Plautinopolis: Imagination and Representation in Plautus' Roman Comedy

Scholarship on self-referentiality in Plautus’ Roman comedy has historically concentrated upon metatheater, highlighting the artificiality of performance conventions but largely taking the content of his plays as reflective of contemporary Greco-Roman reality, however stylized. By identifying a broader range of self-referential effects at work in his plays, including metageneric commentary upon the characters and plots of the New Comic tradition, I demonstrate that Plautus calls attention to the artificiality not only of their performance but also of their content. Plautine comedy is not set in the real world, I argue, but in a made-up, conventional location, “Plautinopolis.”Informed by scholarship on the worlds of science fiction and fantasy media, my first chapter offers a systematic model of Plautine generic conventions, conceptualizing them as the rules of an imaginary world in which all Plautus’ surviving plays are set. My second and third chapters propose that in emphasizing Plautinopolis’ artificiality, the plays’ self-referential effects encourage spectators to gain competence in the generic and theatrical conventions that define it; approaches from fan studies, theater semiotics, and narratology elucidate the processes through which viewers do so. Readings of Mercator in Chapter 2 and Poenulus in Chapter 3 illustrate how characters, too, may gain competence, and I argue that by habitually giving happier endings to more competent characters, Plautus shows spectators the stakes of understanding his play-world. With a reading of Curculio’s choragus speech, my final chapter argues that the imaginative worldbuilding that Plautine comedy encourages creates immersive effects through which spectators may participate as co-creators in playmaking. Recognizing the role that metagenre plays in reinforcing Plautinopolis’ artificiality reveals Plautus’ innovation in the representative dynamics of the New Comic tradition, which he casts as distinct from other theatrical genres in its aesthetics and relationship to its spectators. The imaginative demands that Plautine comedy makes of its viewers show Plautus’ persistent concern with their appreciation of drama as not merely a representative project, but a creative one, as well. The implications of this new model of Plautine representation extend from theater history to historicist work on Roman comedy to reception studies.

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