Hans Bork (Stanford University)
What’s in a genre? The audience experience(s) of palliata comedy and Roman mime
How did audiences experience early Roman mime? The palliata (“Greek costume”) comedies of Plautus and Terence represent just one of half-a-dozen or so genres in active production during the Mid-Republican period (Manuwald 2011). Of these, one in particular remains obscure: Roman mime (planipes, or mimus), particularly in its earlier pre-literary incarnation, sometimes called “popular” mime. Our only substantial fragments of the genre are of this later literary type (Panayotakis 2010). But what do we know if the mid-Republican version?
Very little it turns out, which is unfortunate because the generic lines between mimus and palliata are blurry. Elaine Fantham described popular mime as the “missing link” of Latin literary history. Yet mime is a cipher, a genre that available evidence suggests “does not fit the generic categories of comedy or tragedy” (Fantham 1989). Ancient scholars record generic markers for mimus eerily similar to those of palliata comedy: “loose” plots, abundant jokes, “low” characters, and a focus on humor over narrative (Panayotakis 2005). Compare Horace’s famous critique of Plautus at AP168–76; the conceptual overlap between the two genres was enough that Cicero himself tries to clarify their differences at Pro Cael. 65. To this, contemporary scholars add a tantalizing coincidence: mimus was formally adopted into the ludi scaenici (festival performances) at the Floralia of 170BC, just around the time palliata was breathing its last gasps as a living genre (Brown 2014). Did mimus replace palliata? Perhaps, but the details are lost.
This paper considers the relationship between the two genres from a different angle, by examining palliata comedy and early mime through the lens of audience experience. However similar on the page, the genres surely differed on the stage: at the very least, in their respective use of costuming, music, and styles of stage-blocking, elements each genre of Latin drama applied uniquely (Marshall 2006). Such differences would have been obvious to audiences watching the performance, but would not necessarily carry over into surviving textual evidence. Thus this paper is an experiment in recovery, focusing on two specific elements—masking and music—in a single context: the “expandable” joke routines that typify Plautine style (Duckworth [1952] 1994; Wright 1974). Such routines were deliberately “digressive,” joking for the sake of joking, in comparison to the expository, “progressive” humor routines that advance a play’s narrative (Critchley 2002). Expandable jokes were likely unscripted in both palliata and mimus, and so were an opportunity for the actors to improvise freely (Marshall 1999). My analysis considers how masking and music were deployed in scenes from extant palliata comedies, commenting on how these elements might have affected contemporary audiences. I then extrapolate how the absence of these elements, as was typical in contemporary mime, might have changed audience perception of the joke. Where appropriate (and feasible), I compare evidence from Latin literary mime, as well as other contemporary comedy traditions. The approach is necessarily ex silentio and theoretical, but offers a new avenue for considering the relationship of Latin palliata comedy to its contemporary dramatic genres.