ABSTRACT
Menander uses mistaken identity plots and the comic soliloquy to portray a learning process in which a character comes better to understand himself, his situation, and his responsibility for his actions. Plautus uses word-play, rhythm, spectacle and parody to make comic capital of the theme of self-knowledge. His plays and their Renaissance adaptations demonstrate that Plautus and his imitators recognized the thematic importance of mistaken identity and the rhetoric of consciousness. But because he uses the mistaken identity plot and the set speech for comic purposes, critics have often ignored the Plautine model. Yet it provided an important channel of influence for New Comic strategies of rendering the inner life and movement toward self-knowledge of comic characters. 1
