The Menaechmi is
not only Plautus’ most popular play, it is as well solidly in the mainline of
European comedy, adapted as it is from Greek New Comedy and influencing in turn
Shakespeare and Moliรจre. Across the
centuries dramatists from various countries have employed some of the same
literary devices to generate humor, including conventions that provide
distancing by foregrounding the artificiality of the aesthetic object.
Fundamentally, of
course, the very word art asserts that anything so labeled is artificial. The
point about every poem, painting, or composition is that it is unnatural, not
simply a record of direct experience. No
one moves like a ballet dancer or speaks in verse without the conscious
intention of making something beautiful, something which I presume even Oscar
Wilde did not do every moment of the day.
Yet works have varying degrees of verisimilitude. Though all art depends
on illusion and the “willing suspension of disbelief,” Coleridge’s “poetic
faith," still some paintings and some
narratives give the impression that they represent reality more or less directly while others make no attempt to
mirror everyday life.
Comedy in
particular depends on limiting emotional engagement. Since we cannot simultaneously mock and
empathize with a character, comic drama tends toward the explicitly contrived. Far more people in silent films slip on banana
peels or push a pie in the face of an antagonist than ever do such things in
reality. The acts are silent film
conventions, recognizable to viewers as signals to laugh. The viewer knows that nobody gets hurt; it is
all a game. In the cartoon genre Wile E.
Coyote may be smashed flat as a pancake, but he will instantly rise to fight
the next round.
In the Menaechmi
and other comedies of Plautus detachment is built in part through the use
of recognizable conventions, including highly unlikely coincidences that would
be jarring in a realistic drama. The
circumstance of twins, separated since childhood but eventually reunited is
considerably more common in folktale and legend than in reality. While the classic denouement for comedy is marriage,
in the Menaechmi the brothers’
finding each other is an equally joyful expression of love and
affirmation. Surely watching such a
spectacle offers viewers an imaginative experience of victory just as tragedy
rehearses the spectator’s own defeat and dissolution. Their memory of their own defeats and
suffering, however, as well as the implausibility of the play’s plot reminds
them that the play is a fantasy, generating thereby a dialectic suggesting the
interdependence of joy and sorrow, yet nonetheless offering a few laughs at the
human predicament along the way.
Apart from that
principal story arc, the plot of Plautus’ comedy depends throughout on the most
unbelievable coincidence. The brothers
were apparently not only identical twins; they must in addition have dressed exactly
alike to be taken for each other. The
Syracusan just happens to wander by Erotion’s house and Peniculus later happens
to encounter him after the dinner. His
decision to feign insanity, while necessary for the plot, is unlikely. Here and in romances (which are similarly
unrealistic) there can only be a happy ending. In both genres the reader’s sympathetic
satisfaction at the story’s conclusion is mitigated by the artificiality of the
narrative which suggests that such desirable resolutions are more the stuff of
fables than of most human experience. Thus one relishes the pleasure of victory
over circumstance in imagination while conceding that events rarely fall out so
neatly in reality.
Apart from the conventional
narrative pattern, Plautus in this play and in all his work makes use of stock
characters and formulae. The doddering
father-in-law, for instance, is more ridiculous than pathetic, a figure at whom
the audience laughs rather than feeling sympathy. Messenio the slave is, rather
than an example of injustice, a calculating agent, working often in his own
interest. The courtesan Erotium is portrayed more as a manipulator than as a
victim. The doctor is perhaps as much quack as healer.
These stereotyped
characters, like Pantalone, the dottore, and Arlecchino in commedia
dell’arte, create emotional distancing while generating comedy by
portrayals of these characters as types who act foolishly by nature and lack the audience’s awareness of critical circumstances, in the Menaechmi, that the men are twins. Though the figures on stage may be
unrealistic, they nonetheless arise from common experience. The difficult wife
reflects gender rivalry, the tricky parasite and slave suggest the uneasiness
of social hierarchy, the dubious doctor anxiety about health, and the
calculating courtesan unease about sex for money. It is a measure of the dehumanization that
supports the humor that at the end, when Messenio says the auction of the
belongings of the Epidamnian brother may include his wife, it is nothing but a
laugh line.
With the elements
in place of an assured positive outcome and a cast of characters who are more
reductive types than fully rounded personalities, Plautus is enabled to use the
other classic sources of comedy to make his audience laugh. With this foundation, jokes then emerge
through the constant wordplay (which complicates the already impossible task
of the translator), the emphasis on appetitive desire, and the revelation of
human weakness, but the viewer’s sense of the scene’s unreality is a
precondition.
