We are bewildered by the
innumerable asides of hidden eavesdroppers, the inevitable recurrence of
soliloquy and speech familiarly directed at the audience, while every once
in so often a slave, desperately bent on finding someone actually under
his nose, careens wildly cross the stage or rouses the echoes by
unmerciful battering of doors, meanwhile unburdening himself of lengthy
solo tirades with great gusto;[2] and all this dished up with a sauce of
humor often too racy and piquant for our delicate twentieth-century
palate, which has acquired a refined taste for suggestive innuendo, but
never relishes calling a spade by its own name.
If we have sought an explanation of our poet's gentle foibles in the
commentaries to our college texts, we have assuredly been disappointed.
Even to the seminarian in Plautus little satisfaction has been vouchsafed.
We are often greeted by the enthusiastic comments of German critics, which
run riot in elaborate analyses of plot and character and inform us that we
are reading _Meisterwerke_ of comic drama.[3] Our perplexity has perhaps
become focused upon two leading questions; first: "What manner of drama is
this after all? Is it comedy, farce, opera bouffe or mere extravaganza?"
Second: "How was it done? What was the technique of acting employed to
represent in particular the peculiarly extravagant scenes?"[4]
There is an interesting contrast between the published editions of Plautus
and Bernard Shaw.
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