It's Kind of a Funny Story

Jim, if only I could read your mind
And learn the torture that's tormenting you,
I'd gladly spare two men a lot of bother:
I wouldn't need to ask, or you to answer.
Now, since that's impossible, necessity
Compels me to question you. Answer me this:
Why have you been acting half-alive
These last few days, t---

Plautus, enough, enough. You forget that I've read your Pseudolus.

A hero's act enshrined in fame,
That will perpetuate my name.

Just stop it. You flatter yourself. The truth is that I do feel a bit depressed.

 Oh, dear!

I've been neglecting our blog.

 Oh, dear!

And when I do post something, sometimes it's like dropping a stone into a bottomless well. It never seems to hit bottom. 

 Oh, dear!

Finally, I feel as though my students and I did not do right by you. There was so much more to say about Pseudolus. 

OH, DEAR!!!

Do you really think that helps? I suppose I could do something to help myself -- maybe a blog post on your play?

It's stupid to entrust a plan
To a weak or wishy-washy man;
For all endeavors must depend
On how much effort you expend.

Ouch, that hurts. But okay, I accept the challenge. What shall I write about?

 "Phoenicium to her darling Calidorus . . ."

Yes, I see where you're headed. That letter from Rosie to her lover boy. I do find that bit interesting, for several reasons. Why did you write the play this way? Calidorus could simply have told Pseudolus about his predicament. Strictly speaking, there is no need for a letter. 

When the time is ripe, I'll let you know.
I don't want to repeat myself:
That's how blog posts become too long.

(deep sigh, accompanied by eye rolling) And then there's the other letter, the one from the Macedonian soldier to Ballio. Strictly speaking, that one is not necessary either. All that's required is for Harpax to present the ring, the one that made the wax impression the soldier left with Ballio, along with the rest of the purchase price. 

Yea, yea, forsooth.

So what's up with these letters? Why include them in the play?

Go ahead and ask.
Treat my knowledge as your Delphic oracle.

I'm struck by what Phoenicium writes at the end of her letter: "Everything I know I've tried to tell you clearly: / Now I'll put you to the test. One question, merely: / Are you in love or just pretending." Pretending? OF COURSE Calidorus is pretending: he's an actor on the stage, for goodness sake, playing a role!

So help me Pollux, I do declare
I've gone on a simply spectacular tear!

I mean, at some point this all becomes a bit ridiculous. Here's an actor playing a Latin-speaking Greek slave in a comedy set in Athens but staged in Rome before a largely illiterate audience, purporting to read aloud a barely legible letter written by a courtesan who speaks in verses replete with rhyming, alliterative, whacky language, e.g. teneris labellis molles morsiunculae, / papillarum horridularum oppressiunculae. And she is supposed to be asking Calidorus if this is all just pretense?

But look at the poet; when he starts to write,
He seeks what doesn't exist, and then he finds it;
He makes invented fiction look like truth.

Yea, I remember that part from the play. Anyway, I guess what I'm suggesting is that by introducing the letter, you bring to the audience's attention the idea of a sign. In simple terms, a sign is something that stands for something: I've used the example "red means stop, green means go" in an earlier blog to illustrate this. So here, in this play, Pseudolus draws attention to the function of letters and words as signs. He does this in various ways, but nowhere more tellingly than when he tells Calidorus that he sees Phoenicium "stretched out upon the boards, relaxed in wax." It's her name, obviously, the woman's sign that he sees on the wax tablet, not Phoenicium herself. He's confusing signifier and signified. It's silly, but it's telling.

Get moving,
Won't you?

Okay, okay, I know that I need to get to the point. The point is that whenever we draw attention from what is signified to the sign itself, we're pulling a Toto.

 ???

Toto is the little dog in the Wizard of Oz who pulls aside the curtain to reveal the sad little man at the controls of a machine that creates the mere image, the specter of a terrible, angry wizard that is frightening Dorothy and her friends. In other words, whenever we focus on the sign itself instead of what it signifies, we highlight the arbitrary nature of signs and the illusory quality of what we take for "reality." Or to put it another way, why shouldn't green mean stop, and red mean go?

I suspect that you're suspicious of me now.

Yes, I am. I get the feeling that with this play, you've constructed a world made of the finest tissue paper, and there you are, standing behind it, so that your own face is visible to us through the gauze. The letter at the beginning of the play is so obviously an "invented fiction" -- please, a literary Greek courtesan writing a verse letter in Latin for her favorite client with made-up words like oppressiunculae? -- that it draws attention to the fact that the entire play, too, is invented fiction.

Well, I won't back down.

I don't expect you to.  I don't expect you to be any less cunning than your creation Pseudolus. You're having some fun with us, and it is fun. Elsewhere in the play, you create a series of doubles to further amuse us and to underline (again) the playfulness of the play. The doubles for Pseudolus (Simia), Calidorus (Charinus), Simo (Callipho), and Harpax (Simia) suggest to me nothing so much as two universes that you have arranged to collide. It's as though you're saying: You think an old guy has to be crabby? Well, what about this fellow Callipho? You think Pseudolus is one of a kind? Well, what about this fellow Simia? You think identities are fixed, the world is stable, what you see is what you get? What are you, a dunce?

All the world's a stage.

That's Shakespeare, my flat-footed, clownish friend. Come on, let's go read some Ovid together. I think you'll like him.