the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of
the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's
belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at
meeting our new-found friends in other plays, clothed in different names
to be sure and supplied in part with a fresh stock of jests, but still
engaged in the frustration of villainous panders, the cheating of harsh
fathers, until all ends with virtue triumphant in the establishment of the
undoubted respectability of a hitherto somewhat dubious female
character.[1]

Our astonishment waxes as we observe further the close correspondence of
dialogue, situation and dramatic machinery. We are bewildered by the
innumerable asides of hidden eavesdroppers, the inevitable recurrence of
soliloquy and speech familiarly directed at the audience, while every once
in so often a slave, desperately bent on finding someone actually under
his nose, careens wildly cross the stage or rouses the echoes by
unmerciful battering of doors, meanwhile unburdening himself of lengthy
solo tirades with great gusto;[2] and all this dished up with a sauce of
humor often too racy and piquant for our delicate twentieth-century
palate, which has acquired a refined taste for suggestive innuendo, but
never relishes calling a spade by its own name.

If we have sought an explanation of our poet's gentle foibles in the
commentaries to our college texts, we have assuredly been disappointed.
Even to the seminarian in Plautus little satisfaction has been vouchsafed.
We are often greeted by the enthusiastic comments of German critics, which
run riot in elaborate analyses of plot and character and inform us that we
are reading _Meisterwerke_ of comic drama.[3] Our perplexity has perhaps
become focused upon two leading questions; first: "What manner of drama is
this after all? Is it comedy, farce, opera bouffe or mere extravaganza?"