Howerd and Horace Go Live

When Carlson talks about Roman theories of theatre, he gets into comedy. Since I don't like comedy theatre that much, the work of an unknown fan of Aristotle, which delineates the structure and characters of comedy drama, was bound to drive me frantic. Carlson is probably looking at comedy because Latin only really produced any worthwhile playwrights in this genre and, as he notes, both Terence and Plautus would use their prologues to make a few points about the nature of the art.

Later, Frankie Howerd would use the prologue for a weekly laugh on his acclaimed hist-com, Up Pompeii. And in the same way that Howerd made a living out of ripping Plautus for undemanding 1970s TV audiences, Carlson is quick to remind the reader that Rome owed a great deal to the Greeks. Even when he gets onto Cicero (who had a few opinions on comedy, in the context of how to give a good speech), he suggests that Cicero's deft summing up of the genre - 'an imitation of life, a mirror of custom and an image of truth' - probably has a Greek source.

I doubt that. The meaninglessness of the words, which could apply to any performance, even the Live Art Happenings that passed for rhetoric in Cicero's time and the use of a tricolon makes this sound very much like the sort of thing a Roman would say. Especially one who was a master of the smoke and mirrors school of legal speech like The Big C.

When Carlson gets onto Horace, he observes that it is unlikely that the early Romans had read Aristotle. I envy them that, and wonder how it reflects on the works of Seneca. But there are bigger problems using Horace and Cicero as sources:  they are talking broadly about poetry. The idea of the text is being foregrounded. The actual performance, the theatricality, is being ignored.

I am also a little bit of a snob about comedy, too.