Convention and Comedy in Plautus’ Menaechmi

 

Actors wearing comic masks from a frieze in Herculaneum

     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 Molière.  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.