Name: Roman Theater with Plautus, Terence, and Seneca: Crash Course Theater #6
Uploaded: 2019-05-05T12:04:56.000Z
Duration: 11 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey there. I'm Mike Rugnetta,
this is Crash Course Theater,

Future continuous

and today we'll be looking at
the surviving literature of Roman drama

Transition words & phrases

because Roman life wasn't all naval battles,
naked miming prostitutes

Sometimes, you had to take a break
and go watch a play.

the most popular form of Roman drama were comedies that borrow heavily from Greek originals,

especially the comedies of Menander with a little bit of Atellan Farce thrown into the mix.

These comedies are called fabulae palliatae.

They have outdoor urban settings
and are filled with stock characters.

The hero of the play is typically
a type known as the adulescens.

A young man who is in love with the girl next door,
the Virgo whom he can't marry

because she's of dubious parentage 
or he's in love with a prostitute, the Meretrix.

Then, there's the Senex, usually the father or the old man, who's either a strict miser or a louche skirt-chaser,

other characters are the Servus,
the wily slave; the Leno, the pimp;

the Miles Gloriosus, the bragging soldier;

and the parasite, a slave character
who sponges off of his master.

Sometimes wives and maid servants appear too.

These stock characters get themselves
 involved in stock plots, often a couple plots per play,

typical ones involved thwarted lovers, disagreement between parent and child and mistaken identity,

which is way easier to pull off
when everyone is wearing masks.

Sometimes, there's a direct address
to the audience, too, kind of like a parabasis

and almost always there's a happy ending,
at least for the lovers.

Comedies with happy endings are Yorick's faves.

In the Roman plays, most of the people 
and settings have Greek names,

which is either a hat tip to the original source or a real failure of imagination on the part of these writers.

But even though the setting is ostensibly Greek,

the situations and jokes about current events
and even the street names are definitely Roman,

Plautus and Terence are the two guys
we're gonna be talking the most about.

Why them? Well, partially because they were the greatest practitioners of Roman comedy

but also because you guessed it their plays survived.

Titus Maccius Plautus was born in 254 BCE in Umbria,
a landlocked region with a lot of truffles.

Legend has it that he worked
as a stagehand in his hometown

and then failed as a merchant
before moving to Rome to write plays

but take that with a grain of Roman salt,
a lot of writers tried to pass their plays off as his.

A first century BCE scholar determined that 20 plays
are definitely his, and get this: all 20 survived.

Plautus' plays are rambunctious comedies
about middle class people and their slaves.

because from the meter they're written in 
we know that at least half of each play was sung.

He was a big influence
on Medieval and Renaissance writers.

Moliere was a fan, and we'll see that Shakespeare borrowed most of the comedy of errors from him.

People love Plautus because his plays are energetic
and uproarious with puns galore

and tip-top alliterations that are tricky to translate.

Plautus' works are a lot like real life
with more prostitutes and twins and songs,

which is to say I guess that they're not like real life at all. But they are a hoot.

When he died in 184 BCE,
he apparently wrote his own epitaph.

After Plautus died, comedy mourns,
the stage is deserted;

and then laughter,
mirth and jest all wept in company.

Okay, now tell us how you really feel about yourself.

Yeesh, the other major comic playwright
was Publius Terentius Afer aka. Terence,

who's possibly the first playwright of color.

Terence was born around the late 180s
or early 190s BCE in Africa at Carthage,

He was a slave owned by a Roman senator,
who educated him and then freed him.

He came to Rome to try to break into the theater
by surprising a famous poet at his house.

The poet was not thrilled, but then Terence began to read his play, and suddenly the poet was totally into it.

Don't take too many lessons from this, though,

I didn't get this job by showing up on Stan's doorstep with a stack of things to explain.

Terence wrote six plays,
which borrowed heavily from Menander.

Cicero even called him a pint-sized Menander.

After the sixth, he decided that he needed 
to travel more to write better plays.

So, at the age of 25, he left Athens and died at sea.

His style is more sophisticated than Plautus's.

The comedy is a little less rowdy;
but the ironies are deeper,

the characters are saner, the meter is more regular,
and the constructions are sturdier.

Fewer plot holes, fewer dirty jokes, 
some really elegant Latin,

and the women aren't treated that badly. So, that's nice.

These are classier plays.
But they're maybe not as funny,

and hey, one more difference: In Plautus and Menander,  the prologue basically tells you what's gonna happen.

Terence doesn't do that. He creates suspense.

To take a closer look at Roman comedy,
we're gonna check out one of  Plautus's plays:

which we selected because Shakespeare borrowed most of it for the comedy of errors.

The Menaechmi begins with a prologue 
addressed directly to the audience.

An actor comes out and tells everyone: Hey listen up. This is Plautus. You love Plautus.

Give it up! Give it up for our man, Plautus.

The prologue tells us that once there was a merchant from Syracuse who had identical twin sons.

He took one of those sons to Epidamnus where the son was kidnapped and the merchant died of a broken heart.

Both boys eventually end up being called Menaechmus, which is a little weird, but hey you do you for simplicity?

We're gonna call them "M" in the Thought Bubble.

Syracuse M comes to Epidamnus 
searching for his brother: Epidamnus M.

Epidamnus M is infatuated with a prostitute: Erotium,
a name that basically means Sexy.

He keeps giving her all of his wife's stuff,
which understandably makes his wife mad.

Epidamnus M and his parasite servant 
go to visit Erotium,

he gives her one of his wife's dresses and tells her
to prepare a feast, and then he goes away.

Syracuse M comes in, gets mistaken for Epidamnus M and gets to eat Erotium's feast,

that maybe he's been mistaken for the identical twin brother he's been searching for for six years.

After the feast, Erotium gives Syracuse M the dress 
and tells him to take it to the tailor.

Meanwhile, Epidamnus M's wife is like "Why do you keep giving all of my dresses to your prostitute."

So he tries to get it back from Erotium.
And she's like "Dude. I just gave it to you."

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Roman Theater with Plautus, Terence, and Seneca: Crash Course Theater #6

stuff

basically

extreme

audience