MUSICAL STRUCTURE IN PLAUTUS

Even though act and scene divisions are found in the earliest manuscripts of Plautus and Terence, they possess no authority deriving from the playwright. While Greek New Comedy was divided into acts (each play possessing four act breaks and therefore five acts, though this is hard to prove conclusively) and while Horace believed five acts to be the ideal, at least in tragedy (Ars Poetica 189–90), neither comic playwright structured his dramas on this principle. Act divisions, when intended by the playwright, can serve a number of functions: they may indicate a pause in the action (as with the choral entr'actes signalled in the Menandrean manuscripts), or the passing of time within the narrative, or the blocking of a dramatic passage may allow the audience to consider it as a structural unit. None of these are relevant to Latin comedy. Roman comedies were presented continuously, without any breaks, and the elasticity of time is used on the Roman stage for comic effect, so any recognition of act divisions in performance would diminish the humour of the plays. There are even reasons to doubt an apparently explicit reference to a musical interlude within a play (Pseudolus 573a); nor can the presence of an empty stage be used to justify act divisions in Roman comedy. There were patterns and structural units in the plays of Plautus, which are clear and meaningful for understanding the dramatic procession of each narrative.