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Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence. By 
ALISON SHARROCK. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 321.
Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–76181–9.

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CJ Online 2010.06.01

After an autobiographical preface Sharrock (S.) offers five chapters that
intermittently discuss the 26 extant comedies of Plautus and Terence “as
literary devices, with programmatic beginnings, middles, ends and
intertexts” (p. i): “Art and artifice” (pp. 1–21), “Beginnings”
(pp. 22–95), “Plotting and playwrights” (pp. 96–162), “Repeat
performance” (pp. 163–249) and “Endings” (pp. 250–89). The
chapters’ huge length generally obscures their origin as a set of
lectures given in Dublin in 1999. A bibliography and jejune index precede
an index locorum in which Amphitryo, Andria, Bacchides, Epidicus, Eunuchus,
Pseudylus and Rudens predominate, where Apollodorus, Diphilus, Menander and
Philemon are not mentioned at all, but where Aristophanes, Callimachus,
Euripides and Sappho are.

These biases reflect S.’s stated pathway to Roman comedy from prior study
of Augustan elegy, intertextual theory and (presumably) the contemporary
canon— i.e. via having studied Latin poetry rather than the Greek or
Hellenistic antecedents of the genre (she never mentions, for instance, the
technitai of Dionysus). Her interpretations are commensurate with these
biases. She finds the ideals of Callimachean and Augustan poetics alive in
the comedians, scores of “programmatic” ideas, words, characters, and
signifiers, and numerous layers of subtle irony and meta-characterization.
Playwrights are metaphors for characters, characters for playwrights or the
play, and speech of all kinds reflects the process of creative writing.
Internal complots are programmatic metaphors for dramatic performance,
power relationships abound, and to begin, end or even read something is
deemed tendentiously problematic. The book is a vitrine of “New Latin”
ideas (for this term see Don Fowler in Arachnion 2, 1995
[http://tinyurl.com/DFowler]).

Whether you accept these interpretations will depend on your own
experience. On p. ix S. announces her book is meant primarily for “[t]he
less-than-avid readers of Plautus and Terence,” i.e. those classicists
who like herself find themselves forced to read or teach it, rather than
specialists in the field, though she also hopes “to amuse, if not
inform” those of us who find the genre intrinsically appealing, too.
Since her discussion of actual texts is unpredictably organized and
sparsely mapped out, in the following remarks I isolate what seem to me to
be the principal themes.

In Chapter 1, Roman comedy is theorized in its complex totality as
deception (actually an a priori assumption, we later learn: p. 229 n. 170)
that is typically controlled by an “architectus,” i.e. a prominent
character who “writes the plot with, for or against the playwright” (p.
17). Hence the first theme (Chapter 2), that there is an archetypal
prologue in Roman comedy that is pure exposition of requisite information
(p. 64 n. 110, etc.). Any departure from this ideal that reader-response
criticism can detect—superfluous details, jokes, tangential background
information, banter with the audience—is due to “Plautine mess(ing),”
meaning that Plautus relies on our earlier experiences to constantly tease
and misdirect us about the trajectory of the plot that follows. This
pseudo-expository prologic “pose” of Plautus’ (p. 31) is then refined
by Terence to its fullest form, viz. the literary “quarrel with the
critics” over issues of style and plagiarism. In what is by far the most
original and ingenious idea in the book, these six prologues are considered
to be actively inspired by Callimachus’ Aetia prologue, with Terence’s
unnamed critic both the Telchines and the ear-twitting Apollo.

In Chapter 3 S. argues that complots are central to Roman comedy, with all
extant specimens reducible in more or less procrustean fashion to a schema
involving tricks of identity; the purpose is therapeutic, soothing our
identity-anxieties (pp. 98–9). In a series of extended readings on this
premise of varying depth, focus and originality, S. then traces the
“self-conscious comic playfulness about the control of vision and its
connection with personal identity” (p. 101) in Mostellaria, Miles,
Amphitryo, Epidicus and Andria, and cursorily in other plays, isolating a
number of perceived instances of the primacy of her theme. Chapter 4
continues in this vein with extended intertextual readings of Aulularia as
paranoia-play, Rudens as paratragedy, Eunuchus as
para-Bacchae-Catullo-Sapphic intertext, and Hecyra as instauratio-inspired,
i.e. ritually interrupted, comedy. Some of these readings rely on her
suggestion that intertextuality is a fruitful model for interpreting Roman
comedy’s relationship to its ‘originals’ (pp. 201–4; the inverted
commas are hers, p. 203). By this S. refers not just to the Roman plays’
announced source texts (Kleroumenoi, Adelphoi, etc.) but to such non-source
Greek comedies as Dyskolos or Epitrepontes that share thematic similarities
with Roman plays.

Chapter 5 focuses on the closure of comedies. S. attributes to each
plaudite-speaker (whose identity is sometimes disputed) either
“pro-comic” or “anti-comic” characteristics and concomitant power
to control the drama, while the comedies as a whole “dance” toward
inclusive, farcical endings that “honour the comic spirit” (p. 279).
Plautus likes “closural farce,” and so does Terence (p. 279). Even the
moralizing occasionally found at the end of such plays as Captivi is
insincere: “…underneath this pompous exterior, the signals are still
there which tell us that this is all a joke, that we are to take the
moralizing with a pinch of irony…” (p. 262). Thus will the axiom
ridicula res est explain much. Throughout the chapter discussion rushes
from one play to the next with little warning. The book then ends abruptly,
with no general conclusion. What have we gained?

On p. i the blurb announces, “Where[as] most recent books stress the
original performance as the primary location for the encountering of the
plays, this book finds the locus of meaning and appreciation in the
activity of a reader, albeit one whose manner of reading necessarily
involves the imaginative reconstruction of performance.” Though
tortuously expressed—the style is typical, the square brackets
mine—this, the advertised novelty of S.’s approach, seems both
interesting and original. Her “primary interest is in a reader of a text,
whether ancient or modern,” who “is a member of an audience only by
projection and imagination” (pp. 19, 18). This suggests in principle a
narrow sort of res publica comoediarum: if not the Palatine Hill of 191 BC
or Aemilius Paullus’ funeral in Rome in 160, then certainly Caesar’s
schoolroom, Roscius’ greenroom, Varro’s study, Flavian Beirut,
Gellius’ nightstand, the Carolingian scriptorium, 1850s Bonn, Manchester
2009, your coffee table, mine….

A good idea, but in her execution S. is not committed to it. In fact she
does worry how the play was originally staged (e.g. pp. 208, 211 n. 117)
and how alert its audience was (pp. 54 n. 81, 228 n. 165). This impinges on
her related aim of applying intertextual theory to “the plays as they
stand” (p. 19), particularly in her belief that allusion “is in the eye
of the beholder” (p. 205), i.e. that it is reader-generated rather than
author-imposed, which she doesn’t really believe, either. In fact she
frequently worries about the intentionality of allusions (pp. 78 n.
140–79, 167, 288, etc.) and the related questions of relative chronology
of the plays (e.g. pp. 190, 206 n. 100, 236 n. 191, 269), authors’
knowledge of predecessors, avenues and evidence of transmission, content of
the models, “Plautine elements” vs. reflexes of the Greek source texts,
direct parody, interpolation, etc.—that is, all the concerns of the
traditional philologist, which ought to be totally irrelevant for her
stated aim and beliefs. Meanwhile, her (unannounced) decision to ignore
G.B. Conte’s insightful notion of “code-modeling” and its refinements
in S. Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext (Cambridge, 1998) is hard to
understand. Take for instance her argument (pp. 79–80) that Andria 1ff.
alludes to Callimachus’ Aetia prologue. On its own the relation is at
best topos (poetic quarrel), at worst impossible to see (because
Terence’s prologues seem to evoke the Roman courtroom). But set it
explicitly in the code-model approach (a poet’s rebuttal of unnamed,
carping critics; early in a poem; outside intervention that alters an
incipient poetic program, etc.), and you really can start to see it. But
when S. underplays this approach and instead foregrounds counting rare
words and the like to argue her contentions, it seems like an uphill
battle.

At the same time, where she does adhere more closely to her announced
program I find much of the analysis excessively fuzzy-associative and
reductive. The various totalizations and taxonomies of perceived
“doubles” of characters, plots, genre, etc., strike me as of dubious
utility. Perhaps this is due to my reluctance to accept that, being more
than 50% musicalized, Roman comedy is actually “mimetic” (and
correspondingly “deceptive”) in the sense S. supposes it is, for if by
“mimetic” we mean “a mirror of life,” then the difference between
trimeter-based Greek comedies and Roman musicalizations of them will
resemble that between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story—the latter in
varying degrees necessarily more abstract and more cartoonish than the
former. I am equally skeptical that, despite its obvious appeal,
intertextuality really is the appropriate model to apply. [[1]] But even
so, how do these patterns help us to better appreciate the plays? Space
taken up by potted accounts of verbal style (pp. 167–83) or numerous
footnotes of the “on x see y” type could have been devoted to answering
this question.

Still, quot homines, tot sententiae: I am not one of the less-than-avid
readers of Roman comedy that S. hopes for, so this book was not written for
me. The above remarks should be taken accordingly.

MICHAEL FONTAINE
Cornell University

[[1]] Adaptation theory is the better model; on this and the relationship
between mimetic and musical comedy, see “The Reception of Greek Comedy in
Rome,” in M. Revermann (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy
(forthcoming).


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