COMEDY: PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.
Great as was the place occupied in the culture of the Greek world by Homer and the Attic tragedians, the Middle and New Comedy, as they culminated in Menander, exercised an even wider and more pervasive influence. A vast gap lay between the third and fifth centuries before Christ. Aeschylus, and even Sophocles, had become ancient literature in the age immediately following their own. Euripides, indeed, continued for centuries after his death to be a vital force of immense moment; but this force he owed to the qualities in him that make his tragedy transgress the formal limits of the art, to pass into the wider sphere of the human comedy, with its tears and laughter, its sentiment and passions. From him to Menander is in truth but a step; but this step was of such importance that it was the comedian who became the Shakespeare of Greece. Omnem vitae imaginem expressit are the words deliberately used of him by the greatest of Roman critics.
When, therefore, the impulse towards a national literature began to be felt at Rome, comedy took its place side by side with tragedy and epic as part of the Greek secret that had to be studied and mastered; and this came the more naturally that a sort of comedy in rude but definite forms was already native and familiar. Dramatic improvisations were, from an immemorial antiquity, a regular feature of Italian festivals. They were classed under different heads, which cannot be sharply distinguished. The Satura seems to have been peculiarly Latin; probably it did not differ deeply or essentially from the two other leading types that arose north and south of Latium, and were named from the little country towns of Fescennium in Etruria, and Atella in Campania. But these rude performances hardly rose to the rank of literature; and here, as elsewhere, the first literary standard was set by laborious translations from the Greek.
We find, accordingly, that the earlier masters—Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius—all wrote comedies as well as tragedies, of the type known as palliata, or "dressed in the Greek mantle," that is to say, freely translated or adapted from Greek originals. After Ennius, this still continued to be the more usual type; but the development of technical skill now results in two important changes. The writers of comedy become, on the whole and broadly speaking, distinct from the writers of tragedy; and alongside of the palliata springs up the togata, or comedy of Italian dress, persons, and manners.
As this latter form of Latin comedy has perished, with the exception of trifling fragments, it may be dismissed here in few words. Its life was comprised in less than a century. Titinius, the first of the writers of the fabula togata of whom we have any certain information, was a contemporary of Terence and the younger Scipio; a string of names, which are names and nothing more, carries us down to the latest and most celebrated of the list, Lucius Afranius. His middle-class comedies achieved a large and a long-continued popularity; we hear of performances of them being given even a hundred years after his death, and Horace speaks with gentle sarcasm of the enthusiasts who put him on a level with Menander. With his contemporary Quinctius Atta (who died B.C. 77, in the year of the abortive revolution after the death of Sulla), he owed much of his success to the admirable acting of Roscius, who created a stage tradition that lasted long after his own time. To the mass of the people, comedy (though it did not err in the direction of over-refinement) seemed tame by comparison with the shows and pageants showered on them by the ruling class as the price of their suffrages. As in other ages and countries, fashionable society followed the mob. The young man about town, so familiar to us from the brilliant sketches of Ovid, accompanies his mistress, not to comedies of manners, but to the more exciting spectacles of flesh and blood offered by the ballet-dancers and the gladiators. Thus the small class who occupied themselves with literature had little counteracting influence pressed on them to keep them from the fatal habit of perpetually copying from the Greek; and adaptations from the Attic New Comedy, which had been inevitable and proper enough as the earlier essays of a tentative dramatic art, remained the staple of an art which thus cut itself definitely away from nature.
That we possess, in a fairly complete form, the works of two of the most celebrated of these playwrights, and of their many contemporaries and successors nothing but trifling fragments, is due to a chance or a series of chances which we cannot follow, and from which we must not draw too precise conclusions. Plautus was the earliest, and apparently the most voluminous, of the writers who devoted themselves wholly to comedy. Between him and Terence a generation intervenes, filled by another comedian, Caecilius, whose works were said to unite much of the special excellences of both; while after the death of Terence his work was continued on the same lines by Turpilius and others, and dwindled away little by little into the early Empire. But there can be no doubt that Plautus and Terence fully represent the strength and weakness of the Latin palliata. Together with the eleven plays of Aristophanes, they have been in fact, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, the sole representatives of ancient, and the sole models for modern comedy.
Titus Maccius Plautus was born of poor parents, in the little Umbrian town of Sarsina, in the year 254 B.C., thus falling midway in age between Naevius and Ennius. Somehow or other he drifted to the capital, to find employment as a stage-carpenter. He alternated his playwriting with the hardest manual drudgery; and though the inexhaustible animal spirits which show themselves in his writing explain how he was able to combine extraordinary literary fertility with a life of difficulty and poverty, it must remain a mystery how and when he picked up his education, and his surprising mastery of the Latin language both in metre and diction. Of the one hundred and thirty comedies attributed to him, two-thirds were rejected as spurious by Varro, and only twenty-one ranked as certainly genuine. These last are extant, with the exception of one, called Vidularia, or The Carpet-Bag, which was lost in the Middle Ages; some of them, however, exist, and probably existed in Varro's time, only in abridged or mutilated stage copies.
The constructive power shown in these pieces is, of course, less that of Plautus himself than of his Greek originals, Philemon, Diphilus, and Menander. But we do not want modern instances to assure us that, in adapting a play from one language to another, merely to keep the plot unimpaired implies more than ordinary qualities of skill or conscientiousness. When Plautus is at his best—in the Aulularia, Bacchides, or Rudens, and most notably in the Captivi—he has seldom been improved upon either in the interest of his action or in the copiousness and vivacity of his dialogue.
Over and above his easy mastery of language, Plautus has a further Claim to distinction in the wide range of his manner. Whether he ever Went beyond the New Comedy of Athens for his originals, is uncertain; But within it he ranges freely over the whole field, and the twenty Extant pieces include specimens of almost every kind of play to which the name of comedy can be extended. The first on the list, the famous Amphitruo, is the only surviving specimen of the burlesque. The Greeks called this kind of piece [Greek: ilarotrag_oidia]—a term for Which tragédie-bouffe would be the nearest modern equivalent; tragico-comoedia is the name by which Plautus himself describes it in the prologue. The Amphitruo remains, even now, one of the most masterly specimens of this kind. The version of Molière, in which he did little by way of improvement on his original, has given it fresh currency as a classic; but the French play gives but an imperfect idea of the spirit and flexibility of the dialogue in Plautus' hands.
Of a very different type is the piece which comes next the Amphrituo in acknowledged excellence, the Captivi. It is a comedy of sentiment, without female characters, and therefore without the coarseness which (as one is forced to say with regret) disfigures some of the other plays. The development of the plot has won high praise from all critics, and justifies the boast of the epilogue, Huiusmodi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias. But the praise which the author gives to his own piece—