Supposes

The Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto is most famous for his verse epic Orlando Furioso. However, he also wrote plays, including the highly influential comedy I Suppositi, notable for a 1566 English translation by George Gascoygne called Supposes.

Ariosto's first comedy, La Cassaria (The Coffer), premiered in 1508 at the court of Cardinal Ippolito in Ferrara. It was a hit, and the next year Ariosto premiered I Suppositi at the palace of the duke. Both plays were originally in prose, though Ariosto later wrote verse versions of them.

Both plays are also examples of commedia erudita, the learned comedy of scholars, which differed from commedia dell'arte, which was produced by professionals. Commedia erudita looked to classical Roman drama for inspiration. I Suppositi borrows in part from Terence's comedy The Eunuch and even more from Plautus's play The Captives.

In the first act, we learn that the young scholar Erostrata has switched places with his servant Dulippo. (Gascoygne spells the names Erostrato and Dulypo.) This is similar to the way Philocrates switches places with his slave Tyndarus in The Captives, but in Ariosto's play the motive is different. The false Dulippo (really Erostrata) uses his servant disguise to sleep with the beautiful Polinesta (Polynesta in Gascoygne's spelling).

Polinesta's father Damon, who is similar to the parsimonious Pantalone in commedia dell'arte, wants to marry her off without having to pay a dowery. That's why he favors a match with the old doctor of law Cleandro (Cleander as Gascoygne has it). Cleandro is like the Dottore figure in commedia dell'arte, and similarly has some long, rambling monologues. In the first act, he says (in Gascoygne's translation):

It becometh not a man to praise him selfe; but, indeede, I may say, and say truely, that my knowledge hath stoode me in better steade at a pinche than coulde all the goodes in the worlde. I came out of Otranto when the Turkes wonne it, and first I came to Padua, after hither, where by reading, counseling, and pleading, within twentie years I have gathered and gayned as good as ten thousande ducats.

That incident in Otranto, which the Ottoman Turks seized in 1480, putting much of the population to the sword and enslaving the rest, will become important later. First, however, we get a plot where the false Erostrata convinces a gentleman traveling from Sienna to pretend to be his father. Things get complicated when the real Erostrata's father arrives from Sicily. If this sounds a lot like the subplot in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, now you know where the Bard picked up some of his ideas.

Of course, Ariosto was borrowing from others as well. The parasite character in I Suppositi, Pasifilo (or Pasyphilo according to Gascoygne), is based of Ergasilus from The Captives. Like Ergasilus, Pasifilo is always on the lookout for a free meal. When told he should supervise what is prepared for supper, he replies:

By the masse, if you should have studied this sevennight you could not have appointed me an office to please me better! You shall see what dishes I will devise.

Ariosto's borrowings from The Captives goes far beyond just the parasite character.  We learn that Cleandro's son was sold as a slave to Erostrata's father, just as Hegio's son was stolen and sold as a slave in Plautus's play. In the end, Erostrato married Polinesta (without Damon having to pay a dowery) and Cleandro is content having recovered a son and heir. All ends happily.

Ariosto went on to compose other comedies, including Il Negromante (The Necromancer) and La Lena (Lena). He left another play, I Studenti (The Students) unfinished at his death, though it was completed by his brother Gabriele. It is I Suppositi, however, that has had the most influence of his comedies, at least in the English-speaking world.

Old Comedy

Classicists often refer to the philosophical and political plays of Aristophanes as "Old Comedy" to distinguish them from the more situational "New Comedy" of Menander, whose works influenced the later Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence.

However, Aristophanes was not the only playwright penning philosophical and political comedies during the Golden Age of Athens. He is the only comic dramatist of his era for whom whole scripts survive, but we do have fragments of plays by other writers who appear to have written in a similar vein.

One writer whose plays have only survived in fragments is Metagenes, who wrote Homer or the Athletes and Thurio-Persians. While The Persians is a famous tragedy by Aeschylus about the defeat of the splendid Persian Empire, the comedy Thurio-Persians seems to combine the luxuriousness of Persia with the Italian city of Thurii, which likewise had a reputation for opulence.

How opulent was life in Thurii? According to the play, the city had a river with food just floating on it, including barley loaves, cakes, and meat. According to one translation, "Fish slices that barbecue themselves fly from above right into the mouth." However, pescatarians should be cautioned that in a play by the rival comic poet Archippus, there are political negotiations between Athenians and the fish to establish a truce between them.

Another author of Old Comedy whose plays survive only in fragments is Crates, who acted in the comedies of Cratinus before writing his own works. In his play The Knights, Aristophanes praises the writings of Crates, who in Wild Beasts depicted animals objecting to being eaten (perhaps like the fish in the comedy by Archippus). The play depicts inanimate objects performing labor all by themselves, including automatically pouring pitchers and self-rinsing cups.

According to Aristotle, Crates turned away from making personal attacks on individuals. This was not true of Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds directly satirizes the philosopher Socrates. The few fragments we have of plays by the contemporaries of Aristophanes seem to indicate that Old Comedy was quite diverse in both its themes and its comic methods.

Mandragola

One of the most famed practitioners of commedia erudita--or learned comedy--in Renaissance Italy was the statesman and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli.

Though Machiavelli is most famous today for writing the cynical (or perhaps merely realistic) handbook The Prince, he also created quite a stir in the dramatic world by penning a cynical (or perhaps merely realistic) comedy Mandragola, or The Mandrake.

Machiavelli had already translated Terence's comedy The Girl from Andros when he wrote Mandragola, and he would later adapt Plautus's play Casina as the Italian comedy Clizia. However, his most famous play doesn't adapt a classical source, but instead comes up with something entirely new.

In the first act of Mandragola, we meet Callimaco, a young man in love with the married woman Lucrezia. She is too virtuous to return his affections, though, so he confides in his servant Siro a plan to win her. To make his plan work, he needs the services of the rascal Ligurio, who is quite... well... Machiavellian.

The second act shows Ligurio getting Lucrezia's husband to visit Callimaco, who poses as a doctor who can end the couple's childlessness. He tells the husband that there is no better way to ensure fertility than to have a woman drink a potion made from a mandrake root. The problem is that the next man to sleep with her is sure to speedily die.

Since the husband believes the story, the trouble is in convincing Lucrezia that the best way to honor her marriage is to sleep with a man other than her husband, thus ending the couple's childlessness and sparing her husband's life. In the third act, Ligurio and Callimaco enlist the help of both the corrupt Friar Timoteo and Lucrezia's own mother, Sostrata, who ultimately prevail with her.

The fourth act presents a complication when Callimaco realizes that he has offered to help the husband to kidnap an unsuspecting young man they can put in bed with Lucrezia. The problem is he himself wants to be that young man, so how can they get around this? Ligurio comes up with a plan to disguise the friar as Callimaco and have Callimaco make a funny face and put on ragged clothes so that he looks like a different person. The plan is so ridiculous, it actually works.

If you expect the dishonest characters in a Machiavelli play to get their comeuppance in the end, you will be sorely disappointed. All ends happily for the scoundrels, and they even exit going into church together. That last element might seem scandalous today, but the play's first documented performance in 1526 was during the carnival season, when licentiousness was winked at by authorities.

For that 1526 performance, Machiavelli composed four songs to go in between each act. The songs cover up the passage of time between the acts, and also comment upon the themes of the play. Mandragola is not for everyone, but it certainly had an influence on Renaissance drama.

If at first you don't succeed...

Publius Terentius Afer, better known as Terence, just couldn't catch a break. He was born in Carthage in northern Africa, but ended up becoming a slave to a Roman senator.

He had good looks and was intelligent, though, so he received an education and eventually started writing plays. One of his plays, The Eunuch, was staged twice on the same day, and won what the Roman author Suetonius called the highest fee ever awarded for a single comedy.

Terence's play The Mother-in-Law was not quite so lucky. It was first performed at the Megalensian Games in 165 B.C.E., but was a failure. According to a prologue read at its second performance five years later, "an unusual disaster and calamity interrupted it, so that it could not be witnessed throughout." What was the calamity? Apparently, the audience "carried away with admiration, devoted their attention to some rope-dancing."

As if that weren't enough, the second performance was cut short as well. A prologue for another performance later that same year stated, "a rumor spread that gladiators were about to be exhibited." The audience flocked to see the gladiators, and the play was withdrawn. The third time really was a charm, though, and the third attempt to mount the play proved to be successful. (By the way, the money Terence earned from his plays even allowed him to eventually obtain his own freedom.)

So what is The Mother-in-Law about? If you're expecting a story about a shrewish old woman, that's what Terence wanted you to think, though he in fact took the play in a very different direction. At the beginning of the piece, we hear that a young man named Pamphilus, in spite of being enamored of the courtesan Bacchis, has been forced to marry the daughter of his neighbor. At first, he refused to sleep with his new bride, but eventually he warmed to her, but then had to travel abroad due to the death of a relative.

During Pamphilus's absence, a quarrel allegedly broke out between the new bride and her mother-in-law, Sostrata. "All mothers-in-law hate their daughters-in-law," Sostrata's husband complains. "Is it not a disgrace for an old woman to pick a quarrel with a girl?" Sostrata proclaims her innocence, and longs for the return of her son. When he does return, he goes all emo, complaining that he is the most wretched man in the world. His wife, it seems, has gone back to live with her parents, and now is ill. Her "illness" turns out to be pregnancy, and she gives birth to a child.

But whose child? Remember, Pamphilus initially refused to have sex with his wife. While the families want to rejoice at the birth of a child, Pamphilus does the math, as does the young woman's own mother, Myrrhina. "For it is said that it was two months after the marriage before she had commerce with you," Myrrhina says to Pamphilus. "And then, this is but the seventh month since she came to you." There's some ambiguity in the text, but if the couple has been legally married for nine months, but only started sleeping together seven months ago, the birth wouldn't look suspicious... except to those in the know.

The young bride confides in Myrrhina that shortly before her marriage, she was raped, but she has no idea who fathered the child. "When my daughter was ravished, it was so dark that his person could not be distinguished," Myrrhina relates in a monologue. To add insult to injury, on leaving her, the attacker took a ring from the girl! The families prepare for the young couple separating, but the fathers of the newlyweds, oblivious to what is happening, blame the whole matter on Bacchis, the courtesan Pamphilus previously loved. If only they could get Bacchis to promise to leave her former client alone....

At the end of the play, it is Bacchis who unravels the mystery. When she comes in wearing a ring Pamphilus gave to her, Myrrhina recognizes it as the very ring stolen by the attacker. Bacchis remembers how about ten months ago (though perhaps it was closer to nine) Pamphilus came running to her house "out of breath, without a companion, and surcharged with wine." So I guess we're going with the drunk defense? Apparently, because he confessed to ravishing "some female, he knew not whom, in the street."

What makes the play repulsive to a modern audience is that this is presented as a happy ending. Pamphilus acknowledges the child as his own and takes back his wife. Of course, she now has to live the rest of her life with her rapist. Bacchis proclaims, "I am overjoyed that this happiness has befallen him through my agency; although other courtesans would not have similar feelings." Um... I think most anybody would not have similar feelings.

But hey, writing this sort of thing won Terence his freedom, so at least he achieved a happy ending for himself, right? Well, according to Suetonius, shortly after The Mother-in-Law had its long-delayed success, Terence left for a trip at sea and never returned. Most ancient authorities report he died in a shipwreck.

Like I said, some playwrights just never catch a break.

Stooping to Conquer

In a famous essay in 1772, the author Oliver Goldsmith tried to make a comparison between laughing and sentimental comedy.

Borrowing the definition from Aristotle, Goldsmith called comedy "a picture of the frailties of the lower part of mankind, to distinguish it from tragedy, which is an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great."

The problem was, in Goldsmith's view, British comedy had taken to detail the calamities of people in the middle classes rather than poking fun at their foibles, as had been done by comic writers of the Restoration, such as Colley Cibber and John Vanbrugh.

He also claimed to have history on his side. Though the Roman playwright Terence sometimes had his comedies approach the quality of tragedy, Goldsmith observed that Terence always stopped short of rendering his characters truly pathetic. In Goldsmith's opinion, the only advantage of sentimental comedy was its novelty.

More importantly, he warned of what we might be losing in giving up the genre of laughing comedy for a comedy of sentiment:

It is true that amusement is a great object of the theater, and it will be allowed that these sentimental pieces do often amuse us; but the question is, whether the true comedy would not amuse us more? The question is, whether a character supported throughout a piece, with its ridicule still attending, would not give us more delight than this species of bastard tragedy, which only is applauded because it is new?

Goldsmith tested this hypothesis with his own play, She Stoops to Conquer, which opened the following year at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. George Coleman the Elder was manager of Covent Garden at the time, and he did not particularly care for the piece. Neither did David Garrick, who had turned down the play for Drury Lane.

On the advice of Samuel Johnson, though, Coleman put the play into rehearsal with the actress Mary Bulkley in the leading role of Kate Hardcastle. It ended up a success, and the theatre even chose to use it for their season closer later that year.

At the end of his essay, Goldsmith had written:

It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it will be but a just punishment, that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing.

Fortunately for us, no such calamity occurred, and She Stoops to Conquer continues to delight audiences to this very day.

The Licensing Act

During the beginning of the eighteenth century, many playwrights in Britain tried to imitate the great comedies of the Restoration period, but they eliminated much of the bawdry that made those comedies funny. The laugh-free plays they produced earned the label "sentimental comedies" since they continued to appeal to an audience's sentiments even as they erased what had been a source of great humor. The Irish dramatist Richard Steele scored a hit in 1722 with his sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers. Based very loosely on Terence's Roman play The Girl from Andros, the play featured heroes who controlled and overcame their passions rather than giving in to them. The play emphasized patience over emotions and peaceful resolutions over violent action.

The small success Steele had was dwarfed, however, by the runaway hit by John Gay called The Beggar's Opera. Premiering at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in London in 1728, the play ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run of any play in British history up to that time. It was periodically revived throughout the century, becoming one of the most performed plays ever (though in the twentieth century it was largely eclipsed by its German-language adaptation The Threepenny Opera). Gay used the melodies of popular songs but rewrote their lyrics to make pointed comments about public figures, including the powerful Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister in British history. This new form, called ballad opera, was imitated throughout the century, including by Gay himself in a sequel to the play, Polly, which Walpole had banned.

Traditional tragedies of kings and queens seemed out of place in a world that was increasingly being run by the middle classes. The playwright Henry Fielding exploited this disconnect by mocking high drama in his play The Tragedy of Tragedies, which opened in 1731. Also known as The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, Fielding's play featured a protagonist diminutive in stature in love with a princess named Huncamunca. To add to the comedy, Fielding had a giantess fall in love with Tom Thumb. Nearly everyone in the play dies in grand fashion, and audiences laughed hysterically at the deaths of kings, queens, and nobles.

Just as Gay had run afoul of Walpole, Fielding, too, provoked the wrath of the powerful prime minister. In The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (which actually debuted in 1737), Fielding made fun of all of the events of the previous year, particularly excoriating Walpole. This time, however, Walpole was ready. He took advantage of a particularly outrageous satire of the king called The Golden Rump and introduced to parliament the Licensing Act of 1737. The act provided for extreme censorship of the British stage, ensuring that playhouses be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, and stating that anyone who offered a play without a license be fined the exorbitant amount of fifty pounds for each offense.

The two patent theatres in London now had a virtual monopoly throughout the entire country. What was more, all new plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain at least 14 days before they were performed, and if he deemed them unfit for performance, there was no appeal. A theatre manager who performed a banned play could lose his license immediately, and strolling players who performed without a license were treated as vagabonds. The artist William Hogarth created a famous engraving called "Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn" which depicted a copy of the Licensing Act lying on a bed in the corner. As viewers well knew, the act was the death-knell for small companies like the one depicted in the engraving.

Fielding gave up the theatre to write novels, and most serious authors in England followed his lead. Almost two decades passed before Britain produced another play that would capture the public's imagination and work its way into the standard repertoire. That drama was John Home's tragedy Douglas, which perhaps not coincidentally opened in Scotland, debuting in Edinburgh and only later transferring to London. The Licensing Act worked all too well, banishing serious topics from the stage and intimidating authors for years to come. While the eighteenth century became an era of tremendous growth for the English novel, English-language drama languished until the 1770s.

As it happens, I recently purchased a 19th-century copy of the Hogarth engraving. The details aren't as fine as Hogarth's original, but I'm offering the image for free to anyone who wants to publish it in a journal, book, website, whatever. If you need a higher quality image, feel free to contact me. You can credit it to the personal collection of James Armstrong.

commedia erudita

One of the first playwrights in Italy to try to copy classical drama was Albertino Mussato, who wrote a Latin tragedy called Ecerinis around 1315. Though modeled after the plays of Seneca, Ecerinis was based on the life of a tyrannical Italian nobleman who had only been dead for about 50 years. Other authors, such as the fifteenth-century noblewoman Antonia Tanini Pulci, wrote religious plays in the vernacular Italian. Pulci's miracle plays recall the lives of saints in the medieval tradition, but unlike medieval dramatists, she had her plays published. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, people in Italy were seeing plays as literature, and not just as outlines for performance.

Because these plays were aimed primarily at scholars, they came to be known as commedia erudita, or learned comedy. (This term distinguished such plays from the improvised dramas of professional actors known as commedia dell'arte.) The churchman Bernardo Dovizi, known as the Cardinal Bibbiena for the town where he was born, wrote a play called La Calandra based on Plautus's Menaechmi. The play premiered in 1507 and was later performed before the Pope, in spite of (or perhaps because of) some rather scandalous scenes. More famous than Cardinal Bibbiena was Ludovico Ariosto, who wrote epic poetry as well as drama. Ariosto's most famous play, I suppositi (or Supposes), was later translated into English and influenced William Shakespeare.

Perhaps the greatest writer of commedia erudita was Niccolo Machiavelli. Though Machiavelli is best known today as the political theorist who wrote the cynical analysis of power The Prince, he was also instrumental in reviving Roman comedy. Around 1517, he translated Terence's The Girl from Andros into Italian, but Machiavelli was not content just translating the works of others. His play The Mandrake draws upon Roman drama, but takes place in the author's home city of Florence. Later in life, Machiavelli wrote another comedy, Clizia, inspired by Plautus's play Casina. In it, a father and son fight over the titular character, a beautiful woman who never actually appears on stage.

While Machiavelli excelled at comedy, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, known as Cinthio, wrote one of the great Italian tragedies of the sixteenth century. First performed in the city of Ferrara in 1541, Cinthio's play Orbecche sought to recreate the tragedy of Seneca, complete with violence and gore. The play's heroine, after being presented with the head of her husband and the bodies of her children, resolves to achieve revenge, which she accomplishes with great bloodshed. Other writers, such as the scandalous poet Pietro Aretino, attempted tragedy as well, but none as successfully as Cinthio. The dark mood of Orbecche was not popular, however, and Cinthio gave his later plays happy endings.

It seems that while audiences of commedia erudita did not need their plays to be all-out comedies, they also wanted to avoid the bloodshed of tragedy. The playwright Torquato Tasso achieved a perfect compromise by inventing a new genre: pastoral. Tasso's play Aminta, first performed at a garden party in 1573, embodies the aesthetic of this new form. The title character is a shepherd in love with a nymph named Silvia who at first does not return his affections. After much back and forth, and both characters falsely believing that the other had died, the two end up united in love. Imitations of Aminta include Giovanni Battista Guarini's The Faithful Shepherd, which also portrayed shepherds in love in an idyllic country setting.

Enthusiasts of these new, highly literate plays needed a place to stage them, as well as to put on the classical plays they were rediscovering. While plays could be performed in great halls of nobles or in the open air, many people wanted purpose-built theatres like the Romans had enjoyed. In 1580, the architect Andrea Palladio designed and began work on just such a building. Inspired by Roman theatres, Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in the town of Vicenza contains a scenae frons through which the audience can peak to see an elaborate stage set with linear perspective. The wood and plaster scenery designed by Palladio's successor Vincenzo Scamozzi, has been preserved up to this very day.

Thoughts on Hrotsvitha

Hostility between the theatre and the Christian church during the waning days of the Roman Empire led to a break in the European tradition of drama. Greek and Roman plays were largely forgotten and scholars had to rediscover them during the Renaissance. Dramatic traditions are rarely completely forgotten, though, and such was the case in medieval Europe. Monasteries and convents continued to preserve some classical plays, particularly those of Terence. During the 10th century, in the Gandersheim Abbey in what is now Germany, one woman even took it upon herself to write new Latin plays modeled on the works of Terence.

This extraordinary writer was named Hrotsvitha, which means "strong voice" in Old Saxon. A secular canoness rather than a nun, she remained celibate and lived in the Abbey but took no vows of poverty or obedience. Such women were frequently aristocrats, and hence well educated. Hrotsvitha had to answer to her Abbess, but Gandersheim Abbey remained outside the domain of secular authorities, a right for which the canonesses had to fight during Hrotsvitha's time.

Just as Terence had written six plays, Hrotsvitha also composed six dramas, Gallicanus, Dulcitius, Callimachus, Abraham, Paphnutius, and Sapentia. Instead of portraying women as loose courtesans or sexually available young daughters, she presented strong women who rejected attempts by men to exploit them and who clung to their own sense of virtue, even if it meant martyrdom. In Gallicanus, for instance, the strong-minded Constance is betrothed to the soldier Gallicanus in spite of the fact that she has vowed to retain her virginity. When a battle looks as if it will turn against him, Gallicanus vows to convert to Christianity if he wins. After he is victorious, Gallicanus too, takes up a life of chastity, preserving Constance's vow.

Dulcitius, Callimachus, and Sapentia all feature the miraculous preservation of virtuous women whose faith and honor are threatened by pagan men. Both Abraham and Paphnutius, on the other hand, deal with fallen prostitutes who turn their backs on their sinful lives and accept godly lives of chastity. Though the plays feature both women and men, Hrotsvitha's emphasis is usually on the female characters.

It is doubtful that any of Hrotsvitha's plays were performed during her lifetime, though it is possible they were read aloud or even acted out by the canonesses for their own amusement. Her works were not published until 1501, when interest in classical models had begun to grow. Consequently, Hrotsvitha's plays, however fascinating they may be, had little impact on the development of medieval theatre.

Notes on Roman Drama

A picture of Roman drama does not begin to emerge until the 3rd Century BCE. It was likely influenced, as all Roman culture was, by the Etruscan civilization to the city's north. Little is known about Etruscan drama, but it seems the Etruscans performed short plays as part of their religious festivals, a tradition borrowed by the Romans.

To the south of Rome was the city of Atella, which became known for its short comedic plays known as Atellan farces. Though none of these farces survive, they reportedly featured stock characters, such as the quarrelsome peasant, the wily servant, and the doddering old man. They were known for their licentiousness and low humor.

These and other theatrical traditions in Italy were brought to Rome as that city came to dominate the entire peninsula. By the end of the First Punic War in 241 BCE, Rome controlled all of Italy and Sicily. The city included plays in many of its official festivals, including the Ludi Romani in honor of the god Jupiter, the Ludi Florales in honor of the goddess Flora, and the Ludi Plebeii, which celebrated the political liberty of the common people.

Roman actors had to compete against a variety of other entertainments available at festivals, including acrobats, dancers, and even gladiatorial combats. During the Republican period, they performed on temporary wooden structures, and the audience likewise sat on temporary wooden bleachers raised for the occasion. Usually, all of the plays for a festival were performed in a single theatre, but at very elaborate celebrations there could have been as many as three theatres erected for plays.

Dramatists could be political, but at their own peril. One Roman playwright, Gnaeus Naevius, was supposedly imprisoned for plays that attacked the powerful Metelli family. Credited as Rome's first native-born dramatist, Naevius wrote both comedies and tragedies, but only fragments of his work have come down to us today.

Plautus

            By the beginning of the 2nd Century BCE, a new dramatist was attracting attention. He was Titus Maccius Plautus, and not only would he become the most famous playwright of his age, but his works would have a lasting impact on subsequent drama down to the present day.

            Plautus adapted the plays of Menander and other Greek dramatists into Latin, but he seems to have given them his own distinctive stamp. He apparently took to playwriting later in life, but he became wildly popular with more than 100 plays attributed to him.

            Twenty plays by Plautus survive more or less intact, with another, Vidularia, remaining only in fragments. They all follow the model of Menander's New Comedy, or situational comedy. Typically, a young man wants to marry a beautiful woman, who might be falsely enslaved, but he is thwarted by an old fool or pompous hypocrite who blocks his way. A clever servant helps the young man foil the bad guys and get the girl, often winning his own freedom in the process.

            A proto-typical Plautus play is Miles Gloriosus, the story of a braggart soldier who has kidnapped a beautiful young Athenian woman. The soldier fancies himself the envy of every man and desire of every woman he meets. One slave fawns all over him, but another helps the woman to escape with her sweetheart, and then arranges for the soldier (who is actually a coward) to be swindled and beaten. A long tradition of bragging soldiers, from commedia dell'arte's Il Capitano, to Shakespeare's Falstaff and Parolles, to Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, all trace their ancestry back to the title character of this play.

            Another standard element in Plautine comedy is mistaken identity. This shows up memorably in The Menaechmi, which concerns twin brothers, both named Menaechmus. The twins are separated when they are young, and as adults they both end up in the same city unbeknownst to each other. The play became the basis of numerous twin comedies, including Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, which Rodgers and Hart turned into the musical The Boys from Syracuse.

            The Comedy of Errors goes a step further than The Menaechmi by pairing the twins with a pair of twin servants who also share the same name. Shakespeare borrowed this idea, as well as one of the scenes in The Comedy of Errors, from another Plautus play, Amphitryon. In Amphitryon, the god Jupiter takes on the form of the title character and the god Mercury takes the form of Amphitryon's servant Sosia. Generally, New Comedy did not mix gods and heroes with lowly characters and slapstick antics, so in the prologue Mercury invents a new name for the genre: tragicomedy. Later practitioners of tragicomedy frequently alluded to Amphitryon as a classical precedent, though the play seems more like an out-and-out comedy today. The play has been adapted numerous times, most notably in Jean Giraudoux's play Amphitryon 38.

            An even more unconventional Plautus play is The Rope. The play takes its name from a scene where characters tug back and forth on a rope connected to a fishing net that has hauled up a treasure chest. While most Plautine comedies take place on a city street, The Rope is set on a seashore following a storm. Toward the end of the play, the old man Daemones comes to recognize, through the contents of the chest, that the beautiful young woman Palaestra is actually his long-lost daughter who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Unlike many other plays by Plautus, The Rope is moralistic and openly sentimental. Its non-urban setting evokes a simpler world than the schemer-filled streets typical of Plautine comedy.

Other plays by Plautus include Pseudolus, about a crafty slave, The Captives, about prisoners of war, and The Pot of Gold, about a greedy old man. (Moliere later adapted The Pot of Gold as The Miser.) Like the comedies of Menander, the plays of Plautus usually begin with a prologue summarizing the action. Likewise, they dispense with the chorus and are divided into several acts, between which there might have been short songs or dances unconnected with the plot.

Plautus displays a greater variety of language and meter than Menander, however. His comedies are filled with puns and wordplay. Much of the dialogue was likely sung, and actors might have used a fair amount of improvisation to attract audience members and keep their attention. 

The mixture of farce and song makes Plautus similar in many ways to contemporary musical comedy. The most famous musical based on the work of Plautus is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with songs by Stephen Sondheim and a script by two masters of situation comedy, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart. It is the one play most people in the theatre think of when they hear the name "Plautus," but in fact almost all modern comedy, from Broadway farces to television sitcoms, has been influenced by the plays of Plautus.

Later Playwrights

Plautus died around 184 BCE. We have no other Roman plays until another comic playwright, Publius Terentius Afer, or Terence, began writing a few years later. While the plays of Plautus are difficult to date, scholars are fairly confident in dating Terence's six comedies, The Girl from Andros, The Mother-in-Law, The Self-Tormentor, The Eunuch, Phormio, and The Brothers at between 166 BCE and 160 BCE. 

During the Medieval period and the beginning of the Renaissance, these were the most widely known classical plays in Europe, so they had a lasting impact on Western drama. They are similar to the works of Plautus, but more refined and with more complex plots, often derived from multiple Greek sources. Characters in Terence plays tend to be more sympathetic than the broad clowns created by Plautus, but Terence's poetry lacks the tremendous variety of his predecessor.

No Roman tragedies survive from the Republican period, but we do have tragedies from after the establishment of the Roman Empire in 27 BCE. The tragedies we have were not written for public performance, however, but as closet dramas to be read and perhaps recited at social gatherings. The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid, wrote a closet drama called Medea that is unfortunately lost to us. However, we have a number of tragedies by the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

Seneca worked for the mad Emperor Nero who came to the throne in the year 54 of the current era. In the year 65, Nero forced Seneca to commit suicide, but prior to that, Seneca had written a number of plays based on Greek models, including Medea, Oedipus, Phaedra, and Mad Hercules. These plays established the tradition of five acts. While they had choral interludes between the acts, the chorus spoke with a single voice rather than depicting a group of people.

The tragedies of Seneca are filled with moralizing sentiments from his stoic philosophy, but they also contain gruesome scenes of on-stage violence. The tragic heroes in Seneca's plays must face that horrific violence with dignity and resolve, much as the author himself had to face Nero.

Most of Seneca's tragedies suffer from comparison to similar plays by Greek authors, but one, Thyestes, does not have any extant Greek equivalent. Possibly based on a now lost play by Sophocles, Thyestes tells the story of how Atreus killed the children of his brother Thyestes and fed their flesh to him in a bloody feast. It opens with the ghost of Tantalus, grandfather of the two brothers, being brought back from the netherworld to be tormented by a fury. The ghost scene has been much copied in Western drama, including by Thomas Kyd, whose play The Spanish Tragedy was a forerunner to Hamlet. Some plays by Marlowe and other contemporaries of Shakespeare actually quote directly from Thyestes and other Senecan tragedies.

Another Roman tragedy, Octavia, deals with the death of Nero's wife, and Seneca appears in the play as a character. Though it was once attributed to Seneca himself, it seems likely to have been written by a later dramatist.

Horace

Though not a playwright, the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or Horace, exerted a large influence on Western drama through a verse commentary on playwriting known as Ars Poetica, or The Art of Poetry. The treatise was published in 18 BCE as a series of letters to Horace's friend Piso. It deals with many different types of poetry, but gives special attention to drama. Like Aristotle, Horace offers advice to playwrights, but he tends to me more adamant in his suggestions than his Greek predecessor. 

All plays, Horace says, should be in five acts, and they should never have more than three people speak in a scene. He cautions against using gods to resolve difficulties unless it is absolutely necessary, and he speaks of the chorus as being a single actor. The purpose of drama, according to Horace, is to favor the good and to give friendly advice. He has harsh words for Plautus, whom he considers foolish and unpolished.

Roman poets, Horace tells us, surpassed the Greeks, leaving nothing unexplored. Their main fault, he says, is in not revising their works and improving them with numerous rewrites.

Permanent Theatres

Though the plays of Plautus and Terence were originally performed in temporary wooden structures, the Romans later began building permanent theatres. The first one, the Theatre of Pompey, was built in 55 BCE as part of a larger complex that also included temples. Many Roman theatres still remain, at least in ruins. Notable examples include the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, as well as theatres in Ostia and Verona where plays are still sometimes performed.

Roman theatres were based on Greek theatres, but they differ in many respects. First of all, the orchestra is smaller in the Roman theatre, and instead of being exclusively a playing area, it was used to seat important personages, such as senators. Most of the action appears to have taken place on the raised area behind the orchestra known as the pulpitum. The pulpitum was the equivalent of the logeion in Greek theatres, but it could be less than half the height, rising only about five feet above the level of the orchestra. This way, audience members seated in the orchestra could still view the actors.

We can glean a great deal about the first Roman theatres from the writings of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who in the first century BCE wrote a guidebook for building called De Architectura, or On Architecture. The fifth book of De Architectura goes into detail about how to build a theatre, paying special attention to how to perfect its acoustics. Vitruvius goes to great lengths to describe how sound travels and how it can be aided by the use of brass vases placed around the periphery of the theatre. Today, we simply do not know how these vases worked, or whether they even worked at all. However, their existence seems to indicate the importance with which the Romans treated acoustics.

For Vitruvius, the structure of the theatre also had cosmic implications. In laying out the design of the theatre, he called for architects to inscribe four equilateral triangles in the same way astrologers mapped out the signs of the zodiac. The theatre was supposed to be in harmony not only with sound, but with the entire universe.

De Architectura gives valuable insights into scenic design as well. Vitruvius suggests that the middle door in the scaenae frons behind the pulpitum be decorated as a door to a royal palace, with doors to the right and left decorated as the doors for guests. Near those would be other spaces for decorations known as periaktoi. Vitruvius describes these as turning triangular machines with a different decoration on each side. The periaktoi could be turned to indicate a change in scene or the appearance of a god.

Vitruvius also indicated that there were different decorations for tragedies, comedies and satyr plays. Tragic scenes, he says, should be ornamented with columns, pediments, and statues. Comic scenes represented private buildings and had windows similar to ordinary dwellings. For satyr plays, the scene was ornamented with trees, caves, hills, and other imitations of nature.

We know from paintings that survived in tombs or were buried in the volcanic ash at Pompeii that the Romans were quite capable of skilled artistic renderings. However, it is far from certain that the periaktoi bore any resemblance to modern realistic stage designs. Designs on the periaktoi might have been largely conventional, much as masks worn by actors gave an impression of a character rather than trying to fool the eye. Still, Renaissance scene designers often interpreted Vitruvius as calling for illusionary stage effects, something the Romans likely never had.

Roman Actors

            When Shakespeare has Hamlet quip, "When Roscius was an actor in Rome," few audience members may realize that a real actor, Quintus Roscius Gallus, once entertained thousands during the first century BCE. Born a slave, Roscius became famous for his comedic performances and was freed by the Roman dictator Sulla. The famous orator Cicero took lessons from Roscius, and in turn later defended him in a lawsuit.

            While Roscius was known for comedy, his contemporary Clodius Aesopus was reputed to be the best tragic actor of the day. Both men managed to amass fortunes and to gain respectability on the stage. Later Roman actors would not be so lucky. In fact, the Emperor Tiberius later forbade actors from associating with senators and upper class Romans.

            Gradually, the literary theatre declined in favor of mime, in which actors wore no masks, engaged in acrobatic feats, and improvised much of their dialogue. Women performed in mime along with men, and the scenes they depicted frequently involved adultery and other explicitly sexual situations. The most famous mimes could win the friendship of emperors, but overall they enjoyed a low reputation. The declining status of performers mirrored a declining reputation for theatre in general.

            The sexual nature of mime, together with the pagan origins of Greek and Roman drama, led the early Christian church to oppose the theatre. The fact that mimes took to making fun of the church and its sacraments surely did not help matters. In the year 313 of the current era, the Emperor Constantine, himself a convert to Christianity, issued the Edict of Milan, which ended state persecution of Christians. When Christianity became the official religion of the empire in 380, the theatre's days were numbered. The church's Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 officially excommunicated actors, supposedly cutting them off from any chance of salvation unless they recanted and gave up their profession.

            Historians often give the year 476 as the date for the official end of the Roman Empire, but the empire did not simply disappear overnight, and neither did the theatre. In the West, a succession of emperors, many of them Germanic invaders themselves, tried to hold together pieces of the empire, though they never again possessed the far-reaching authority of their predecessors. In the East, emperors were more successful, ultimately creating the new Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople.

            The sixth century saw attempts to revive drama. In Rome, the Ostrogoth King Theodoric ordered the restoration of the Theatre of Pompey. Drama, at least in the form of mime, flourished in the Byzantine Empire, and Emperor Justinian I famously married a former mime performer, Theodora. She came to be known as the power behind the throne in spite of her humble origins.

            Still, the days of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca were long gone. As a new civilization emerged out of the ashes of the Roman Empire, it would create its own dramatic traditions, and the theatre of ancient Rome would have to be rediscovered centuries later.