Hans Bork

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922568

This paper examines the performance dynamics of onstage texts in Plautus’ comedies. Examples of rare “epigraphic texts” are compared with the more common motif of in-play “perishable texts.” The perishable type were performed by actors as though varbatim, and transmit novel information to the audience. In contrast, epigraphic texts are paraphrased, and so require specific knowledge. Each kind of text thus does different dramatic work. The difference originates in the different material “entanglements” of each medium in the lives of ancient Italians. Therefore Plautus’ audiences understood comic theater through its extra-textual elements as much as through “the text” as we have it. To understand Roman comedy, scholars must also account for how ancient objects were entangled in Roman culture.

This chapter examines the nature and use of insult-humor in the comic plays of the Latin author Plautus. I propose a new approach to "linguistic (im)politeness" in Plautine comedy, which accounts for the role of humor (specifically, the expectation of humor) effectively defuses potential insult, both in character interactions and for the viewing audience.  This approach reflects thinking in current theories of humor (e.g., "Benign Violation Theory"), and casts the interaction of various Plautine character types in a new light—rather than caricatures of "real" contemporary people, they illustrate a broad palette of opinion, withwhich contemporary audiences might identify.

Characters in Plautus’ comedy frequently mention geographical details from the “real”(i.e., out-universe) world. For example, Menaechmi begins with a wink toward setting:atque hoc poetae faciunt in comoediis: omnis res gestas esse Athenis autumant (“But poets dothis in comedies: claim that everything happens at Athens,” Pl. Men. 7–8). Suchreferences are common in Plautus, and are catnip to scholars interested in unraveling“Plautus” from his “Greek originals.” Therefor recognizably “Roman” (or “Italian”)locations, institution, and features are thought to be Plautine “innovations,” whereasrecognizably “Greek” features are artifacts from the Greek comedies that Plautusadapted (Fraenkel ([1922] 2007)). “Non-Greek” innovations are thus marked, and worthyof special attention. Thus Chapter 3 of Moore (1998), “Greece or Rome?” (pp.50–66),begins with the programmatic claim that Plautus’ plays are “the earliest and one of themost wide-ranging literary sources for the reaction to the Greek world that was to be adefining feature of Roman culture.”

The approach can offer fascinating insight into the plays, but as so often withQuellenforschung, has deficiencies. In particular, the assumption that Plautus’ texts arestatic, literary objects. In fact, they were scripts. Faint echoes of a larger artistic whole:performance. Many have pointed out (e.g., Slater ([1985] 2000); Marshall (2006)) thatperformance-as-art requires a different approach from texts-as-art, if for no otherreason than that performance happens linearly, in real-time. Audience members cannotpause reading to consider meaning during the event, nor hunt through “the text” forclues. Plautine comedy was ephemeral by design. This reality can be difficult formodern scholars, since our experience of “Plautus” is necessarily textual; everythingbeyond the words on the page must be reconstructed. Much of this reconstruction isextremely speculative. (E.g.: Goldberg (1998); Dutsch (2013); Gellar-Goad and Moore(2015).) But the alternative is worse: treating plays as texts ignores the audienceexperience almost entirely. Theater is inherently social, and without an audience it fails. This is especially true of comedy, which necessarily requires intervention by theaudience in order to succeed: that is, laughter (Revermann (2006); Weitz (2016)). Ignoring the audience of comedy irreparably strips it of meaning.

This paper is thus a speculative attempt to consider comic geography—“local(e) jokes”in Plautus—from an audience perspective. It builds on work by Niles Slater, TimothyMoore, Amy Richlin, Toph Marshall, and others, who approach Latin palliata comedy ofthe 3rd–2nd centuries BCE as a living performance tradition. This approachemphasizes the lived experience of ancient people involved in performance events, fromactors to audience (E.g.: Richlin (2014); Richlin (2017a)). Despite recent work on the“mobility” of individuals and objects within Plautine comedy (Isayev (2017); Lape(2021)), as well as the geographical realities of early Italic performance and performers(e.g., Richlin (2017b)), I know of no scholarship on Plautine geography as humor. That is: how did geographical references function as jokes? It stands to reason that thefrequency of these references in Plautus is purposeful. That audiences enjoyed them. But this creates a set of problems: how did they understand them? For more generalreferences (e.g., “Athens,” “Greece,” “Sicily”), we can presume general knowledge (Dueck(2020)). However, a number of references are highly specific, such as a list of towns inthe Trerus Valley that follow the via Latina (Cap. 880–83), or the “tour” of the Forum inCurculio (461–97). For these, I see two models: 1) such jokes were pitched at deeplyeducated, worldly audience; 2) these were “local(e) jokes”, inserted and adapteddepending on the venue. I argue for the latter, and suggest they were a kind of“expandable routine,” of the kind that Plautus frequently uses elsewhere (Marshall(1999)). Migratory stage performers (Richlin (2021)) would have inserted these asneeded in order to develop rapport with local audiences—and so make the comicperformance more successful (O’Shannon (2012); Brodie (2014)). The technique is foundin comedy traditions throughout the world, and is part of a larger complex of ethnic/social jokes that signal in-group affinity for various speech communities (Davies(1998)).

This paper examines the nature and use of insult-humor in the comic plays of the Latin author Plautus. Plautus' comedies are full of insults, from brief bits of mocking dialogue to extended exchanges of flyting and verbal dueling. Most discussions of this material is from either a linguistic perspective, with emphasis on the apparent relationship with “real” spoken Latin; or from a sociohistorical perspective, in order to uncover evidence for contemporary life. Almost none, so far as I can find, consider the most primary role of Plautine insults: their role as jokes and comic shtick. Insult humor is fundamental to Plautus dramatic technique, and in performance would have required substantial skill by an actor. I argue that rather than considering these as moments of “linguistic impoliteness,” we should consider the performance dynamics of the language, whereby the audience's expectation of humor defused potential insult, both in character interactions and for the viewing audience. The perspective reflects contemporary approaches to humor (e.g., “Benign Violation Theory”), and considers Plautine character types in a new light—rather than caricatures of "real" people, they offer a broad palette of opinion with which contemporary audiences might identify.

A look at the puzzling lack of *dativus possessivus* forms in our corpus of Mycenaean Greek, with a possible pragmatic explanation for this phenomenon.

Presented at the Greek and Latin Linguistics panel of the 2016 SCS meeting in San Francisco.

Handout for my presentation at the 2015 BSA Postgrad Epigraphy course.  Summary of my epigraphic edition (based on personal autopsy) of IG II2 1136, with dialectal and sociolinguistic commentary, and thoughts about the social significance of the stone.

A sporadic analysis of how Latin metrical inscriptions formally represent aural/metrical content in a visual medium, with a consideration of how such generic features are used in funereal inscriptions to personalize the memorial.

2014 British School at Rome epigraphy presentation

An analysis of how Simonides' reputation as a "poet of memory" created a corpus of spurious 'Simonidean' epigrams.  As these were collected and passed on in anthologies and collections, genuine epichoric dialectal features of inscriptional epigrams were lost or deliberately removed, in order to reframe and reimagine the epigrams as relevant to contemporary concerns.

2013, UCLA Classics Graduate Workshop talk

Git repositories for various projects devoted to Social Network Analysis (SNA) of character interactions in Roman Comedy.

° Social Networking Analysis (SNA) project: https://github.com/ancient-drama-SNA/Roman_Comedy-SNA

° Prototype site: https://ancient-drama-sna.github.io/Roman_comedy_networks/

° Insult Tables: https://github.com/ancient-drama-SNA/Insult_tables-Roman_Comedy

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38z512bm

This dissertation examines how abuse-language and insults function in the plays of Plautus. Existing work on insults in Plautus is largely taxonomic, with small attention to the dynamics of insult among characters or to how insults are construed within the plays.  Plautus is one of the most important Latin authors, and insult is a bedrock feature of his comic style.  Moreover, every type of character in Plautus’ plays—from slaves to gods—uses insults freely regardless of their status and generic type, but characters do not all react to insults in the same way.  Some will react calmly to extreme abuse, and others will become distraught over mild critique.  This suggests that the “valence” of insult words is not stable; indeed, supposedly neutral or even positive terms can be insulting if used in certain situations.  Moreover, Plautus’ plays were designed to be realized through live, physical performance, and thus to understand the insult scenes they contain, we must consider not just the textual evidence of insult usage, but also how performance details—delivery, occasion, audience—could have influenced or even altered surface meanings found in the text.  Abuse scenes and their aftermath drive much of the dramatic action and humor in Plautus’ plays; the various ways that participants in these scenes deploy and respond to insults are thus crucial evidence for in-text themes, as well as for the social culture of 3rd- and 2nd-century Rome.  To understand Plautus’ comedy, we must understand how he used insults.

My project takes a “3D” view of insults in Plautus: I apply a theoretical method that combines performance theory and sociolinguistic theory—especially work on linguistic (im)politeness—to consider how insults function across and within social boundaries.  I place special emphasis on the idea that “social intimacy” is the defining factor for determining how potential insult meanings are resolved; how characters react to insult is the result of interpersonal relationships, and not of pure lexical semantics. Intimacy and rapport are major aspects of scripted character interactions, but they also can develop between audience and actors during the theatrical event, and this relationship ultimately mediates the semantic valence of insult terms.  I begin my study with a narrow analysis of a single, widespread insult (fur, “thief”),  and then apply the generalized conclusions of that study to an analysis of multiple terms that occur in two-person scenes, with attention to how these affect (and are affected by) interpersonal relationships.  I then widen my scope and consider how the realities of ancient performance, as well as the perspective(s) of a heterogeneous audience, would have affected these relationships.  Lastly, I consider how insults can become humorous, a development guided by the tension between two opposing modes of expression: one that produces pleasure, and the other pain.  Between these, the dynamics of insult play out on a large scale in the arc of plot development.