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Reviewed by:
  • The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy
  • Ian C. Storey (bio)
C.W. Marshall. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge University Press. 2006. xiv, 320 US $100.95

Ancient drama used to be something one read in the study or taught as a classroom text. Forgotten was the fact that these plays were living, [End Page 225] breathing works of theatre, whose primary purpose was to entertain an audience. Oliver Taplin (1978) and J. Michael Walton (1980) were the first to treat Greek tragedy persuasively as ‘theatre,’ and Marshall has now done the same for Roman comedy, although we have much less evidence for its conventions than for Greek drama. I fully expect we shall routinely tell our students and interested colleagues to consult Marshall for everything you always wanted (and needed) to know about the staging of Plautus’s and Terence’s comedies. Reading his first chapter allows one to see immediately and in great detail how different the Greek theatre (large audiences, permanent theatres, state sponsorship, formal occasion, citizens as performers) was from Roman comedy (smaller audiences, makeshift acting-spaces, the informal occasion of a circus or carnival, many distractions, the professional troupe).

Marshall is an experienced actor and director and has first-hand experience of staging these ancient plays. He concentrates on three comedies by Plautus (Curculio, Asinaria, and Miles Gloriosus), which he himself had directed in various venues; I was able to see his Curculio at my own university in March 1996. In an attempt to mimic ancient conditions of production, Marshall staged Curculio outdoors in a busy traffic area of the campus, with all the distractions of classes, library, bus stop, and Tim Hortons. The fact that the temperature hovered at 33°F with more than a hint of snow in the air made this a memorable performance.

Marshall constantly raises issues that many of us would never have thought of considering: how sails (vela) acted not just as sunscreens, but also added colour and a sense of separation from the larger world; the possibility that, if the audience knew the social status of a certain actor, effective irony could operate when a slave-actor played a free man and vice versa; how quickly an actor could vanish through one exit, change costume, and return in a new persona by a different entry; using the repeated characters of the Marx Brothers’ movies to illustrate the effect of the Roman comic mask; and finally considering the structure of Roman comedies, not in terms of five acts (as in Greek New Comedy), but in terms of ‘arcs,’ by which Marshall means a ‘rise’ and ‘fall,’ a passage in unaccompanied iambics followed by passages accompanied by the flute-player (tibicen), either sung or in recitative. His analysis does get complicated at times, and has to be stretched to cover all the plays satisfactorily, but this is an attractive way of approaching the structure of a Plautine play.

In his final chapter Marshall argues that Plautus’s greatest difference from previous Greek comedy lies in ‘improvisation,’ that is a blend of scripted performance and pure improvisation, in which ‘performance necessarily precedes text.’ This has all sorts of implications for establishing an ‘official text’ for Plautus, even whether we can talk of a text at all. Marshall detects a variety of places where doublets in the text reflect [End Page 226] various productions of a play. His emphasis on the impromptu explains also the length of his comic productions, sixty-five minutes for Asinaria (947 lines) – which is how long Trent’s Classics Drama Group needed for a tragedy (Antigone), some 50% longer. Comedy simply takes longer to perform than tragedy; Marshall’s emphasis on improvisation would do much to explain this difference.

I had two minor quibbles, neither of which should mar what is an impressive and persuasive first book. First, under ‘Focus’ I think he stresses too much a single focus of attention. Off-side characters are inevitably visible to the spectator, and even a masked actor overhearing a conversation can react with humorous possibilities. And he regards the potential for violence as ‘a genuine problem for modern readers and audiences,’ but one need...

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