Placeholder Image

字幕列表 影片播放

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

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

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

  • and Christians being eaten by lions.

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

  • Much like Roman deities,

  • 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.

  • He is a man of Infinite Jest after all.

  • Oh, sorry, was a man of Infinite Jest.

  • 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,

  • especially in the works of Plautus.

  • 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

  • 130 plays are attributed to him

  • 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.

  • More or less, that's fine, I'll take it.

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

  • You could even call them musicals

  • 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,

  • in a spot, that's now a Tunisian suburb.

  • 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.

  • It's not a great plan.

  • 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:

  • The Menaechmi, or The Menaechmus Twins,

  • 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.

  • Years after, their poorly fated trip,

  • 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,

  • and he's all this place is rad.

  • But somehow it never occurs to him

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

  • Yeah, there are some plot holes.

  • 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."

  • Then his wife sees Syracuse M and mistakes him for her husband.

  • He doesn't recognize her, so she tries to have him arrested for craziness and maybe dress stealing,

  • just then, Epidamnus M enters, and the two identical brothers see each other,

  • but it still doesn't occur to Syracuse M that this is the brother he's been looking for.

  • Luckily, the smart servant figures it out.

  • The brothers are reunited, and Epidamnus M decides to auction off all of his stuff, including his wife.

  • So he can return with his brother to Syracuse.

  • Thanks Thought Bubble, so yeah, it's absurd sexist heavily reliant on stock characters and stock situations.

  • But still funny, not all of Roman drama is quite so hilarious though. Take the work of Seneca the Younger.

  • Please, haha! Just a little comedy, comedy for you there.

  • Seneca Jr. is born Lucius Annaeus, Seneca in what is modern-day Cordoba Spain in 4 BCE.

  • That's just a little while after Horace publishes the Ars Poetica.

  • The first major work since Aristotle's Poetics to tell people what plays should be.

  • Seneca's dad was a big deal rhetorician,

  • and when he was young he was moved to Rome to study stoic philosophy

  • because there's nothing the kids like more than stoicism.

  • He came to adulthood during a pretty volatile time in Roman history.

  • Little Seneca who grew up to be another big deal rhetoric guy, kept running afoul of Emperors,

  • which was easy to do, because a lot of them were dangerous psychopaths.

  • Caligula almost executed Seneca, then Claudius banished Seneca on the grounds of adultery.

  • Claudius's wife called him back and installed him as a tutor for Nero who became Emperor,

  • and kept Seneca on as a councillor.

  • But then Nero went a little crazy, and even though Seneca was retired,

  • Nero blamed him for taking part in a conspiracy and ordered him to kill himself.

  • So Seneca did.

  • Man! Stoics you.

  • When Seneca wasn't being threatened by Emperors, he sometimes wrote plays,

  • which are mostly revisions of classic Greek works and they're all tragedies.

  • One possible exception is his Apocalocyntosis, a satire about the emperor Claudius.

  • That no one really likes, which maybe he didn't even write.

  • In general, Roman tragedies based on Greek subjects are known as "fabulae crepidatae",

  • and there were lots - 300 years worth.

  • But, basically, Senecas are the only ones that survived.

  • Senecas' tragedies are notable

  • because they're the first to favor the V act structure that Shakespeare would adopt.

  • They have a different relationship to the divine with a lot less confidence

  • that the gods are going to help everything work out

  • Which is to say? They're pretty dark?

  • It makes sense when you remember all of the scary violent Emperor's

  • who were ruling Rome during Senecas time.

  • Nero was as merciless and arbitrary as even the most capricious God.

  • Remember all that stuff the Greeks liked to keep off stage,

  • like say, really extreme and incredibly gory violence.

  • That's just the kind of thing Seneca wants to show

  • because atrocities especially those perpetrated on the weak by the powerful were facts of life in his society.

  • Also a regular feature in violent entertainments like gladiator fights,

  • so if you've ever thought "hey, I'd really like to see Oedipus blind himself,

  • and maybe he could actually tear out both of his eyeballs, man I have got a play for you, but not you.

  • You don't have eyes.

  • Because of scenes like that one, and the fact that Seneca was a high-class kind of person.

  • There's been a lot of debate about whether his plays were actually performed

  • or whether they were closet dramas meant to be read rather than produced.

  • Certainly some of the scenes like the cannibal meal in Thyestes would have required special effects

  • But let's not put some creepy props or even extreme violence beyond the limits of the Roman stage.

  • Remember these are the people who thought that a group of dwarves beating a woman with spiked clubs

  • was just normal entertainment.

  • Check us out next time for a survey of ancient Sanskrit theater,

  • and then, theater is gonna disappear for a while, at least in the West.

  • Until then, Curtain!

  • Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.

  • Head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like The Art Assignment and Eons.

  • Crash course theater is filmed at the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis Indiana,

  • and is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.

  • Our animation team is Thought Cafe.

  • Crash Course exists thanks to the generous support of our patrons at Patreon.

  • Patreon is a voluntary subscription service,

  • where you can support the content you love through a monthly donation,

  • and help keep crash course free for everyone forever.

  • Thanks for watching.

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

字幕與單字

單字即點即查 點擊單字可以查詢單字解釋

B1 中級 美國腔

羅馬劇場與普勞圖斯,特倫斯和塞內加。戲劇速成班#6 (Roman Theater with Plautus, Terence, and Seneca: Crash Course Theater #6)

  • 11 5
    Pei-Yi Lin 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
影片單字