Shakespeare’s Transformation of Plautus

Shakespeare’s Transformation of Plautus John Arthos I In adapting Plautus’s Menaechmus Shakespeare fashioned one of his most perfectly articulated pieces. It is as much more than a well ordered farce as Plautus’s play is more than a skit, although the character of both farce and skit is important to each play. Plautus possessed a wonderful imagination and I think he moved Shakespeare as much by the power of his conception as by the ingeniousness of his writing; and I think that what Shakespeare made of his original owed greatly to what was most imaginative in it. Plautus’s play begins in a violent provocation. Menaechmus, very angry, is simply putting his wife aside and going to his mistress in a huff. It is a man’s world, and this is the point above all others— it is every man’s unassailable right to have his dinner as he likes it, when he likes it, where he likes. And afterwards he is content. 0 ye immortal gods, to what man soever did you ever grant more, who hoped for so much less? I have dined, I have drunk, 1 have lain with my mistress (Menaechmus, 474-6).1 Now and then the women display their force and their charm, now and then they put almost insuperable difficulties in the way of a man’s ambitions, but no one is ever permitted to doubt that the power of decision remains with the lords and masters. What is said elsewhere applies here: “Anything a master does is right, no matter how wrong it is.” (The Captives, 200). What happens in the Menaechmus happens in all the plays— fortune rains its blows everywhere sooner or later, and the moral is always that the most important thing is to bear the blows well. The blows do not always come from the heavens— although births and deaths play their parts; chiefly they are the defeats and disappointments men suffer when someone else gets his way, or when the dice take the unwanted turn. And they are by and large the defeats that come not through the excesses or the misplacing of passions but in the matching of wits. Almost everyone is a good fellow or at least a likeable rascal, but there are very few holds barred in their encounters with each other. There is a continuous interplay of something like cynicism— everyone has the right to outwit the other— jailor and prisoner, slave owner and slave, father and son. As a jailor says to a 239 prisoner in The Captives, “ I’m not saying you shouldn’t try [to break out] if you get the chance” (210). Very much as criminals understand the universal disposition to criminality, and as liars count on others lying, there is in Plautus the perfectly clear understanding on all sides that perfidy is to be expected: I see what you are up to; you are trying to find a way to cheat me out of what you gave me (Menaechmus, 685-7). And again: Generally speaking men have a habit of being fine fellows for so long as they are seeking some favor; but when they have obtained it there is a change, and you fine fellows turn into villainous cheats of the worst description (Captives, 232-7). This is the real key to Plautus’s world: The man on his guard against being deceived is hardly on his guard even when he is on his guard; even when he supposed he was on his guard, your guarder has often enough been gulled (Captives, 255-6). There is an implacable vitality in the contrivance of deceit. The dignity that is inherent in men is the dignity inherent in enmity. Each one owes respect to the other’s power to conduct in­ trigues. One supposes in the other what one depends on in oneself, the strength to rally from any worsting and to begin the war all over again. If you win, you may do as you like, and slavery, or the idea of it, sets the terms for every undertaking. This is true of the society and this is why it provides so much of the stuff...