ABSTRACT
This is especially true of Plautus’ plays (see Chapter 3.8-3.9), many of which have metatheatrical moments, such as when a character breaks the dramatic illusion to refer to the presence of the audience, in so doing drawing attention to the artifice of the situation – the actors on stage playing their parts and the audience accepting the dramatic illusion created by the actors. Plautus’ supreme metatheatrical creation is one of his latest plays, Pseudolus, first staged in 191 bce and so popular that it was still being performed more than a hundred years later, in Cicero’s time. The play itself has a plot typical of Roman comedy, in which boy wants girl but cannot get her until some obstacle has been overcome. Here the plot is in minimal form, as the play seems to be more than anything else a vehicle for the creation of Plautus’ most spectacular comic villain and his most ingenious slave, Pseudolus. The characters are all hilariously overwritten – Calidorus, the infatuated young man, wallowing in his emotions and absolutely no help in practical terms; Ballio, the unscrupulous, hard-nosed pimp, owner of the girl with whom Calidorus is in love and interested only in getting his money; and Pseudolus, the clever slave, who rashly promises Calidorus that he will get him the money he needs to buy his girl from the pimp and then has to devise a scheme to fulfil his extravagant promise. Since this is a comedy, we can feel confident that Pseudolus will achieve this aim, even though for the first half of the play neither we nor he has the faintest idea how. But it is precisely that ‘how’ that opens the way for metatheatricality.
