Plautus: Mostellaria

George Fredric Franko

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350188433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

Plautus' Mostellaria is one of ancient Rome's most breezy and amusing comedies. The plot is ridiculously simple: when a father returns home after three years abroad, a clever slave named Tranio devises deceptions to conceal that the son has squandered a fortune partying with pals and purchasing his prized prostitute's freedom. Tranio convinces the gullible father that his house is haunted, that his son has purchased the neighbor's house, and that he must repay a moneylender. Plautus animates this skeletal plot with farcical scenes of Tranio's slapstick abuse of a rustic slave, the young lover's maudlin song lamenting his prodigality, a cross-gender dressing routine, a drunken party, a flustered moneylender, spirited slaves rebuffing the father, and Tranio hoodwinking father and neighbor simultaneously. This is the first book-length study of Mostellaria in its literary and historical contexts. It aims to help readers and theater practitioners appreciate the script as both cultural document and performed comedy. As a cultural document, the play portrays a range of Roman preoccupations, including male ideologies of the acquisition, use and abuse of property, relations between owners and enslaved persons, the traffic in women, tensions between city and country, the appropriation and adaptation of Greek culture, and the specters of ancestry and surveillance. As a performed comedy, the play celebrates the power of creativity, improvisation and metatheater. In Mostellaria' s farce, sleek simplicity replaces complexity as Plautus aggrandizes his comic hero by stripping plot to the minimum and leaving Tranio to operate alone with no resources other than his quick wit. A chapter on Mostellaria 's reception considers modernity's continuing fascination with Plautine farce and trickery.

1

Why Plautus? Why Mostellaria?

Twenty-one comic scripts attributed to Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE) are our earliest surviving works of Latin literature. Seniority alone merits Plautus a mention in the history of Western literature and theater, and several qualities in his drama continue to draw our attention: his Latin is briskly imaginative; his characters flamboyantly memorable; his staging infectiously playable. Plautus was Rome’s most popular playwright, and drama figured prominently in the Romans’ formulation of their national cultural consciousness. For example, according to the Roman narrative, Latin literature began with a play when in 240 BCE a certain Livius Andronicus staged a translation or adaptation of a Greek play during a public festival. Today, comedy in film, television, and theater is a multi-billion-dollar industry in the world’s economy, and many of comedy’s plotlines and character types descend directly or indirectly from Plautus.

Mostellaria (The Little Ghost Play) is one of Plautus’ most breezy and amusing farces. The plot is ridiculously simple: when a father returns home after three years abroad, a clever slave named Tranio devises deceptions to conceal that the son has squandered a fortune partying with pals and purchasing his prized prostitute. Tranio convinces the gullible father that his house is haunted, that his son has purchased the neighbor’s house, and that he must repay a moneylender for the housing loan. Plautus animates this skeletal plot with scenes of Tranio’s slapstick abuse of a rustic slave, the young lover’s maudlin song lamenting his prodigality, a woman’s grooming scene (played by male actors), a drunken party, a flustered moneylender, a rakish neighbor, bold slaves rebuffing the father, and Tranio hoodwinking father and neighbor simultaneously. In many ways, Mostellaria offers a spirited introduction to the theater of Plautus.¹

This companion aims to help readers and theater practitioners appreciate the script as both cultural document and performed comedy. To make coherent discussion out of Mostellaria’s sprawling farce, it proceeds by topics rather than scene-by-scene. Chapter 1 examines Mostellaria’s relationship with Greek and Italian antecedents and Plautus’ status as a translator and adapter. Since the first two sections of this chapter speculate on shadowy evidence, some readers may prefer to jump in medias res with the comparison of Mostellaria and Homer’s Odyssey (p. 11). Chapter 2 considers Mostellaria as a cultural document embodying Roman male ideologies about owners and enslaved persons; the traffic in women; the acquisition and abuse of wealth; tensions between city and country; stereotypes of Greeks; public performance of daily activities; funerals for and surveillance by deceased ancestors; ghosts and superstition. Some of those ideologies may fascinate and others may repulse, but scrutiny of them helps reveal the mentality of Roman audiences that Plautus aimed to entertain. Chapter 3 examines the play as comedy performed on a Roman stage with its celebration of metatheater, improvisation, and song. In Mostellaria’s farce, simplicity replaces complexity as Plautus aggrandizes his comic hero by stripping plot to the minimum and leaving Tranio to operate alone with no resources other than his wits. Chapter 4 looks briefly at the play’s afterlife in three plays from early modern England (William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller) and the Broadway musical and film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The companion concludes by positioning Tranio among some notable trickster figures beyond theater.

If the notes and bibliography seem a bit thick or wide-ranging, it is not to intimidate or be defensive; rather, I hope that interested readers can mine them for further inquiries and find a variety of approaches for digging into a Plautine script (with references emphasizing anglophone works). And since our topic is The Little Ghost Play, without too much apology this companion sometimes invokes ghosts and spirits as a metaphor.

Ghostly Greek Comic Ancestors

Many people approach Plautus as a font of Western comedy, an author near the beginning of a tradition and to whose works later authors respond. While Plautus’ Latin diction is archaic compared to the later elegance of Cicero and Vergil, early does not equal primitive. Subsequent generations may retrospectively apply the label “archaic” to an earlier artist, but in his own context Plautus did not know that he was “archaic.” He likely seemed on the cutting edge in his dramaturgy, for even when he exploited traditional elements he did so in new contexts and stylings. It remains important for assessing Plautus’ creative achievement to understand that he did not compose his plays ex nihilo; rather, he translated and adapted foreign, Greek scripts for his Roman audiences by interlarding indigenous, Italian comic features. That understanding helps us to approach Plautus not only as a source of the comic tradition to be tapped by later authors but also as an innovative transmitter and transformer of divergent Greek and Roman comic traditions, one whose process of composition still has something to teach us about the creative regeneration of “classics.”

We may think of Plautus as a kind of shifty necromancer, resurrecting Greek classics and reanimating them in a new Roman cultural matrix. In so doing, he participated in a Roman translation project of authors adopting and adapting Greek works and genres. Playwrights contemporary with Plautus composed not only comedies but also tragedies adapted from Greek scripts. His era produced an epic of Roman history that folded Latin poetic diction into Greek dactylic hexameter (the meter of Homeric epic). Latin prose emerged in political oratory and Greek-style histories of Rome in both Greek and Latin.² Thereafter, the appropriation and renovation of Greek literary forms continued to inspire most all Latin literature. We might think of Catullus recasting a poem of Sappho, Vergil’s Aeneid refashioning Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, or Horace in Ode 3.30 boasting that his transformation of Greek lyric poetry makes him partially immortal.

Roman artists embraced the opportunities and challenges of this secondariness—of repurposing classics from Greek literary or visual arts—to showcase their own talents and visions. Motives for and appreciation of the Roman achievement has varied among individuals and eras. We can view their appropriation of Greek artistic culture as a kind of imperialism concomitant with Rome’s military takeover of the Mediterranean; or a pragmatic opportunism in producing arts and entertainment to meet a market demand; or a marker of cultural cachet, much as serving a notable French wine when one’s local vintage can be of worse, equal, or better quality. The Tudor translation project, wherein a torrent of translations and adaptations of Greek and Roman classics flooded the English market as England began to assert itself on the European political, religious, and artistic map, provides a rough but useful comparison.³ We ourselves perpetuate aspects of the translation project begun by the Romans whenever we read or see translation or adaptation of another culture’s art.

The prologues of several plays announce that Plautus has transformed a Greek script into a Roman play. For example, Trinummus informs us that “The name of this play in Greek is The Treasure; Philemon wrote it. Plautus spun a barbarian version (Plautus vortit barbare); he named it Three Bitcoins” (18–20). Not all Plautine scripts have prologues, nor do they all give such precise details. Mostellaria offers no prologue and summons us into the middle of the action, as if the play’s ancestry held no importance. Perhaps surprisingly, thirty lines from the play’s end Tranio boasts: “If you’re a friend to Diphilus or Philemon, / Tell ‘em by what scheme your slave tricked you: / You’ll ‘ve given ’em the best deceptions for comedies.” (1149–51). Is this quip a kind of endnote to acknowledge Plautus’ Greek models? Possibly. More importantly, whereas identifying the play’s Greek ancestors in the prologue could imply that Plautus merely followed the trail of his forebearers, withholding an attribution until the end suggests that Plautus (or Tranio?) abandoned a well-trodden Greek path and broke fresh ground.

Diphilus, Philemon, and Menander were lauded as the three greatest Greek playwrights of the genre we call “New Comedy” (as opposed to the “Old Comedy” best represented by Aristophanes). The three were prolific playwrights competing roughly a century before Plautus. Sadly, from Menander’s 108 plays we have only one complete script (Dyscolus), one nearly complete (Samia), and portions of others totaling perhaps 5 percent of his dramatic output.⁴ Sadder still, of approximately 100 plays by Diphilus, we only know the titles of about sixty plays and have over 130 fragmentary quotations. From Philemon’s ninety-seven plays we have only about sixty titles and 190 fragments.⁵ Since we know that Philemon wrote a play entitled Phasma (The Ghost, Latin monstrum, hence Mo[n]stellaria), Plautus may invoke Philemon as a kind of curtain call to imply that Mostellaria borrows from his Phasma.⁶ In naming his courtesans Delphium and Philematium, Plautus comes acoustically and alphabetically close to tarting up Diphilus and Philemon. Whatever the case, Tranio’s taunting tone towards his master functions as a mouthpiece for declaring that an ironically servile Plautus surpasses his own Greek “masters.” Diphilus and Philemon provided Plautus with the building blocks of excellent plots, but Plautus himself freely reconstructs and remodels them for Roman audiences.

Without the lost Greek scripts, it remains impossible to assess with precision the quality and quantity of Plautine alterations. We can, however, outline his usual procedures. In 1968, publication of a papyrus fragment with roughly 100 legible lines of Menander finally allowed direct comparison with a Plautine adaptation. Comparison mostly confirms the deductions of earlier scholars that while Plautus sometimes translated the Greek text almost word-for-word, at other times he made massive changes to Menander, as discussed in the next section. Nevertheless, the extent to which the comedy of Diphilus and Philemon resembled that of Menander remains an open question. Prologues reveal that Plautus adapted at least two of his surviving ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Playbill
• 1 Why Plautus? Why Mostellaria?
• 2 Foundations and Frames
• 3 Staging Mostellaria
• 4 Afterlife and Ghost Lights
• Appendix 1: Pliny’s “Haunted House” (Letter 7.27.5–11)
• Appendix 2: A Doubling Chart
• Appendix 3: Character Line Counts
• Appendix 4: A Selective Chronology
• Notes
• Editions and English Translations
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright