EVIDENCE FOR PERFORMANCES OF REPUBLICAN COMEDY IN FOURTH-CENTURY ROME

[...]in cases like the present, Donatus claims, they would stay on the proscaenium, the interior (intus) being situated behind what he calls (the convincing thing) a fair guess being that he is referring to the use of an illusionistic flat representing a house facade, from behind which the audience would have heard the girls cries.14 Knowledge of this and similar stage conventions (there seems to be no means of ascertaining their origin and date) may of course have been transmitted by the tradition on which Donatus drew. Briskly dismissing the very possibility of such performances, he instead outlines various options, suggesting that Donatus is perhaps referring to a performance tradition not using masks (Auffhrungspraxis ohne Masken)20 or to what women actors (Frauen) did in mimes (which basically would amount to much the same).21 15 While claiming that there were no fourth-century performances of Terence, W. Madyka, De Donato histrionum praeceptore (Wrocaw, 1953), 57 (despite his books title) dismisses Donatus report, arguing that Donatus performance-related comments were directed at future rhetors. 420 PATRICK KRAGELUND vocabulary and of course in dramaturgy, the information offered by such glosses ranges from the exceptional to the trivial, much of it being duplicated by other guardians of language (to use the expression of Robert Kaster).25 Here, however, where the amount of rival evidence is patchy in the extreme, the gloss on Mysis varied life on ancient stages by pure accident offers something truly precious, since, in an offhand manner, it acknowledges not only that but also in what form at least one of Terences comedies in Donatus own day still had a stage life of its own. Far from it, only men of little learning (parum doctis) and the unlearned spectator (inconditi spectatoris) had difficulty in understanding such niceties, these divisions having been cleverly made less clear-cut by the learned men of old (doctis ueteribus).31 Terence and his fellow Latin comedy writers (Latini comici) had done so because they did not want to let the act divisions split up the flow of the action, fearing that the unenthusiastic (fastidiosus) spectator would take some intermission in the continuous flow of events (distincta alicubi continuatione succedentium rerum) as a signal to leave the theatre before the final curtain, thus becoming disrespectful of the remainder of the comedy (reliquiae comoediae contemptor).