years before his death in 184 B.C.

Welcome as a full autobiography of Plautus would be, in place of such
scant and tasteless biographical morsels as we do have, only less
welcome, perhaps, would be his own stage directions for his plays,
supposing him to have written stage directions and to have written
them with something more than even modern fullness. We should learn
how he met the stage conventions and limitations of his day; how
successfully he could, by make-up and mannerism, bring on the boards
palpably different persons in the Scapins and Bobadils and Doll
Tear-sheets that on the printed page often seem so confusingly similar,
and most important, we should learn precisely what sort of dramatist he
was and wished to be.

If Plautus himself greatly cared or expected his restless,
uncultivated, fun-seeking audience to care, about the construction
of his plays, one must criticize him and rank him on a very different
basis than if his main, and often his sole, object was to amuse the
groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more
seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical
comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate
laugh, then much of Langen’s long list of the playwright’s dramatic
delinquencies is somewhat beside its intended point.

And in large measure this--to hold his audience by any means--does
seem to have been his ambition: if the joke mars the part, down with
the part; if the ludicrous scene interrupts the development of the
plot, down with the plot. We have plenty of verbal evidence that the
dramatist frequently chose to let his characters become caricatures;
we have some verbal evidence that their “stage business” was sometimes