It had good reviews and I enjoyed it myself. Moving on: in 2017, at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company put on Vice Versa, by playwright Phil Porter – a farce based upon Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus. What a treat he was to research! How incredibly Plautus’s aged, ageless writings based on man’s gift for silliness, for pomposity and hypocrisy, have survived how well it all stood up, the comedy that would serve as fodder not only for the theater, but for future stand-up comedians as well. As he recalls the creative work process, Gelbart states: The fact of Forum’s being based on the plays of Plautus is acknowledged by its authors. Meanwhile, in the early 1960s, Stephen Sondheim, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, wrote the well received and often performed musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In his Preface to his Plautus – Four Comedies (OUP, 1996), Professor Erich Segal recounts that in 1962 he saw Casina (acted in Italian) “convulse” an audience in Rome and he goes on to report that his own translation of The Braggart Soldier “actually made people laugh” when played at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass) in 1963.
However, the outstanding feature of the plays of Plautus is the role of the clever slave – the man ( always a man) who manipulates other characters, devises plots, and generally saves the day (for a happy ending). Slaves are afraid of being beaten by their masters. Women, indeed, play smaller and somewhat passive parts. The societal values reflected exhibit what to us are unpalatable features: patriarchy, misogyny and slavery. As a general point, farcical elements are predominant, but in some of them young couples succeed in getting married as well (the happy ending).īarriers to a present-day appreciation of Plautus are, I would argue, cultural: he wrote in Latin, so he needs to be translated for virtually every reader or audience member and the context of the plays is that of Ancient Rome, with borrowings from the society of Ancient Athens. The Comedy of Errors itself has very serious moments.īut back to the works of Plautus himself. This observation can be utilised as a tool to be applied to comedies down the ages. (See for example, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.)Īs regards the use of jokes and slapstick, is there a difference between comedy and farce? Or is there a continuum? Professor Stanley Wells offes a useful definition in his Introduction to the Penguin Comedy of Errors (1972):Ĭharacteristics of farce….include absurdities of plot, stylization of action, subordination of character to plot, and dissociation of response in which violence evokes laughter rather than pity. The happy endings of comedic stories, on the other hand, end with marriages, and, perhaps, restoration of separated members of a family to each other.
And his Menaechmi gave Shakespeare the basis for his Comedy of Errors.)īut how do we define “comedy”? There are two types (which may overlap) – stories with a happy ending, and stories that have jokes and horseplay in the course of the action. (Plautus is mentioned by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He is regarded by literary critics as having a lasting influence on comedic writing, up to the present day. Who was Titus Maccius Plautus? He was a playwright active in Republican Rome circa 200 BCE.
PLAUTUS MENAECHMI TRANSLATION TRIAL
At the Washington Post, read To Live and Defy in LA author Felicia Viator on how judicial edicts on language in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse-barring use of the term “victims” for the men killed but allowing “looters,” “rioters,”, and “arsonists”-parallel decisions in a 1942 case in Los Angeles that became a flashpoint for the original “Zoot Suit Riots.I have been asked this question by a friend, when I told him and other friends about my recent study of eight plays by the above-named.The Irish Times spoke with Thane Gustafson, author of Klimat, about the “climate change reckoning” facing Russia-as Vladimir Putin avoids attending the COP26 international climate change conference in Glasgow.At the Washington Post, Global Health Security author Lawrence Gostin analyzed the legality of President Biden’s federal mandate requiring COVID-19 vaccination or testing in private businesses.On C-SPAN’s Q&A, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment coauthors Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick argued that the United States must get its “Constitutional house in order”-and stop chronically misinterpreting the amendment.
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