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Menaechmi: A Serious Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
It is not at all unusual for even the staunchest admirers of Plautus to feel that his plays lack genuine seriousness. His skill, his wit, his robust gaiety, above all his showmanship are recognized for their excellence. They always hit the mark. And yet he is characterized as an entertainer only, a classical George S. Kaufman.
Even Erich Segal in his illuminating study, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, for all his enthusiastic admiration of Plautus, seems uneasy about judging his achievement as anything more than masterful popular entertainment. Plautus deserves our attention, he writes, because he ‘was the most successful comic poet in the ancient world …. And yet few scholars of the last century have been willing to examine Plautus for what he undeniably was — a theatrical phenomenon’; and he concludes, ‘His art does not give rise to “thoughtful laughter” …. For True Comedy should banish all thought — of mortality and morality’. Segal willingly compares Plautus with Aristophanes and Molière (he mentions Shakespeare only to dismiss the possibility of comparison as unreasonable), and surely no one would write of either as only theatrical phenomena, banishing all thought.
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- Copyright © Aureal Publications 1981
References
NOTES
1. Segal, Erich, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 1, 3 and 14Google Scholar. Italics original.
2. The text used is that of Lindsay, W. M. (ed.), T. Macci Plauti Comoediae (Oxford, 1904Google Scholar). The English verse translation by Segal, Erich, though not always literal, is lively; Plautus: Three Comedies (New York, Evanston and London, 1969Google Scholar). The translations used in this study are for the most part his. The prose translations are my own.
3. Op cit. (n.2 above), 132f. The introductory remarks to Segal's translation are a shortened version of his essay ‘The Menaechmi: Roman Comedy of Errors’, YCS 21 (1969), 77–93Google Scholar. In the chapter ‘From Forum to Festival’ of Roman Laughter, Segal argues that the play dramatizes the conflict between holiday and everyday, or in Freudian terms between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In another chapter, ‘From Slavery to Freedom’, he considers the role of freedom in the plays of Plautus, but only as a mechanical turn of plot, specifically the emancipation of slaves. In both cases Segal seems unnecessarily narrow in his reading of Plautus' drama.
4. Grimal, Pierre, ‘Existe-t-il une “morale” de Plaute?’, Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé (1975), 485–98Google Scholar.
5. Grimal, op. cit. (n.4 above), 497.
6. Ibid., 496.
7. Segal, op. cit. (n.1 above), 143.
8. See Duckworth, George E., The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, 1952), 33–38Google Scholar.
9. Grimal, op. cit., 498.