much of his Greek originals practically untouched, he considered them in
effect but a medium for the provocation of laughter, but a vessel into
which to pour a highly seasoned brew of fun; that to this end his actors
went before the public, potentially speaking slap-stick in hand, equipped
by nature with liveliness of grimace and gesture and prepared to act with
verve, unction and an abandon of dash and vigor that would produce a riot
of merriment; that his dramatic machinery is hopelessly crippled and that
his evident intentions and effects are hopelessly lost unless interpreted
in this spirit: then we relegate Plautine drama to a low plane of broad
farce, where verisimilitude to life becomes wholly unnecessary because
undesirable; where the canons of dramatic art become inoperative; where,
contrary to what KArting says, we are not asked to believe that
"everything is happening in a perfectly natural manner"; where the poet
may stick at nothing provided the laugh be forthcoming; where all the
apparently absurd conventions of _palliatae_ cease to be absurd, vanish
into thin air and become unamenable to literary criticism, inasmuch as
they are all only part of the laugh-compelling scheme. This is the
_solvent_ that we propose. To establish this, let us proceed to an
examination of the internal mechanism of the plays.




Part II

An Analysis of the Dramatic Values in Plautus



The salient features that characterize the plays of Plautus include both