I hope that these readers will appreciate the playwright’s inventive comic genius and discover his remarkable variety in tone, characters, and situations.įirst, his inventiveness second, his variety. Which ones to choose? They could do worse than turn to the ones that led Shakespeare, Molière, and Sondheim to write their imitations. Readers or actors may, I hope, go on to read or see or produce complete plays by Plautus. Most or all of these scenes are suitable to use for audition or separate performance.

Then I hope to interest people who like doing comedy as well as reading it, feeling the threads tying ancient to modern comic plots and characters. First, those (like me) also interested in the classical tradition, comedy above all, and its history. I have assembled this collection of scenes with several audiences in mind, besides, of course, readers who like to laugh. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest are partly based on Menaechmi, Amphitruo, Mostellaria, Casina, and Rudens Molière’s L’Avare ( The Miser), on Aulularia Gelbart and Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, on Pseudolus, Miles Gloriosus, Casina, and Mostellaria David Williamson’s Flatfoot (2004) on Miles Gloriosus the Capitano in Commedia dell’Arte, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and Jonson’s Bobadill all inherit traits of Plautus’s braggart soldiers. The jokes, characters, and plots that Plautus and his successor Terence left have continued to influence comedy from the Renaissance even to the present. These first situation comedies, Greek then Roman, were called New Comedies, in contrast with the more loosely plotted Old Comedies, surviving in the plays of Aristophanes. In Rome the forerunners of such plays, existing a generation before Plautus, were called fabulae palliatae, comedies in which actors wore the Greek pallium or cloak. He spun his work from Greek comedies, “New Comedies” bearing his own unique stamp. This collection celebrates a comic artist who left twenty plays written during the decades on either side of 200 B.C.

Preliminaries: The Playwright Speaks, Gods and Humans, Philosophy.

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Hardin © Copyright 2021 All Rights Reserved. Lowijs Elzevier (publisher) Netherlands (Amsterdam) 1652 - The Rijksmuseum ‘Title page for Titus Maccius Plautus, Comoediae Superstites XX, 1652’ An Introduction to Plautus Through Scenes

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