• Nem Talált Eredményt

Old Cantankerous is an early play and perhaps not Menander’s best one, though it received first prize at the Lenaia Festival in 316. The story is, in fact, rather simple, it is often chaotic (perhaps because of some corrupted parts of the text) and very didactic, openly preaching the value of hard work, of innocent love, of “moderate competence” and of a community, and the bad consequences of misanthropy and selfishness. There are too many servants and their tricks and fooling about is, in many cases, little connected with the main plot.

The scene is “a village in Attica, about fourteen miles from Athens” and Pan gives a detailed and lively introduction to the story, explaining who is who and what happened before the play starts; of course it is him who has put “fetters” on Sostratos, the young hero, i. e. Pan made him fall in love. The entrance to the shrine of Pan and the Nymphs is the third door on the stage (besides the respective doors to the house of Knemon (the title-hero) and Gorgias (his step-son)), yet the play takes place in the “presence” of Apollo, too: his statue stands by Knemon’s entrance.

In Act I Sostratos, a young and wealthy man of Athens, tells his best friend, Chaireas (a very popular name in New Comedy) that he has fallen in love at first sight with Knemon’s, a farmer’s daughter, whom he would like to marry. The sudden appearance of Pyrrhias, Sostratos’ servant disturbs the scene – he is not only a victim of a comic chase and he does not only complain about having been beaten (the typical fate of servants) by Knemon but he re-enacts his conversation with the grumpy old man (to whom he went upon Sostratos’

command, to plead for the girl), which gives a chance for personification and parody, to be followed by Knemon’s real appearance, being worse than described. When he leaves, his daughter appears (simply called: “Girl”) and she complains that their servant has dropped their bucket into the well (nicely preparing the scene when Knemon himself will fall into it), yet they need water, and of course gallant Sostratos fetches some for her from the shrine of the Nymphs (holy water as a sign of purity). This scene is overseen by Daos, Gorgias’ servant.

Gorgias is Knemon’s step-son and lives with his mother next door; this elderly woman used to be Knemon’s wife, who bore for the bad-tempered man the Girl (so the Girl and Gorgias are half-siblings because Gorgias – as we learnt from Pan – is from a former marriage of Myrrhine, Knemon’s estranged wife). Act II starts with Gorgias telling Daos how upset he is because of the visit of Sostratos, who suddenly re-appears and first Gorgias thinks he is a simple seducer (Gorgias’ speech is full of pieces of general wisdom, e.g. “The successful man continues to prosper and flourish only as long as he can accept his good fortune without harming others”) yet he is easily won over to Sostratos’ side and advises him to take a mattock and start digging as a labourer – they hope that then Knemon might talk to Sostratos.

The act finishes with a conversation between Gretas, Sostratos’ mother’s servant and Sikon, the cook: they were sent to Pan’s shrine because Sostratos’ mother saw a dream that her son was digging in the fields because he has fallen in love, and she wants to show a sacrifice lest this would come true (it is already true). The servants, with pots and pans and dragging a sheep for the sacrifice are making fun of each other. In Act Three Sostratos’ mother is urging the servants to make haste with the sacrifice and Knemon is upset because of the bustle around the shrine and his house. Then first Getas and then Sikon wants to borrow a pot from Knemon but Sikon is beaten up by the misanthrope. Sostratos arrives complaining that his painful digging was in vain: he did not meet Knemon. Simiche, Knemon’s servant-maid appears and complains that she could not lift the bucket out of the well but he has lost a mattock, too, with which he tried to pull out the bucket. Knemon decides to go into the well himself and Sostratos invites Gorgias for lunch (after the sacrifice). In Act Four we learn from Sostratos’ description how Knemon was rescued from the well, into which he eventually fell.

It was Gorgias who pulled him out, the misanthrope is now on a couch with wheels and the nearness of death has prompted him to amend his ways: he makes Gorgias his inheritor and consents to her daughter’s marriage, preaching about the “moderate competence” everyone should strive at as an absolute value. At the end of this act, Kallapides, Sostratos’ father appears as well. In Act Five Sostratos persuades his father to allow not only his marriage with Knemon’s daughter (the Girl) but Gorgias’ marriage with Sostratos’ sister. Kallapides argues a bit but quickly gives in; Gorgias does not want to accept a dowry but finally he does. They all agree that hard work is the best thing on earth (they do not ask Sostratos’ sister about the marriage – we do not even see her and the Girl does not say a word, either). Everyone goes into the shrine to celebrate – it seems that Knemon and his estranged wife have made up in the meantime –, yet Knemon prefers to stay at home alone. Getas and Sikon take the helpless old misanthrope out of his house and first they tease him a bit by asking for pots, pans and other things for the wedding, then they convince him to join the others in the shrine because it is better to be with the others than alone. This is the end, the last words are spoken by Getas, the young lovers do not reappear and such characters as Pyrrhias and Chaireas are simply

“forgotten”.

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Chapter 4

Roman Drama. Plautus, Terence, Seneca

I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words – Un dessein si funeste, S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.

They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée’.

(Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter)

4. 1. The Beginnings of the Roman theatre: Roman comedy

In the form of Fescennine verses, mostly associated with weddings and harvest festivals, there were rudiments of Roman comedy at a very early date; these were full of jesting and used obscene language; further, we have the record of Etruscan dancers coming to Rome in 364 B. C., and there was a more elaborate medley of dance, song and dialogue, too, which Livy called satura. Yet the most important early comic dramatic forms were the Fabula Atellana and the mime.

The Fabula Atellana (which was named after Atella in Campania) is the leading genre in Rome until comedies based on Greek originals are introduced in 240 B. C. (see below). It is a short farce played in masks, dealing with life in the country or in a small town, and has four stock-characters: Bucco, the glutton or braggart; Pappus, the gullible old man; Maccus, the stupid clown, and Dossennus, the cunning trickster. It became a canonised literary form in the 1st c. B. C., chiefly written by Pomponius and Novius.

The mime in Roman (and Greek) times is a short, improvised dramatic – often indecent – farce, restricted to one scene and often used as interludes in the performance of regular plays. Its special feature is that women were also allowed to play in them and that they were performed without masks. The mime reached Rome around 211 B. C. and became an important literary form in the late Republic. The chief authors were Decimus Laberius (c.

115-43 B. C. ) and Publius Syrus.

In the 3rd c. B. C. the Romans started to have regular contact with the Greeks of Southern Italy and Sicily, especially during the First Punic War (264-241 B. C.). Livius Andronicus of Tarentum, a former Greek slave translated the Odyssey into Latin (he set up a school and he taught his translation there), and established comedy and tragedy on the Roman stage at the ludi Romani (“Roman games”) in 240 B. C. The comedies at that time were all called fabula palliata, i. e. “comedy in Greek dress” because they were invariably based on the plots and characters of Greek New Comedy and dealt with Greek characters in their native dresses and settings.

Andronicus was followed by the two greatest comedy-writers of Roman literature:

Plautus and Terence (see below); twenty comedies (and a fragment) are ascribed to the former, and six to the latter. Plays in Rome were performed at the ludi Romani in September, the ludi plebeii in October, both in honour of Jupiter, the ludi Apollinares in July (first in 212 B. C., in honour of Apollo), and the ludi Megalenses in April, (from 204 B. C.), dedicated to the Great Mother (Magna Mater) as well as to Flora and Ceres. At these annual festivals not only comedies, but tragedies, music and dancing (called ludi scaenici, ‘theatrical shows’) were performed as well. The ludi scaenici were organised by the Roman magistrates who wished to impress their peers, clients and the citizens and to achieve some political goals Back to the Contents

(especially with the praetexta). The authors were first regarded as paid employees of the magistrate and the situation only started to improve in the 1st century B. C.

The model for writing plays came from Greece: for comedies it was New Greek comedy, especially Menander, for tragedies both themes and plots were from earlier Greek tragedies, and the theatrical conventions were not much different, either: first there were temporary stages made of wood, and in the earliest period of Roman theatres spectators were standing or they brought their own stools. For a long time, theatrical productions in the city of Rome were opposed by the authorities as harmful to public morals; the first permanent (and magnificent) stone theatre was ordered to be built by Pompey and was erected in the Campus Martius as late as in 55 B. C., but the wealthier Greek cities of Southern Italy and Sicily had boasted with stone theatres form the 5th century (e.g. the theatre of Syracuse was built around 460 B. C.), and in the Latin world outside of Rome – e.g. in Pompeii in 200 B. C. – there had been some permanent stone-built theatres, too. In permanent theatres wooden stands were provided to seat the audience; the stage was long and narrow (c. 55 meters long), in most cases representing an Athenian city-street, making the numerous soliloquies, asides and eavesdropping scenes possible. The background, made of wood, too, consisted of doors providing an entrance to one, two or three houses. The stage exit to the left of the audience led to “the harbour” and to “the country”, to the right to “the centre of the city” and “the forum”.

The Theatre of Pompey was indeed magnificent; a marble and concrete structure: there was a stage-building with richly decorated stage curtains, storing statues, scene-paintings, masks and garlands, a semi-circular orchestra (later providing seats for the members of the Senate, as there were no choruses after a while), a tiered concave auditorium, all united into a closed, holistic space. This provided the model and the standard for lots of later theatres.

The actors – as far as we can conjecture – always wore masks signifying character-types, female roles were played by men and plays were performed by companies of five to six actors, with a doubling of the minor roles. The actors played without interruption, the five-act divisions in comedy are usually later additions but Horace in the Ars Poetica (189-92) draws attention to the five-act-rule, the three-actor-rule and the deus ex machina with respect to tragedy. The lines were sometimes spoken in six-foot iambic meter without music, sometimes recited or sung to flute accompaniment, and the lyric sections in early Roman tragedy were much longer than in, for example, Seneca’s or in Sophocles’s tragedies.

Perhaps the most important stock-character of Roman comedy is the servus, an intriguing slave. Other prototypical figures include the adulescens, the young lover [cf.

Orlando in As You Like It or Romeo]; the scenex, an unsympathetic or too lenient father [cf.

Egeus, Hermia’s father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, unsympathetic towards the lovers] or a ridiculous, aged lover [cf. Malvolio in Twelfth Night], sometimes an ageing helpful friend, [cf. Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, though this play turns into tragedy]); various female types (young girl, wife, courtesan, maid), and types according to profession (braggart warrior, parasite, professional jokester, slave dealer, merchant, doctor, money-lender, cook).