Plautine actor?[75]

Apart from the rhetoricians, the most fruitful literary source of our
information on gesture is Donatus' commentary on Terence. The
trustworthiness of this has been the subject of much argument. Sittl[76]
accuses him of speaking merely from the standpoint of a professor of
rhetoric, as comedies of Terence were no longer given in the time of
Donatus. Weinberger in his "Beitrage zu den Buhnenaltherthumern aus Donats
Terenz-commentar,"[77] admonishes us to be very careful not to put too
high a value on the commentary. Van Wageningen[78] is of the opinion that
much of the work was inspired by Donatus' having seen in his own time
unmasked actors play. To this view color is lent by Donatus' note to
_And._ 716: "Sive haec personatis viris agitur, ut apud veteres,
sive per mulierem, ut nunc videmus."

If this is true, it makes Donatus' work of more significance to us, as it
would imply a harking back to the play of feature of the unmasked
performances of Plautus' day. But while it is certain that Donatus had
other sources than the Terentian text for his annotations,[79] it is
equally certain that practically everything he has to say relative to
gesture and stage business is readily to be deduced from the text and is
in the main interesting only as a compilation.[80] However, everything he
says continues to point persistently to lively gesture and action; and
this too in Terentian comedy, where the text makes far less rigorous
demands on the actor's muscles than in Plautus' works.

Donatus remarks occasionally that certain words must have been accompanied
by especially expressive gesture and byplay, evidently of feature, as
_vultuose, cum gestu_ and similar phrases are used to indicate this.[81]
His note to _And._ 722 is: "Haec scaena actuosa est: magis enim in gestu