Plautus and Terence: Five Comedies Book

They say that comedy is one of the most difficult things to do well: itʻs so much a question of timing, phrasing, even the choice of an individual word can make or break a joke (and perhaps a whole scene, as well). So much harder, then, is the job of a translator of comedy; and this combination of Plautus & Terence, Parker & Berg achieves very mixed results, but Iʻm glad that they made the attempt.

Plautus, as the author of emotionally simple plots, boisterous energy, and almost non-stop wordplay, strikes me as the harder of the two authors to adapt. He is very much a product of his time and place and was well adapted to it, as his place as the more popular of the playwrights among the ancient Romans attests. But the result is that he doesn't necessarily travel well, across either time or space. We've no doubt lost much of the nuance of many of the words he uses and can therefore only guess at the effect that they would have had on the audience. Worst still, trying to approximate not just the jokes, but also the very sounds of the words themselves used to make them is would be a nearly impossible task under the best of circumstances. With this in mind, it's hardly a condemnation to say that Parker shoots a bit wide of the mark. His use of alliteration comes off feeling forced and the insults he uses end up just sounding foolish (but not in a good way). The energy is there; the art (and thereby, much of the humor, as well) is lacking.

Berg's Terence is strikingly different. Terence is, of course, the more restrained, thoughtful writer, whose plots may not achieve the guffaws of a Plautine farce, but are nevertheless, in their way, more well rounded as pieces of literature. They give the reader (or, more ideally, viewer) not just something to laugh at, but something to think about: an engaged member of the audience cannot simply let a Terentian play wash over him like a Plautine, then leave the theater unchanged by the experience. Terence taps into some very basic conflicts, and they in turn almost force the theater-goer/reader to form an opinion, take a side, root for one character or another. And so, where Terence puts less emphasis on wordplay (which is not, by any means, to say "elegance of phrasing") and more on ideas, his plays, it seems to me, are pre-primed for a potentially more positive reception from audiences of a far wider array of times and places.

In the end, I enjoyed Berg's Terence more than Parker's Plautus, perhaps for the reasons mentioned above. But then again, it is all just a matter of taste, and as the Romans themselves might say, de gustibus non disputandum est!