The endlessly adaptable plays of Plautus - I’ll make it into a comedy with some tragedy mixed in

The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of Menander and the other Greek New Comedy writers was irrelevant, since all of those texts were soon lost.  Plautus (and his successor Terence) carried the stage traditions, the character types, and the jokes into the future.

I read five Plautus plays over the last five weeks.  A play a week seemed like a natural pace.  Amphitryon, Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier), Pseudolus, Rudens (The Rope), and The Menaechmus Twins, all from the late 3rd and early 2nd century BCE.  Plautus’s plays are also the beginning of Roman literature, the oldest surviving complete works.  The great age of Roman literature (Catullus, Virgil, Lucretius, etc.) is 150 years in the future.  Always curious what is saved and what is not.

How Plautus loves twins.  Separate them at birth and the confusions of their later meeting is all the comedy he needs.  And the play ends when the twins finally meet on stage.  Young Shakespeare turned The Menaechmus Twins into The Comedy of Errors, but added a second set of twins, likely borrowed from Amphitryon, to double the fun.  I have wondered if he was deliberately trying to outdo Plautus.

Revisiting these plays, and having read a lot more plays since I last read Plautus, Amphitryon looks like the star of the bunch.  Jupiter “seduces” Alcmena by appearing as her husband, a general who should be at the front but has returned home for one night just for the sex.  Mercury, disguised as the general’s servant, guards the door.  When the general and his servant return home early, sour comedy ensues as the gods openly torment the humans for laughs.  It all works out, since Jupiter impregnates Alcmena with Hercules, and anyway these are gods so what can you do?

Jean Giraudoux titled his 1928 version Amphitryon 38, putting the question in the title: why another Amphitryon, among the most adapted plays in history.  I’ve read versions by Molière and Heinrich von Kleist.  These versions both at least suggest that part of the comedy of Amphitryon, the abuse of power by the ruler, is not all that funny.  Even Plautus’s Mercury, in a prologue, first calls the play a tragedy, and when the audience groans “turn[s] it from a tragedy to a comedy without altering a line” (3, tr. Lionel Casson):

I’ll make it into a comedy with some tragedy mixed in.  After all, with kings and gods appearing in it, I don’t think it would be right to make it pure comedy.  (3)

But even the more typical comedies, with their young couple in love and loyal slave tricking the grumpy father who is keeping them apart, the purest of comedies, have their sour moments, particularly the way women are treated as property.  And these are the stories where love triumphs over money, fantasies that hint at some of the miseries of ordinary Roman life.

But no one, outside of a university Classics department, would now perform a Plautus play as such.  They are perfect for adaptation, which is what 20th century playwrights have dome with them.  Pump up the female characters, update the jokes, add new songs, and you have The Boys from Syracuse and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  You have Amphitryon 38, and then 39 and 40.

In February I will read several plays by Terence, more elegant (I am told) and sophisticated (he invents the double plot) than popular Plautus.  Please try one if he sounds interesting.

life is probably nothing other than happiness - Jean Anouilh and Anne Carson adapt Greek plays, and Jean Giraudoux adapts something else

The French went nuts, in the 1930s and even more so in the 1940s, for adaptations of ancient Greek plays.  I don’t know why.  I have guesses.  The one I read most recently is Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944).  The play’s major theme of “duty to the state” versus “duty to something else” (the gods in Sophocles, perhaps the self in Anouilh) sounds like the perfect way to get in trouble with Nazi censors, but no, they seemed all right with the debate. 

A third of the play, one long scene, is nothing but the debate between Creon and Antigone.  Each debater is convinced, by the end, that they are less right than they thought.  Creon is, to a large degree, arguing to Antigone that she should live, that she should let him protect her from his own law:

You’ll despise me more than ever for saying this, but finding it out, as you’ll see, is some sort of consolation for growing old: life is probably nothing other than happiness. (tr. Barbara Bray)

Meanwhile Antigone argues, in contemporary French fashion, that life is nothing other than absurdity and Creon should execute her as soon as possible.  Psychologically, it often seems like she buries her brother not out of duty but as a form of “suicide by cop.”

Greek plays in general, and this one in particular, are ideal for stripped down sets, avant-garde musical accompaniment, and anachronisms.  The big surprise to me was the large, goofy part of the guard, pure comic relief, perfect for, say Lou Costello or Stan Laurel.

***

Anne Carson has a new adaptation of (riff on) a Greek play, the Herakles or Euripides (c. 416 BCE) turned into the H of H Playbook of Carson (c. 2021 CE).  Like her Antigonick (2012), but I think not her Antigone (2015), it is a mix of poetry and art book, jokes and tragedy, aggravation and brilliance.

I thought the piece starts to snap together when H of H takes the stage, his labors complete, his existentialist doubts just beginning.  Was that really such a good way to spend a life?  I mean, killing a lion, what’s the point of that?  He finds reading Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) helpful for understanding his own psychology:

Our business was to crush the counterrevolution.  And Victor Serge sums it up: occupational psychosis.

This dang book has no page numbers.  Here it is:

Maybe another photo, too.  It is an art book:

H of H:

I should have left you in The Chair of Forgetfulness.

Th[eseus]:

Maybe you did, Daddio, maybe you did.

H of H:

One correction.  I don’t call them gods.  If god exists, god is a perfect thing, not some hooligan from bad daytime TV.

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Anouilh was deeply influenced – in fact inspired to become a playwright – by Jean Giraudoux, and I have trouble telling them apart.  Giraudoux’s “Greek plays” are mostly from the 1930s, while Anouilh’s are form the 1940s, so there’s a difference.  Their styles and interests are similar.  It is strange to think that plays by both writers were once commonly staged in English.

I read a non-Greek Giraudoux adaptation recently, Ondine (1938), where the lovely 1811 fairy tale novella of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué is turned into what else but absurdist French proto-existentialism.  Can a man survive the love a pure water spirit?  No, for he is human.

Parts – the tragic ending – are still lovely, parts ridiculous.  Parts both:

HANS: I’m being called too, Undine; called by something pale and cold.  Take back your ring, and be my true widow under the water. (almost at the end, tr. Roger Gellert)

Giraudoux stuffs in plenty of magic and trickery and surrealist goofing.  Unlike stripped-down wartime Anouilh, he had a budget.

***

I have been thinking about organizing some kind of readalong for next year, and one idea that seems almost good is to read through the extant Greek plays, all of them, at a pace of one a week.  They are all short, and there are only 45* survivors.  They are foundations of Western literature in multiple ways, and mostly a great pleasure in their own right.  Anyone interested? 

* I first wrote "44," miscounting Euripides, but now I think I will do a 46 week event, reading Menander's complete Dyskolos and also his completed The Girl from Samos.

the rest of my French reading in May - André Breton's war and Jean Giraudoux's peace

Two authors, aside from Kessel, filled out my May reading in French, André Breton and Jean Giraudoux.

Nadja (1928), Breton’s novel-like textual art object, some mix of the early history of Surrealism, art criticism, and a fictionalized encounter with a mentally ill woman who is perhaps what we now call an “outsider artist.”  Breton’s use of photographs – of his friends, his art collection, his favorite cafés, documents, scraps – is the most notable feature of the book, full of ideas.  I suppose I found all that more interesting than the central story about the woman in the title.

I read the revised 1964 version of Nadja, which seems to be the one in print in France.  The only English translation is of the original 1928 version.  So strictly speaking, whatever I read is not available in English.  My understanding is that there are some substantial differences in the texts, but I do not know what they are.  All of this was a surprise to me.

Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930).  The original Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) felt like a work of Surrealist art, while this one read more like an important historical document.  Breton fights with his enemies and also his friends, some of whom will be enemies soon enough.  Freud is diminished a little, Marx, or maybe more accurately Stalin, elevated.  Passages on the great Surrealist predecessors – Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Poe – were interesting, but this is not really a work of criticism.  A couple of later essays included in the same volume, written when Breton had some distance and was not getting in fistfights, have more insight into the artistic purpose of Surrealism.

Both Nadja and Second Manifesto were difficult texts, sometimes discursive and obscure.  An important aspect of learning a language by reading is to puzzle out words and phrases from context, but Surrealist writing often deliberately jerks the language away from the context.  That is much of its fun.  But perhaps the French language-learner should not spend so much time with Surrealism.  Yes, perhaps.

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I read two Jean Giraudoux plays, Intermezzo (1933, in English as The Enchanted) and La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (1935, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place – I would add an exclamation point).

Intermezzo is about a young woman who has fallen in love with a ghost, and the small-town bourgeois officials (the mayor and so on) who try to save her.  Aside from the good comedy about the pompous, self-centered officials, I did not understand this play, “the point,” I mean.  I think I was all right with the language.  I have read two earlier Giraudoux plays, Siegfried (1928) and Amphitryon 38 (1929), both of which were about divided identities, or divided loyalty.  Intermezzo belongs with them, at least I can see that.

The Trojan War Won’t Happen! has a point that is clear enough.  Giraudoux's day job was in the diplomatic service, and this play is an outraged warning.  Paris has just brought Helen to Troy, and the Greeks are in pursuit.  Hector, the great warrior, and a few other characters do everything they can to stave off war, but we know that Cassandra is right, the Trojan War will happen, and poetry will pass from Troy to Greece, as she says in the last line.  The old men, hotheads, incompetents, and theorists will make sure of that.  The Trojans are the French, the Greeks the Germans.

The most audacious scene, I thought, features an expert in international law, who first argues that the law requires peace, then, just as easily and logically, that it requires war.  I think this is where I double-checked the date of the play.  No, this is 1935, not 1938, long before “peace in our time” and all that.  Giraudoux obviously saw what was happening, for all the good it did him.