Week 4: Terence’s Eunuch. Aggression, incongruity, metatheatre Roman Laughter Week 4: Terence’s Eunuch. Aggression, incongruity, metatheatre

All Greek to me, or not… “‘Greek’ is not just ‘Greek’ for the Romans of our – or any – period.. The status and prestige of the Greek shimmering behind the translated surface of tragedy or Saturnian epic is very different from the flavour of the Greek employed by the code-switching characters of Plautus.” Feeney, Beyond Greek, p84. “The Greek in Plautine comedy is not the Greek of the originals he adapted but rather the Greek spoken in Rome and the rest of Italy, and its connotations are not prestige and education but servile status and frivolity.” De Melo 2011, ‘The language of Roman comedy’ in Clackson ed. A Companion to the Latin Language, 337.

One of the functions of Roman comedy was to ‘make the Greeks knowable’ and to present a ‘stereotype of Greekness that would fix the colonial subject as a category within Rome.’ McElduff, Roman theories of translation 2013,78

‘Let us scrutinise more closely the image of the spring which is bent, released and bent again. Let us disentangle its central element, and we shall hit upon one of the usual processes of classical comedy – repetition. Why is it that there is something comic in the repetition of a word on the stage? No theory of the ludicrous seems to offer a satisfactory answer to this very simple question.’(p41)

N.Slater, Plautus in Performance 1985 ‘In transforming Greek New Comedy by the process he called vortere, …Plautus knew he had not merely to translate but to re-theatricalize an alien drama for this Roman audience. Plautus was unusually aware of theatre as theatre. He knew its artifices and commented on them for his own and his audience’s amusement.’ (p6)

Suetonius, The Life of Terence ‘He wrote six comedies, and when he offered the first of these, the "Andria," to the aediles, they bade him first read it to Caecilius. Having come to the poet's house when he was dining, and being meanly clad, Terence is said to have read the beginning of his play sitting on a bench near the great man's couch. But after a few lines he was invited to take his place at table, and after dining with Caecilius, he ran through the rest to his host's great admiration. Moreover, this play and the five others were equally pleasing to the people, although Vulcatius in enumerating them all, writes thus: "The sixth play, the 'Hecyra,' will not be included." The "Eunuch" was even acted twice in the same day and earned more money than any previous comedy of any writer, namely eight thousand sesterces; and for this reason the sum is included in the title-page. Indeed Varro rates the beginning of the "Adelphoe" above that of Menander. ‘

Role-playing, role-swapping, metatheatre Chaerea plays the eunuch (Parmeno’s experimental comic plot - v.378: What are you on about? I was just joking, iocabar) Rape as ad-hoc improvisation, a ludus Chaerea the rapist ‘plays’ and ‘imitates’ Jupiter, who transformed himself (convortisse, from convertere) into a shower of gold to rape Danae (portrayed in another mini-plot within the play: a painting). Cf. Germany (2016) ‘mimetic contagion’

Thais the courtesan acts as internal playwright, yet she does not act according to stereotype (or she follows a different ‘script’). Thais writes parts for both her lovers, Phaedria and Thraso. The former will play ‘exclusus amator’, while the later will play the favoured leading man: E.g.150-1 (Thais to Phaedria): ‘Please now, help me in this matter, smooth the path for me. Let him (i.e. Thraso) play the fist part (priores partis) with me for the next few days.’ New comic mask for a young hetaira character, Sicily 3rd- 1st c. BC

Chaerea, the adulescens: a rival director? Thinking up alternative plots, e.g. at 386-7 (‘Or do you think the thing to do is to pull off some scheme at my father’s expense? I’d be blamed for that alright if I was found out, but everyone would think this deed well done.’) Chaerea’s assertion here is transparently misguided; he also shows himself to be ignorant of the fact that Thais is working in his own long-term best interests, in seeking to establish Pamphila’s free-born status. He is exposed from the start as a deceitful ‘plagiarist’ (stealing Parmeno’s idea for a comic plot) and an actor who misunderstands and misinterprets the plot(s) he is acting out.

More intricate dramatic patterns: see handout on vv.397-434, 493-499 Cornell College, Iowa: recent production of Terence’s Eunuch (the Rhodian rival joke scene, starring comedy duo Gnatho and Thraso)