To Script or Not to Script: Rethinking Pseudolus as Playwright

In Plautus’s Pseudolus, the trickster slave Pseudolus, contemplating his next move, turns to the audience and delivers what Niall Slater (2000, 103) has dubbed the “poet soliloquy” (401–5):

sed quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi,quaerit quod nusquam gentiumst, reperit tamen,facit illud veri simile quod mendacium est,nunc ego poeta fiam: viginti minas,quae nunc nusquam sunt gentium, inveniam tamen.

But like a poet, when he has taken his tablets, he searches for that which is nowhere in the world. Still he finds it. He makes that which is a lie similar to the truth. Now I will become a poet. The twenty minae, which are now nowhere in the world, nevertheless I will find them.¹

In his influential study, Slater has urged scholars to see Pseudolus, the poet, embracing a metatheatrical stance to the world in order to write the script of the plot.² While I agree with Slater that we should view self-conscious theatricality as the strength of Pseudolus and other servi callidi, too much emphasis has been placed on scriptwriting as the expression of it. Rather than focusing on how servi callidi write plots to ensnare their opponents, I would urge us to consider, through Pseudolus, the importance of improvisation as a different expression of the slave’s self-conscious theatricality. We should view Pseudo-lus’s project as poesis rather than as a poema.³ The audience is not encouraged to reflect on a perfectly wrought play in order to appreciate the poet’s masterful control; instead, we are invited to follow a play in development, lacking a clear path, where the poet must rely on his ability to adapt to shifting circumstances. By emphasizing improvisation, we can view the servus callidus in a way that embraces the comic spirit’s drive for new ways of approaching a seemingly fixed and finite world.

In the contrast between poema and poesis, we see opposition between what I will call the written and the improvisatory modes. Both involve the creation of scripts, but each takes a different approach to what is at stake with the script. In the written mode, the playwright writes a script that the actors are to produce exactly to the best of their abilities. The emphasis is placed on the text first and foremost. In this mode, the script is produced before performance, and as a result, the script is more or less fixed when it comes to the performance. Such an approach to comedy is more appropriate for a poet like Menander than Plautus, as Sander Goldberg (1995) has noted.⁴ The audience is put in a position to enjoy a product that has been worked out fully in advance. Wrinkles in the plot are anticipated from the start, and the action proceeds fairly smoothly towards the marriage at the end of the play.

If the playwright engages the improvisatory mode to create his script, then the emphasis shifts away from the primacy of the text. As C. W. Marshall (2006, 245) has suggested, “Improvisation is a process of composition in which the moment of composition coincides with the moment of performance.” Rather than working out all of the details in advance, the playwright sets up a framework within which the action will take place, and the script takes form as playwright and actors work out what should happen within that framework. If we think of the commedia dell’arte tradition, the numerous lazzi provide scenarios within which the actors may explore potentials. They will have a sense of the cue that starts a particular lazzo, and they will have an end towards which they will work. The events in between may take several avenues: some agreed upon from previous rehearsals and performances, others that will arise unexpectedly during the current performance. The key, then, to the improvisatory mode is a different attitude toward the performance of the script than that characterized by the written mode. Because of the way that improvisation creates plots, the improvisatory mode must adapt to the performance circumstances, accepting some lack of control over events.

With...