The art of deceit: Pseudolus and the nature of reading

Classical Quarterly

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 152-174

  Sharrock, A R ^a  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60950594848     PISSN: 00098388     EISSN: 14716844     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/cq/46.1.152     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. That is the briefest possible introduction to my form of reader-response criticism. Standard introductory works on the subject include Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds. ), The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, 1980);
2. J. P. Tompkins (ed. ), Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, 1980);
3. E. Freund, The Return of the Reader (London, 1987).
4. An interesting way of looking at reader-response criticism is to watch the debate between Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish. It is, I hope, sufficient for the needs of this paper that such statements apply to texts which are generally accepted as being 'fiction'. The extent to which it would apply to other forms of reading (e. g. of critical discourse) would be a question of considerable interest, but I do not propose to address it here. The following works will from now on be cited by name alone: W. G. Arnott, 'Calidorus' Surprise: A Scene of Plautus' Pseudolus with an Appendix on Ballio's Birthday', WS 95 (1982), 131-48;
5. G. E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, NJ, 1952);
6. E. Lefèvre, 'Plautus-Studien I, Der Doppelte Geldkreislauf im Pseudolus', Hermes 105 (1977), 441-54;
7. N. Slater, in Plautus in Performance (Princeton, NJ, 1985);
8. M. M. Willcock, Plautus: Pseudolus (Bristol, 1987);
9. D. Wiles, in The Masks of Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance (Cambridge, 1991);
10. G. Williams, 'Some Problems in the Construction of Plautus' Pseudolus', Hermes 84 (1956), 424-55;
11. O. Zwierlein, Zur Kritik und Exegese des Plautus, particularly Vol. III: Pseudolus (Mainz and Stuttgart, 1991).
12. See E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven & London, 1979), passim, but particularly 43, 82.
13. It is not, I concede, often phrased like that. It is perhaps unfair to attack an easy target, but the views of people like G. Norwood (Plautus and Terence [London, 1932]) remain influential, at least subliminally. Norwood allows Plautus the credit neither of being an effective translator at the level of entire plays, nor of being an original playwright (99).
14. See also D. Bain, 'Plautus uortit barbare;
15. Plautus, Bacchides 526-61
16. and Menander, Dis exapaton 102-12', in D. West and A. J. Woodman (eds. ), Creative Imitation in Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1979), 33.
17. See E. Lefèvre, E. Stārk and G. Vogt-Spira, Plautus Barbarus: Sechs Kapitel zur Originalität des Plautus (Tübingen, 1991). The implication that the Greek plays provide only a veneer of respectability over what is essentially a form of Atellan farce perhaps characterizes the more recent views of Lefèvre. In his article on the Pseudolus, he is still very interested in the Greek original, arguing that the Plautine version is drastically different from the Greek in dramaturgy and characterization (particularly pp. 453-4), and that this is done not through Plautine inadequacy but through a desire to concentrate on the triumph of Pseudolus. This view is I think largely accepted by what might be termed the 'pro-Plautus' faction, with which I would align myself. Discussion then remains as to how the play achieves this. There is no need in this regard to take up rigid positions, for it is the power of the comic text that it can achieve its goals in different ways for different people.
18. On this matter see also Wiles, 140-4,
19. and briefly A. S. Gratwick, Plautus: Menaechmi (Cambridge, 1993), 16.
20. Stärk has argued, in Die Menaechmi des Plautus und kein griechisches Original (Tübingen, 1989), that there is in fact no Greek original for the Menaechmi.
21. For a similar argument for the Epidicus see S. M. Goldberg, 'Plautus' Epidicus and the Case of the Missing Original', TAPhA 108 (1978), 81-91.
22. In this regard, the essay of Bain, op. cit. (n. 3), is important, both in itself and in the fact of its prominent position in a volume which expressly aims to investigate the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and which prefigures much later work. See now particularly W. S. Anderson, Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy (Toronto, 1993).
23. See also the review by Gratwick of Zwierlein's first volume (on Poenulus and Curculio) in CR 43 (1993), 36-40, which is very helpful not least in pointing out that a difficulty in responding to the thesis is that Zwierlein differentiates little in his rejection of lines which many would regard as suspect and those which most would not even consider doubting.
24. Important work has been done on Plautine drama as theatrical performance, for example by Slater, and by Wiles, 129-46.
25. See also G. B. Walsh, The Varieties of Enchantment (Chapel Hill & London, 1984).
26. The notion of the 'play within the play' has a long history in the traditions of drama. For a treatment relating to New and Roman Comedy, see J. Blānsdorf, 'Die Komödienintrige als Spiel im Spiel', A&A 28 (1982), 131-54.
27. See E. Kern, The Absolute Comic (New York, 1980), 117-208.
28. Among the more famous modern theoreticians of the psychology of humour are S. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, translation of the original 1905 edition by J. Strachey (London, 1960).
29. H. Bergson, Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London, 1911).
30. There is an excellent survey of ancient and modern theories of comedy, in which the superiority theory looms largest (with 'contrast' or 'cheating of expectation' coming next) in Duckworth, particularly 305-21.
31. There is an extensive treatment of this and other ancient theories of comedy in K. Freudenburg, The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 52-108.
32. J. Wright, 'The Transformations of Pseudolus', TAPhA 105 (1975), 403-16,
33. J. C. B. Lowe, 'The Cook Scene in Plautus' Pseudolus', CQ 35 (1985), 411-16,
34. J. P. Hallett, 'Plautine Ingredients in the Performance of the Pseudolus', CW 87 (1993), 21-6,
35. E. Gowers, The Loaded Table (Oxford, 1993), 93-108.
36. The musical, originally a stage play by Harold S. Prince, was produced in 1966 by Melvin Frank. Up Pompeii was a television series from the same era.
37. J. N. Hough, The Composition of the Pseudolus of Plautus (Lancaster, PA, 1931), Williams, 424-55.
38. Lowe opens his article on the Asinaria with an excellent history of the debate on originality and contaminatio, which I shall not repeat here. See J. C. B. Lowe, 'Aspects of Plautus' Originality in the Asinaria', CQ 42 (1992), 152-75.
39. In addition to the Zwierlein and Lefèvre schools referred to above (nn. 1 and 4), the range of modern critical approaches includes that of Segal (E. Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, MA, 1968)), who makes Plautus' originality lie in the subversive pleasure created for a Roman audience by a representation of 'Greeking it up', and that of the modern metatheatrists, such as Wiles and Slater, whose concerns could perhaps be characterized as based on an interest in the traditions of drama as it affects the playwright in hand, rather than on the exact relationship between Plautine and New Comic texts.
40. The theme of Ballio's birthday could be held to be a' different strand' in the plot, but even that works towards the glorification of Pseudolus, who gets the party at the end. See Lefèvre, and Arnott. I would suggest that many, if not most, Plautine plays contain more complex plots in the sense of more action than does the Pseudolus, including for example Aul. , Mil. , Men. , Bacch. , Most. But perhaps complexity is in the eye of the beholder. Dieterle sees three intrigues in the play (those of Simo, Harpax/his master, and Ballio), but one could see them as all part of the same thing: it is Pseudolus' tongue-twisting self-display (704-6) which creates the sense of triplication. See A. Dieterle, Die Strukturelemente der Intrige in der griechish- rōmischen Komödie (Amsterdam, 1980), 17-18.
41. Willcock, 96, wonders whether there might once have been an expository prologue in place of or in addition to the two lines we have. K. Abel, Die Plautusprologe (Frankfurt, 1955), 15-17, defends the two lines as Plautine.
42. Twenty minae is a standard price for a girl in comedy. See F. Ritschl, Opuscula Philologica II (Leipzig, 1868), 308-9.
43. See also T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy (Manchester, 1953), 190.
44. See Williams, 435.
45. See also Slater, 130. Lefèvre, 450-1, considers that the deceit of Simo (which he claims is not really a deceit at all) would probably not have been needed in the original, but is a Plautine invention to enhance Pseudolus. He usefully points out the balance between 508-11 and 1313-18, the forging and conclusion of the bet respectively.
46. The line is excised by Zwierlein, 21-4.
47. Williams, 432-3;
48. otherwise Slater, 134-5.
49. This suggestion was made by W. Theiler, 'Zum Gefüge einiger plautinischer Komödien', Hermes 73 (1938), 269-96, at 275.
50. This could all be made explicit by having Callipho exit to sit in the audience, as is suggested by W. Görier, 'Plautinisches im Pseudolus', WJA 9 (1983), 89-105, at 98 n. 29.
51. In this regard, he conforms closely and programmatically to the (non-conformist) model of the hero of Old Comedy. Lack of communication serves as an example of the difference-in-sameness of comedy and tragedy: in tragedy, characters fail to communicate either through wilful manipulation of language to another's (and often their own) tragedy, as for example Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, or, more commonly, through accident and personal blindness, as for example Aeschylus' suppliants in their play, or Sophocles' Deianira in Trach.- and these failures result in tragedy. See for example J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York, 1988), ch. 2, 'Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy'.
52. Duckworth, 105-7;
53. Wiles, 53: 'Everything that happens on the Greek stage is manifestly laid out for an audience's benefit. Characters tell the audience exactly what they are thinking and planning. Motivations are complex rather than concealed or withheld. ' I have not been able to consult J. Blundell, Menander and the Monologue (Göttingen, 1980);
54. B. Denzler, Der Monolog bei Terenz (Zurich, 1968).
55. On the possibility of a need for a break here, see R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge, 1985), 38. He rightly comments that the metatheatricality of the play at this point in particular makes the contrived break and the reference to the flute-player 'stylistically integrated and less surprising than it would be in many other contexts'. Paradoxically, Pseudolus creates the dramatic illusion by breaking it.
56. This example looks the most promising for anyone searching for clever slaves in Menander, since the master is threatening punishment for the slave's trickery, and the slave clearly talks about deceiving his master in a way that looks generically comic. But too little remains to build much on it. A determined case for the presence of something quite like the Plautine clever slave in Greek comedy has been made by P. W. Harsh, 'The Intriguing Slave in Greek Comedy', TAPhA 86 (1955), 135-42, but I remain unconvinced that his examples show more than a seed out of which the Plautine tree could be said to have grown.
57. Duckworth, 28: '[t]he slave [in Menander] takes part in the action but is not the intriguing slave of Plautine comedy. ' He rightly says that we do not know either way how other New Comic playwrights used the slave.
58. A bilingual joke, depending on an audience who knew a bit of Greek and would appreciate it. I think some of them were probably up to it . . . Play across syllable length is not unknown in antiquity, although I admit this requires a slightly bigger change than between long and short versions of the same vowel. See F. Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca and London, 1985), 15.
59. Recognition of the wordplay with dolus goes back at least to K. Schmidt, 'Griechische Personennamen bei Plautus', Hermes 37 (1902), 353-90, at 381.
60. A. Barton, The Names of Comedy (Oxford, 1990), 155, discussing the importance of names in identity, describes Pseudolus as a 'transparently speaking name' for a 'clever slave who assume[s] a false identity to trick an old master'. She does not, however, expressly say what she thinks the name says. Actually Pseudolus only performs the role she mentions in so far as Simia may be seen as an extension of him, but I am here interested in the power of the name, rather than Barton's particular argument.
61. See E. Fantham, Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery (Toronto, 1972).
62. and A. S. Gratwick, 'Drama', in E. J. Kenney (ed. ), The Cambridge History of Classical Literature II: Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1982), 77-137, at 117.