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List of contents
Preface
Playbill
Summary and Highlights
Character Names and Meanings
Synopsis and Arcs
1 Why Plautus? Why Mostellaria?
Ghostly Greek Comic Ancestors
Ghastly Roman Renovations?
Translation, the Odyssey, and Versatile Plautus
2 Foundations and frames
Venue and Date
Roman Slavery
The Traffic in Women
Expenses of Monstrous Scale
Rural Roman Conservatism and Urban Greek Liberality
Paratheatrical Performances and the Roman Forum
Ghosts, Haunted Houses, and Superstition
3 Staging Mostellaria
The Roman Scaena
Masks, Characterization, and Actors
Costumes and Props
Embedded Stage Directions
Monologues, Asides, and Eavesdropping
Metatheater
Improvisation
Meter
Farce and Low Resolution
4 Afterlife and ghost lights
The postmortem Scripts
Three Early Modern English Reincarnations
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Tranio Trickster
Appendix 1: Pliny’s “Haunted House”
Appendix 2: A Doubling Chart
Appendix 3: Character Line Counts
Appendix 4: A Selective Chronology
Notes
Editions and English Translations
Bibliography
Index
About the author
George Fredric Franko is Professor of Classical Studies at Hollins University, USA.
Summary
Plautus' Mostellaria is one of ancient Rome’s most breezy and amusing comedies. The plot is ridiculously simple: when a father returns home after three years abroad, a clever slave named Tranio devises deceptions to conceal that the son has squandered a fortune partying with pals and purchasing his prized prostitute’s freedom. Tranio convinces the gullible father that his house is haunted, that his son has purchased the neighbor’s house, and that he must repay a moneylender. Plautus animates this skeletal plot with farcical scenes of Tranio’s slapstick abuse of a rustic slave, the young lover’s maudlin song lamenting his prodigality, a cross-gender dressing routine, a drunken party, a flustered moneylender, spirited slaves rebuffing the father, and Tranio hoodwinking father and neighbor simultaneously.
This is the first book-length study of Mostellaria in its literary and historical contexts. It aims to help readers and theater practitioners appreciate the script as both cultural document and performed comedy. As a cultural document, the play portrays a range of Roman preoccupations, including male ideologies of the acquisition, use and abuse of property, relations between owners and enslaved persons, the traffic in women, tensions between city and country, the appropriation and adaptation of Greek culture, and the specters of ancestry and surveillance. As a performed comedy, the play celebrates the power of creativity, improvisation and metatheater. In Mostellaria’s farce, sleek simplicity replaces complexity as Plautus aggrandizes his comic hero by stripping plot to the minimum and leaving Tranio to operate alone with no resources other than his quick wit. A chapter on Mostellaria’s reception considers modernity’s continuing fascination with Plautine farce and trickery.
Foreword
An accessible introduction to Plautus' farcical Mostellaria that examines the play in its guises of both a Roman cultural document and a performed comedy.
Additional text
Franko’s Mostellaria offers students and scholars valuable summaries of some of the biggest issues, both social and theatrical, running throughout the Plautine corpus and provides performers with numerous approaches specific to the play.
