Roman Comedy and the Poetics of Adaptation

Abstract

Every act of literary creation endeavours to bridge the gap between fiction and reality by transplanting a textually constructed subjective experience into the cultural realm of its audience. When a play announces itself as a deliberate remake of a priorwork, the process of cultural adaptation is programmatically disclosed and converted into a subject of theatrical discourse. This is especially true in the case of the comoediae palliatae (‘comedies in Greek dress’) of the archaic Roman dramatists, which present themselves as revisitations of works originally conceived in and for a different cultural context. All the plays of Roman comedy are overt adaptations of originals of Greek ‘New Comedy’ (nea), so called to distinguish the Hellenistic evolution of the comic genre from its fifth-century manifestations, grouped under the label of ‘Old Comedy’ (archaia). The transition from the archaia to the nea marks an apparently radical thematic and tonal shift: from political topicality to familial domesticity, from vitriolic, ‘iambic’ abuse to psychological humour, from rampant obscenity to restrained laughter. It is from the main representatives of NewComedy (Menander,Diphilus, Philemon),whoseworks becameknown to Roman culture in the middle of the third century bc , that the Latin comedians drew their plots with stock characters, bourgeois atmospheres, and Greek settings. Roman comedy thus was born and developed as a genre of remakes. Roman comedy’s acknowledged appropriation of the repertoire of Greek New Comedy, then, transforms the stage into a site for meditating upon