Roman Comedy

ROMAN COMEDY S. M. ADAMS APPRECIATION of Plautus . and Terence does not rt leap forth, like Athena from the brows of Zeus, adult and armed. It en ters into existence, if at all, in a manner much more painful and prosaic, and quite ungeared for battle. I hold no energetic brief for these unhappy poets; I merely offer a few considerations which seem to justify the verdicts given by their contemporaries, and which may also serve to temper our modern judgments . At the outset a confession is in order. Comparatively few people read Plautus and Terence after they are in a position to do so properly-that is, after the plays have ceased to be just so much Latin, and can therefore be viewed with comfort and convenience in their real form as pieces for the stage. Undergraduate impressions blunt the reader's interest; nor is the fault entirely his: as he wades· these reedy waters the question, "What does this sort of stuff really matter 1" is, after all, as reasonable as it is obtrusive, and he feels no thing but relief when Cantor hands him again to solidground. Yet to read any playas a play requires that the reader be free to occupy his mind with the business of visualizing·the stage-scene, the stagebusiness , and the acting. This he cannot do if his mind is occupied chiefly with grasping the mere sense of the lines; and it must in fairness be admitted that a certain amount of the contempt in which Roma:n Comedy is generally held can be attributed to failure to treat these works as plays at all. For this failure the novice may claim some sligh t excuse in that Roman Comedy has no modern counterpart . Written in verse that runs the gamut from metrical 514 ROMAN COMEDY back-chat to something akin to poetry, it involves also copious draughts of recitative, and a good deal of actual lyric- much 1n Plautus, a distinctly less amount in Terence . We have here no counterpart of the half-parallel which Gilbert and Sujlivan make with Aristophanes. The 'nineteen th-cen tury musical comedy and its twen tiethcentury revival in the cinema are, with a few notable e;>rceptions , on an even lower plane; they are, first and foremost , shows, not plays; they make even less pretence at plot and certainly no more serious attempt at characterd .rawing; and the humblest estimate of Graeco-Roman music must put it at something better than jazz unbrchestrated . Yet this " musical comedy" is probably our closest approximation; for "straight" 'comedy naturally stands on a different level from that of any comedy-withmusic , and light opera, being wholly set to music, makes a different kind of thing again. It is indeed true that, while Plautus likes his music plentiful, Terence leans decidedly in the direction of straigh t comedy; bu t his long passages of recitative, with the occasional lyric, pen him safely in the same category. Prerequisite to fair judgment, then, is the visualizing of any specimen ofRoman Comedy as something rendered on the stage; and a performance which can he judged by the commonly accepted standards of anyone type familiar in the modern theatre is not to be expected. The reader must allow his specimen to unfold itself in its own way, taking each element in it as it appears, prepared to enjoy it, if he can, for what it really is. This visualizing process is likely to surprise him. He will discover, for instance, that these Roman plays move swiftly-especially those of Plautus; for Terence is smoother and more sedate, not only in his verse but also in his method. A competent director could put them on 515 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY with considerable "snap." The action "clicks." To take one example:. the Rudens of Piautus, a work ·of some fourteen hundred verses wi th a considerable cast of characters , leaves an empty stage ten times; on four Of these occasions we have a natural "act"-break, and on each of the others the next arrival has been so deftly forecast that the momentarily empty stage makes for dramatic entry. In fact, the whole business of...