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PLAUTUS was born in Umbria about
the middle of the third century B.C. He is said to have been
a slave and afterwards a stage-carpenter. But these may be stories
invented to account for his knowledge of slave character and
his connection, though a man of humble origin, with the theatre.
He produced his first play in 224 B.C., and wrote without a rival
till his death forty years later. Twenty of his plays remain.
Like his successors, Cæcilius
and Terence,
he was largely indebted to Menander
and the later comedians of Athens, though he is probably more
original than either of them. His method of borrowing in some
points resembles that of Shakespeare
himself. Characters with Greek names, and nominally living in
Greek cities, act as Romans, and refer to Roman customs as familiar
things and to the Greeks as foreigners. For this reason the plays
of Plautus are much more valuable than those of Terence as pictures
of Roman life. In one play, the Poenulus, or Young Carthaginian,
written at the time of the second Punic War, we have a unique
picture of the Roman enemies drawn by the popular Roman poet;
and it is very fairly and generously drawn. Plautus, like Terence,
draws only on recognised types of the later Athenian comedy--the
stern or indulgent father, the spendthrift son, the clever and
faithful slave, and the shameless parasite--who were all classified
and fitted with a characteristic mask. Considering these limits,
the genius of Plautus for developing amusing situations and lively
dialogue is very great and has been appreciated--in adaptations
and imitations--by Shakespeare, Molière,
Fielding, and many other dramatists.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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