Negotiating Credibility in the Prologues of Plautus

Doug Clapp (Samford University)

Plautus deploys his Prologus or the character assigned the prologue duties to invite the audience into the dramatic world of the comedy by eliding the distinction between that world and the reality inhabited by the audience. Plautus will toy playfully with the dramatic illusion, as explored by Slater (Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind, 1985) and Moore (The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience, 1998), but this paper studies one element of Plautus’s effort to establish the illusion. Plautus buttresses the credibility of the dramatic circumstances by calling on informal, word of mouth corroboration.

Several Plautine prologues triangulate between the characters on the stage and the audience in the seats with a third position that occupies the time and space of the audience but the circumstances of the comic situation. The brief reference to this unnamed voice offers verification for the comic premise. At Menaechmi 22-23, Prologus acknowledges that he has not seen the twins whose perfect likeness he describes, and he is concerned that the audience will not trust him. He assures the audience, however, that he has his information on the authority of an eye-witness. This eye-witness, then, brings news from the comic universe directly into present-day Rome. Likewise, the Prologus of Poenulus can speak at 59-63 with the utmost confidence about two Carthaginian brothers, one dead, one alive, because he has spoken with the undertaker for the deceased. In Captivi, Prologus does not call on an outside voice but at 1-3 asks the audience to verify the veracity of his claims. In this case, he only wants confirmation that the prisoners are, in fact, standing, but he thus implicates the audience in the credibility of the dramatic project.

These examples point to the need for Plautus to produce ostensibly reliable witnesses in order to fulfill an apparent burden of proof, proof that a single universe contains both the audience and the action. The existence of this need for corroboration indicates, perhaps, an underlying assumption that a spoken assertion only suffices when supported by credible evidence. Without such evidence, we would come face to face with the dangerous Vergilian monster, Rumor.