Such being the taste of the audience whom he had to please, and who crowded to the theatre not to acquire purity of taste, but to relax their minds with merriment and jest, it became the great object of Plautus to make his audience laugh; and for this he sacrificed every other consideration. “Nec quicquam,” says Scaliger, “veritus est, modo auditorem excitaret risu.” With this view, he must have felt that he was more likely to succeed by emulating the broader mirth of the old or middle comedy, than by the delicate railleries and exquisite painting of Menander. Accordingly, though he generally borrowed his plots from the writers of the new comedy, his wit and humour have more the relish of the old, and they have been classed by Cicero as of the same description with the drollery which enlivened its scenes[284]. The audience, for whom the plays of Plautus were written, could understand or enjoy only a representation of the manners and witticisms to which they were accustomed. To the fastidious critics of the [pg 167]court of Augustus, an admirer of Plautus might have replied in the words of Antiphanes, a Greek dramatist of the middle comedy, who being commanded to read one of his plays to Alexander the Great, and finding that the production was not relished by the royal critic, thus addressed him: “I cannot wonder that you disapprove of my comedy, for he who could be entertained by it must have been present at the scenes it represents. He must be acquainted with the public humours of our vulgar ordinaries—have been familiar with the impure manners of our courtezans—a party in the breaking up of many a brothel—and a sufferer, as well as actor, in those unseemly riots. Of all these things you are not informed; and the fault lies more in my presumption in intruding them on your hearing, than in any want of fidelity with which I have portrayed them[285].”
Indeed, this practice of consulting the tastes of the people, if it be a fault, is one which is common to all comic writers. Aristophanes, who was gifted with far higher powers than Plautus, and who was no less an elegant poet than a keen satirist, as is evinced by the lyric parts of his Frogs, often prostituted his talents to the lowest gratifications of the multitude. Shakspeare regarded the drama as entirely a thing for the people, and treated it as such throughout. He took the popular comedy as he found it; and whatever enlargements or improvements he introduced on the stage, were still calculated and contrived according to the spirit of his predecessors, and the taste of a London audience. When, in Charles’s days, a ribald taste became universal in England, “unhappy Dryden” bowed down his genius to the times. Even in the refined age of Louis XIV., it was said of the first comic genius of his country, that he would have attained the perfection of his art,
“Si moins ami du peuple en ses doctes peintures,
Il n’eût point fait souvent grimacer ses figures,
Quitte, pour le bouffon, l’agreable et le fin,
Et, sans honte, a Terence allié Tabarin.”
Boileau.
Lopez de Vega, in his Arte de hacer Comedias, written, in 1609, at the request of a poetical academy, and containing a code of laws for the modern drama, admits, that when he was about to write a comedy, he laid aside all dramatic precepts, and wrote solely for the vulgar, who had to pay for their amusement:
“Quando he de escribir una comedia,
Encierro los preceptos con seis llaves;