In Letters in Plautus, Emilia A. Barbiero systematically analyzes the effects of epistles as a medium in six of Plautus’ plays. Each chapter deals with a specific play (except the final chapter, dedicated both to Epidicus and Trinummus) in which the writing and the delivery of a letter (or, in some cases, more than one letter) play a significant role. The structure of the chapters contributes to a clear presentation of Barbiero’s analysis. Each chapter has a section dedicated to summing up the play’s plot and presenting the main ideas of the chapter in the order in which they will be discussed. Then, Barbiero, reading the play’s plot closely, examines how epistles are integrated within the plot, and how they contribute either to the deceit that makes the plot advance or to the depiction of Plautus’ literary activity. At the end of the book, there is an appendix describing each letter that is mentioned and its characteristics.
Barbiero takes as a premise that by observing the epistolary motif, one may find aspects related not only to the nature of Plautus’ comedies but also to the cultural milieu of their composition, that is, the mid-Republican period. This premise is subsequently related to Plautus’ relationship with the origins of the palliata and its creative restrictions. As Barbiero clearly states in the book’s introduction, a reading which regards Plautus as a literate author tends to diverge from part of the recent scholarship on his comedies. Scholars such as Slater (1985/2000) and Marshall (2006) have treated Plautus’ comedies more as improvisational pieces (or, at least, as imitating an improvised action) than as written (and stable) works. Claiming that Plautus is “a firmly literary author who was cognizant of the comic tradition that came before him” (p. 13), Barbiero acknowledges that she is swimming against the tide.
In chapter 1, which focuses on Bacchides, Barbiero demonstrates that the deceits conceived by Chrysalus, all of them involving the writing and delivering of letters, explore the essential characteristics of an epistle. For example, while planning to deceive Nicobulus, Chrysalus decides to use a letter because he knows that the old man would trust its content more than anything said by the slave. Such scenes involving the dictation of an epistle and, later, the delivery of its content, in Barbiero’s opinion, metatheatrically mirror the playwright’s own enterprise in the real world. Just like the slave who concocts a plan and presents himself as someone conscious of his role within the comedy’s plot, the playwright also creates his fabula based on illusion and deceits, while reflecting on his poetic production. Barbiero suggests that this feature replicates the dynamic between model poet (Menander/Plautus) and translator (Plautus/Chrysalus). What is more, by depicting writing inside this play-within-the-play (that is, Chrysalus’ scheme), Plautus ultimately highlights that the comedy itself originates in a script. This idea, which pervades Barbiero’s entire book, contrasts with the notion that Plautus’ comedies have an essentially oral nature—an important premise for those who defend the improvisational nature of Plautus’ plays. Epistles, then, are generative of metatheatre and also of metapoesis.
Chapter 2 deals with Persa, a play involving three different letters. Whereas in Bacchides all the letters contribute to the planned deception, in Persa only one of them is read aloud on stage. This does not mean, however, that the two other missives, which are love letters exchanged between the slave Toxilus and his mistress Lemniselenis, do not play a pivotal role of their own in the plot. Although their content remains secret, these epistles display, in Barbiero’s opinion, the connection between epistolary activity and sex in the Plautine plays. In addition, their relevance lies in the fact that Paegnium and Sophoclidisca, two slaves who act as couriers in delivering each lover’s letter to their addressee, seem to treat these texts as scripts for their own dramatic action. In this sense, Barbiero highlights a scene in which Sophoclidisca answers to Lemniselenis, who is repeating her instructions, insisting on her ability to learn the litterae and to memorize the mistress’ orders. Considering that this is a pun on the tabellae that Sophoclidisca holds, Barbiero asserts that in this context, the writing tablet “cannot but remind us of the script: an actor provides assurance of her (his) ability to perform while holding the very medium in which this dramatic role originates” (p. 62). While this argument is indeed convincing, it would be fruitful to consider the limits of its applicability by turning our attention to a similar yet ultimately distinctive scene in Bacchides. When the two meretrices appear on stage for the first time, they are discussing how to carry on their stratagem against Pistoclerus, acting as if they were stage directors (Bacc. 35–38). Their dialogue also includes a discussion of the role of memory in acting, but, unlike the scene from Persa mentioned above, a written text is not clearly mentioned. In the sequence of the chapter, Barbiero discusses the most prominent of all the letters presented in Persa: the one involved in Toxilus’ plan to buy Lemniselenis’ freedom. Besides the fake epistle, the slave’s plan also involves the conventions of a comedy that would exist in the real world: Sagaristio plays the role of a merchant; Virgo plays the role of Lucris, and even an anagnorisis should feature in this play-within-the-play. Thus, Plautus’ and Toxilus’ plots mirror each other, revolving around the sale of a young girl. Regarding this point, Barbiero introduces a concept that, in her view, describes a feature also present in other plays analyzed in the book. According to Barbiero, Persa contains a mise-en-abyme that disturbs the distinction between inside and outside, blurring the limits of the plots, and even the distinction between model and imitation, creator and creation, reality and illusion.
Barbiero also discusses the problem of creativity imposed by a genre like the palliata, in terms of mise-en-abyme representation, when analyzing Pseudolus in chapter 3. Although scholars have already discussed this play’s metatheatrical aspects (Barsby 1995, Marshall 1996, Sharrock 1996, Feeney 2010), which cause the comedy to resemble an improvised show, in Barbiero’s opinion the play’s focus is of a different kind. It is the “spontaneous” delivery and recitation of a letter that generate a metapoetic dimension highlighting, in fact, the letter’s written origins. In this sense, the letter from Phoenicium brought onstage by Calidorus at the beginning of the play is crucial to the development of Pseudolus’ comic action. The slave begins reciting the letter 40 verses after knowing about its existence, finally revealing what upsets the meretrix: a pimp has sold her to a soldier. Since the soldier still needs to pay 5 minae to finalise the purchase, he has left his seal behind so the pimp can recognize it and send the girl away. Even though Pseudolus behaves as though he has no clue about what to do throughout most of the play, as Barbiero points out, every element of the play’s resolution is already there, embryonically, in Phoenicium’s letter. As Barbiero highlights, Phoenicium’s missive serves as a script for Pseudolus’ invented deceit in such a way that even some of the lines delivered by the slave, while he is thinking aloud about his plan, resemble the letter’s written contents. But the plan—involving the appearance of a real messenger carrying a real letter—is a nova res, as Pseudolus calls it, in the comic stage. When it comes to dealing with epistles, Pseudolus will act in an unprecedented way: instead of forging one, he steals a real letter. Thus, Barbiero concludes, this novelty is all about “a fraught image of innovation reified in the deception that is (…) put on play” (p. 113). This subsequent deception involves a play-within-the-play depicting a scene that has already occurred in the comedy: the arrival to Athens of a “Harpax”, who carries a letter to Ballio. Barbiero claims that this comedy’s self-replication—a feature which, in the end, is not as new as Pseudolus puts it—is another example of mise-en-abyme. This one, however, focuses on the moment of the play’s textual inception (by replicating the content of the comedy’s letter) instead of the whole plot, as in Bacchides and Persa. In Barbiero’s view, the metatheatrical question of Pseudolus is related to a creative dilemma posed to Plautus and to the trickster slave, as playwrights. They are condemned to replicate plots that have already been staged before, due to the chains that constrain those who translate New Comedy’s plots – a translation that is inevitably a copy.
The next chapter deals with Curculio. Barbiero’s analyses focus on the soldier’s ring stolen by the slave Curculio. For her, the ring has such significant theatrical agency that Curculio’s forged letter becomes “real” and thereby theatrically integral to Planesium’s anagnorisis, rendering possible the play’s happy ending. Although this signum feature is quite common in comedies, in Curculio, unlike in Bacchides and Persa, the ring can evoke places (instead of persons, as letters do). This is illustrated, for example, in the scene where the slave re-enacts a dialogue that he had with Therapontigonus (ll. 337–363). In this situation, the soldier unintentionally shares the information that the slave will use later in the play to elaborate his deceitful ploy. Moreover, this is the moment when Curculio steals Therapontigonus’ ring. Reenacting this scene, Curculio, through his words, transmigrates the scene that occurs in Epidaurus to Caria. At this point, Barbiero insists on the relationship between the script and the performance because the dialogue is connected to the content of the letter that Curculio had forged and allowed to reach Lyco prior to Therapontigonus’ letter. Thus, the letter and the textual basis of the comedy’s internal ludus are simultaneously created. In Barbiero’s view, this represents how much the play evolves around an object (the signet ring) and what it can or cannot do, reproducing the creative limits experienced by a comic playwright.
In the book’s final chapter, Barbiero analyzes Epidicus and Trinummus together on the basis that they share a common feature: the action described in the letter is invalidated throughout the play. For Barbiero, however, this does not mean that the letter does not generate dramatic content for the plot. In the case of the Epidicus, there is a break between what happened before and what will happen after changes to the plot’s course caused by Stratippocles. The fact is that the adulescens no longer loves the same girl whom the slave, who deceived the senex with a letter, was entrusted to buy. In Barbiero’s view, Plautus is either signaling that this comedy refuses to adhere to its model’s plot, or else he is altogether renouncing the conventional comic plot, in which an adulescens typically loves the same girl for the entirety of the play and a single trick is enough to secure the couple’s destiny. Either way, Barbiero asserts that what happens in the sequence is an inverted repetition of the play’s initial scheme. Thus, the play continues to follow the direction presented in the letter that the slave followed in its comic past; that is, Epidicus must fabricate a ruse to buy Stratippocles’ Athenian girlfriend. According to Barbiero, the persistence of the plot initially outlined in the letter points to the question of the limits of comedic novelty. Even if Plautine comedy seems to be looking for novelty insistently, it nevertheless replicates the same features due to its generic limitations. In Trinummus, it is the changes during the action promoted by Charmides (who enters the scene and realizes that he is the supposed letter’s author) which indicate the typical dramatic core: the need for action in a play. As Barbiero highlights, the point here is that the action must follow the traditional script (in which an old, fooled man cannot avoid being deceived). She describes this feature as intrinsic to Plautus’ reflection on the originality and the limits of comedic originality that characterizes his comedies.
Finally, it should be highlighted that Barbiero places an excessive emphasis on the literacy of Plautus’ comedies in her analysis. In considering the playwright’s consciousness about his role as a poet, Barbiero seems to suggest that such consciousness necessarily relies on the written origins of Plautine plays. Consequently, her analysis obscures the ways in which these effects could be linked to the oral features of the palliata, which seem to be as important as the written ones. A more nuanced analysis might consider that images related to writing also pervade the oral tradition, and, consequently, acknowledge the role of orality in the palliata.
References
Barsby, J. (1995) “Plautus’ Pseudolus as Improvisatory Drama,’ in Benz, Stärk and Vogt-Spira, 55–70.
Benz, L., Stärk, E., Vogt-Spira, G. (eds.) (1995) Plautus und die Tradition des Stegreifspiels:
Festgabe für Eckard Lefèvre zum 60 Geburtstag (Tübingen)
Feeney, D. (2010) “Crediting Pseudolus: Trust, Belief and the Credit Crunch in Plautus’ Pseudolus,” CPh 105.3: 281–300.
Marshall, C. W. (1996) “Plautus’ Pseudolus: The Long and the Short of It,” T&P 17: 34-8.
–––, (2006) The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge University Press.
Sharrock, A. R. (1996) “The Art of Deceit: Pseudolus and the Nature of Reading,” CQ 46.1: 152-74.
Slater, N.W. (1985/ 2000) Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind. Amsterdam: Harwood.