogue, slapstick scenes, and an infinite variety of jests, all kept within the limits of popular recognition. That recognition is embodied in the characters, the most famous of which in his time and, perhaps, in any time is the miles gloriosus figure, the Greek alazon or “overstater” (commonly translated as the soldier-braggart), whose vanity and consequent exposure have never failed to entertain. In Plautus’s time, the Punic Wars created an audience receptive to fast-paced action and to the adventures of the returning soldier.

On a broader social scale, the element of recognition is drawn from the merchant-class milieu of his time, in which servants, wiser than their masters, extricate their superiors from entrapments of one sort or another, thereby resolving problems and bringing the play to its happy conclusion. Molière’s middle-class comic heroes and villains stem from this Plautine tradition. The stories borrowed from Greek comedies became merely the scaffolding for the native Roman ribaldry, schemes, and jests that characterize the famous Plautine humor, and the upper-class characters are frequently a part of that scaffolding. In the course of the play, they give way to the servants or peasants. Thus, in the tradition of the New Comedy of Menander (as opposed to the old Aristophanic satire, which was topical), Plautus opened the comic stage to the common man. What social satire is present is a part of the more broadly based humor, concerned with the outwitting of the upper classes by their inferiors. Like death, humor becomes the great leveler.

Of the twenty-one surviving plays, the two that remain the most famous are The Twin Menaechmi—frequently translated as The Two Menaechmi—and Miles gloriosus (The Braggart Warrior, 1767), the date and source of the former unknown, the latter dated about 205 b.c.e. Both are placed by scholars in the early or early middle of the agreed-on chronology of Plautus’s writing. Respectively, they are the direct source of Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592-1594) and of his most famous and complex comic figure, Falstaff. Indirectly, they have influenced both literary style and popular humor in most succeeding comedies. Both plays exude the festive spirit to which C. L. Barber attributes Shakespeare’s comedies and which distinguishes Plautine humor, heavily dependent on robust and fast-moving physical actions, from that of traditional satire, invective, or other modes of comedy in which ideas are prominent.

The Twin Menaechmi, more directly imitated perhaps than any other play, builds its comedy on a set of separated twins, whose lives develop complications that, once begun, take on a life of their own in a seemingly endless web of mistaken identities and consequent misunderstandings. Only the most skillful plotting of events by the author can extricate the twins from that web created by disguises and accidental meetings.

The title figure of The Braggart Warrior (variously titled The Soldier-Braggart), the soldier Pyrgopolynices, is considered by scholars to be Plautus’s most brilliant creation. Convinced of his bravery and appeal to women and recently returned from the wars, Pyrgopolynices (who is characterized by lechery and stupidity as well as vanity) falls victim to the elaborate deceptions of a slave whose master is in love with a woman whom the braggart soldier has brought to Ephesus against her will. The slave concocts a pattern of disguises and misunderstandings that befuddle the vain soldier, and the lovers are reunited. Again, disguises, misunderstandings, and deceptions create a farcically intricate plot, delightful in its escalating complications and ingenious in its resolution.

Significance

In addition to being “the dean of Roman drama,” Plautus has directly provided the plots for at least three illustrious successors: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, based on The Twin Menaechmi; Molière’s L’Avare (1668; The Miser, 1672), based on Aulularia (The Pot of Gold); and Jean Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 (1929; English translation, 1938), based on Amphitryon. Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897; English translation, 1898), Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598, 1605), and the contemporary American musicals The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) are among the popular descendants of Plautus’s work.

Erich Segal, writing about Plautine humor, quotes the psychiatrist Ernst Kris, who describes comedy as a “holiday for the superego.” A “safety valve for repressed sentiments which otherwise might have broken their bonds more violently,” Plautine comedy provides release from the conventions of a socially prescribed life. It produces a resolution of the tension between dreams and actuality, order and chaos, and finally between the vital and repressive forces in life, as it acts out that resolution for the audience. In the end, a kind of ironic equilibrium is achieved, an equilibrium that reconciles dream with reality, providing the release necessary to avoid the violence inherent in the tragic mode.

Bibliography

McCarthy, Kathleen. Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. A look at the relation of slaves to their masters, with emphasis on the work of Plautus. Bibliography and index.

Moore, Timothy. The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. A study of Plautus that focuses on his endeavors to adapt works to suit his audience’s taste and culture. Bibliography and indexes.

Riehle, Wolfgang. Shakespeare, Plautus, and the Humanist Tradition. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1990. A comparison of William Shakespeare and Plautus, examining Plautus’s influence on Shakespeare. Bibliography and index.

Segal, Erich. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. A sprightly treatment of the social milieu that spawned Plautus’s comedies, with extensive notes, an index of passages quoted, and a general index.

Segal, Erich, ed. Oxford Readings in Menander, Plautus, and Terence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A collection of papers tracing the development of the “New Comedy.” Segal’s introduction draws connections between these Latin plays and modern comedy.

Slater, Niall W. Plautus in Performance: The Theater of the Mind. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000. This study focuses on the production of the plays of Plautus. Bibliography and index.

Sutton, Dana Ferrin. Ancient Comedy: The War of the Generations. New York: Twayne, 1993. An examination of early comedy that looks at Plautus, Aristophanes, Menander, and Terence.