9 Early Roman Drama and Theatre
Early Roman Drama and Theatre
I. Introduction: An Overview of Roman Drama
As Rome begins and ends with Romuli, so its drama and theatre also come full circle across the ages. Traditionally, there are three major phases of development:
1) an early period (pre-240 BCE) when native Italian drama,
such as Atellan farces, phlyaces and Fescennine verses, dominated
the Roman stage;2) the period of literary drama (240 BCE – ca. 100 BCE),
when the Romans primarily adapted classical and post-classical Greek plays;3) the renaissance of popular entertainment (ca. 100 BCE
– 476 CE), when traditional Roman fare like circuses, spectacles and mime
returned to the forefront of the entertainment scene.
The third phase is far and away the longest, encompassing all of Roman history from its highest point in the first century BCE to the civilization’s so-called “Decline and Fall” in the fifth century CE. Arguably, a fourth phase could be added, namely, Byzantine entertainments which centered on mime and chariot races, essentially an extension of the preceding period of popular entertainment. Thus, it is clear Roman tastes gravitated toward circuses, sports and broad comedies making those Hellenized Latin dramas, on which our attentions primarily rest today—they constitute the vast majority of surviving scripts—littlemore than a brief intermission in the form of entertainment the vast majority of Romans preferred over time: spectacle.
At first glance, Roman theatre history presents a fundamental problem: the evidence for theatre does not coincide with that for drama. That is, the majority of texts we have today derive from the second phase (the age of literary drama in the second and third centuries BCE), whereas all extant Roman theatres date significantly later and may not even have been constructed for dramatic performances at all. With that, it is hard to reconstruct the dynamics of Roman stagecraft. While much the same might be said of ancient Greece, it is certain that Greek post-classical theatres were designed for the performance of plays, at least to some extent. At Rome there is no such guarantee.
This discrepancy between the physical and literary evidence stems largely from the two-fold nature of Roman theatre, itself a ramification of the social context of ancient Rome. Literary drama was aimed, for the most part, at the upper classes. Plautus’ comedy, as low-brow as it may look to us, was directed toward an audience willing to listen to words and follow a plot, as opposed to watching acrobats, tightrope-walkers and gladiators.
Terence’s plays go further yet and invite actual contemplation of the human condition, what, no doubt, the Roman tragedies written during the late Republic also did, many of which were based on Greek myth and drama. Unfortunately not a single play of this sort has been preserved intact. Conversely, the great arenas found all over the Roman world, of which the Colosseum is the most visible reminder, ho