Menander uses mistaken identity plots and the comic soliloquy to portray a learning process in which a character comes better to understand himself, his situation, and his responsibility for his actions. Plautus uses word-play, rhythm, spectacle and parody to make comic capital of the theme of self-knowledge. His plays and their Renaissance adaptations demonstrate that Plautus and his imitators recognized the thematic importance of mistaken identity and the rhetoric of consciousness. But because he uses the mistaken identity plot and the set speech for comic purposes, critics have often ignored the Plautine model. Yet it provided an important channel of influence for New Comic strategies of rendering the inner life and movement toward self-knowledge of comic characters.1
Plautus and Terence represent the chief dramatic tradition from which Renaissance comedy sprang. During the middle ages Terence was far more popular and widely read than Plautus both for his style and moral tone. The Renaissance interest in Plautus and Latin comedy can be traced to the arrival of Cusanus at Rome in 1429 with a manuscript containing sixteen Plautine comedies, twelve of which had been lost for centuries, and to the discovery of a manuscript of Donatus’ commentary at Mayence in 1433. Throughout the late fifteenth century, Plautus was performed in Latin and in vernacular translations in Italy and elsewhere. These productions were mounted not only at courts, but in the academies and schools. Plautus’ plays inspired Ariosto’s early comedies, and influenced subsequent Renaissance comic practice throughout Europe. We thus need to begin by looking at several Plautine comedies to discover how he uses the rhetoric of consciousness for comic effect.
Plautus’ Amphitryo opens with a prologue spoken by Mercury in which he explains the argument – Jupiter has impersonated Amphitryo in order to seduce Alcmena, and Mercury has impersonated Amphitryo’s slave Sosia to help his father. On the last night before the real Amphitryo’s victorious return from war, Jupiter has asked Night to extend her hours to permit him extra pleasure. The play proper opens on the real Sosia approaching his master’s house with Mercury watching and commenting from the side. Sosia has been commissioned by his master to tell Alcmena of his victory at war and of his impending return. The scene begins in characteristically Plautine fashion with Sosia’s invented comic boast about his brave behavior in battle juxtaposed against his actual pusillanimity when he sees Mercury standing before the doors of Amphitryo’s house. Within the comic framework of the play, the meeting between Sosia and Mercury is a confrontation of Sosia with Sosia, a corporeal encounter of self with self.
This scene was so influential a representation of mistaken identity and doubling that both the Italians and the French have taken the proper name Sosia or Sosie as a noun meaning ‘double’ or ‘twin’. Many modern critics have been tempted to philosophize about this scene, to view it as ‘the problem of everyman; that is, ultimately, he is a stranger to himself’.2 But this scene parodies as well as dramatizes an existential problem. Plautus has taken what was a serious theme in Greek drama and New Comedy and parodied it in part through the comic business of contrasting Sosia’s boasts with his cowardly behavior, but more importantly by parodying the rhetoric of consciousness which Menander had used for more serious purposes.
In the interchange with Mercury Sosia poses himself a series of rhetorical questions (lines 402 ff., 455 ff.) and appeals to his past experience and common sense to assert his identity:
nonne hac noctu nostra navis (hue) ex portu Persico
venit, quae me advexit? non me hue erus misit meus?
nonne ego nunc sto ante aedis nostras? non mi estlanterna inmanu?
non loquor? non vigilo? nonne hie homo modo me pugnis contudit?
(lines 404–8)
Didn’t our ship arrive this very night from Perse Harbour, and me on it? Didn’t my master send me here? Aren’t I standing in front of our own house? Aren’t I carrying this lantern? Isn’t this me speaking? Am I awake? Hasn’t this fellow beaten me black and blue? (p. 244)3
Both he and Mercury, and later Amphitryo, accuse him of madness and dreaming. Sosia is convinced he has lost himself, literally: ‘ubi ego perii? ubi immutatus sum? ubi ego formam perdidi?/an egomet me illic reliqui, si forte oblitus fui?’ (lines 456–7). (‘Where did I lose myself? Where was I translated? Where did I shed my skin? Have I gone and left myself at the harbour by mistake?’ p. 246). Later in an absurd conversation with his master, he asserts ‘sum profecto et hie et illic’ (line 594) (‘I am here and there’). He is driven to imagine himself a twin: ‘geminus Sosia hie factust tibi’. His speech here is reminiscent of monologues of discovery which we find so often at the close of comedies of mistaken identity:
Sosiam servom tuom
praeter me alterum, inquam, adveniens faciam ut offendas domi,
Davo prognatum patre eodem quo ego sum, forma, aetate item
qua ego sum. quid opust verbis? geminus Sosia hie factust tibi.
(lines 612–15)
I bet you anything you like, when you open that door you’ll find another slave Sosia; son of my father Davus; same age as me; same face, same everything. Well that explains it, doesn’t it? You’ve got twins! (p. 253)
There is, of course, more of the ridiculous than the pathetic in Sosia’s plight; nevertheless the rhetorical devices Plautus uses suggest both a psychological and mythical dilemma – the rivalry of twinship or doubles and the confrontation of self with self.
Renaissance adapters of Plautus and Latin comedy recognized and exploited the comic possibilities of this rhetoric of consciousness. Early in the scene between master and slave, Amphitryo asks Sosia
tune id dicere audes, quod nemo umquam homo antehac
vidit nec potest fieri, tempore uno
homo idem duobus locis ut simul sit?
(lines 566–8)
Have you the face to tell me something no one has ever seen on this earth and never will – one man in two places at the same time? (p. 251)
The Renaissance Protestant adapter used these two scenes to attack the doctrine of transubstantiation. In the interlude Jack Juggler he parodies the motif of self-reference by multiplying the pronouns. The Sosia figure, Jack Careaway, uses both the first and third person to refer to himself:
And is not he-I an unkind knave,
That woll no more pity on my self have?
Here may you see evidently, i-wis,
That in him-me no drop of honesty is.4
Both Plautus and his English adapter understand the comic potential of such a meeting; both are parodying the problem of the divided self. Neither uses the device to force his character to face any of the psychological implications which confrontation with self raises, and neither shows characters who change and develop. Whether for purposes of comic absurdity or mocking religious dogma, this rhetoric of the divided self was available to Renaissance comic playwrights, to be exploited not only for its comic possibilities, but, as we shall see, for its potential as a means of characterization.
We should look also at Plautus’ Pseudolus, said by Cicero, who greatly admired it, to be the playwright’s own favorite. The Pseudolus is larded with soliloquies spoken by the trickster slave in which we find the rhetoric of consciousness characteristic of complex comic characters. Plautus’ slaves, as is well known, are intriguers, creators opposed to the irascible masters and crooks who represent a conservative, propertyconscious society. Their deceits, which are never punished ensure the triumph of a less rigid social order, usually represented by an erotic relationship. They are, therefore, morally positive within the world in which they operate, which is why, despite continual threats of punishment, Plautine slaves are never actually sent to the mills. Pseudolus is the creator-slave par excellence. His improvisations and self-consciousness outdo even Tranio of the Mostellaria, and he is undoubtedly the most interesting character of the play, the one whom Plautus endows with life as well as dramatic function.
From the opening scene in which the young lover Callidorus explains his dilemma to Pseudolus, we find the typical reversal of roles characteristic of the servus-adulescens relationship. Callidorus asks for his orders (‘equid imperas?’, line 383) and Pseudolus is in command. In no other play of Plautus is the military imagery to describe the slave strategist more pervasive. Not only is Pseudolus a military strategist; he is at various moments and among other roles a cook, weaver, grave robber, Socrates, tragic villain, oracle and Greek dancer. Callidorus’ father Simo calls him ‘meus Ulixes’ and likens his attempt to inveigle the slave girl Phoenicium from the pimp Ballio to Ulysses’ theft of the statue of Pallas.5 In the Pseudolus, Plautus plays with the mistaken identity plot primarily through his protagonist’s role playing.
But perhaps the most interesting is his role as poet-creator to whom he compares himself in his first soliloquy:
sed quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi,
quaerit quod nusquam gentiumst, reperit tamen,
facit illud veri simile quod mendacium est,
nunc ego poeta fiam: viginti minas,
quae nunc nusquam sunt gentium, inveniam tamen. (lines 401–5)
Well, after all, when a poet sits down to write, he has to start by looking for something which doesn’t exist on this earth, and somehow or other he finds it; he makes a fiction look very much like a fact. That’s what I’ll do; I’ll be a poet; I’ll invent two thousand drachmas, which at present don’t exist anywhere on earth, (p. 233)6
Pseudolus does finally invent twenty minas just as he creates his roles, with words. All his roles and identities depend on language. In the soliloquy quoted above, Pseudolus begins by speaking to himself: ‘tu astas solus, Pseudole’ and then poses himself a series of questions: ‘quid nunc acturu’s, postquam erili filio/largitu’s dictis dapsilis? ubi sunt ea?’ (‘That leaves me, on my own. Now what are you going to do, eh, Pseudolus? You’ve entertained your young master with a feast of fine talk. And what does it amount to now?’ p. 233). In this soliloquy Plautus sounds as if he were speaking about his own method of poetic creation. The twenty minas come to represent not literal money, but the intrigue itself which Pseudolus, like Plautus, invents with words.
In the following scene Pseudolus plays the oracle, replying in Greek with the oracle’s conventional response to Simo’s queries. Pseudolus boasts he will inveigle the money for Phoenicium before the end of the day, despite his master’s being on his guard. Simo’s friend Callipho, sympathetic or at least admiring of the slave’s confidence, says ‘edepol mortalem graphicum, si servat fidem!’ (line 519) (‘the man’s a living marvel, if he can be as good as his word’, p. 237). Callipho compares Pseudolus to a work of art; a few lines later, when accused of collusion with Ballio, Pseudolus swears that if such were the case,
quasi in libro quom scribuntur calamo litterae,
stilis me totum usque ulmeis conscribito.
(lines 544a-5)
you can scribble me over from head to foot with birch rods for pens, like writing words in a book. (p. 238)
For Pseudolus even punishment will be like the act of writing.
Self-conscious allusions to the play itself appear more frequently here than in any other Plautine comedy and serve to extend our sense of Pseudolus as surrogate artist. The first immediately precedes the slave’s opening soliloquy quoted in part above. Callidorus has asked him to explain his plan; Pseudolus responds, ‘nolo bis iterari, sat sic longae fiunt fabulae’ (line 388) (‘No point in going over it twice – plays are long enough as it is’ p. 232). In his next soliloquy he speaks directly to the audience, swearing he is not simply making rash promises to amuse them:
nam qui in scaenum provenit,
novo modo novom aliquid inventum adferre addecet;
si id facere nequeat, det locum illi qui queat.
(lines 568–70)
What’s an actor for, if he is not to bring some new kind of surprise on to the stage? If he can’t do that much, he’d better make way for someone who can. (p. 239)
It is almost as if Plautus were using his slave-creator to describe his own poetic method – a kind of improvisation.
But Pseudolus’ final role is not of the stature of those he has assumed earlier in the action. After the success of his deception, he gets dead drunk. Instead of addressing himself as he had earlier in the second person, he addresses his feet. In the description he gives of himself at the party of celebration with Callidorus, he is as unselfconscious as he has been self-conscious elsewhere. Though he is still able to manipulate his master, the atmosphere of transformation has changed. Pseudolus as a Greek dancing girl is a far cry from the general, orator, tragic actor, oracle and poet he has played earlier. It is a strange ending – comic, but not without a certain pathos at the loss of such capaciousness and lifelike power.
Role-playing is not the only way Plautus explores the theme of mistaken identity in the Pseudolus; he also uses the more conventional mistaken identity devices of deception and disguise in the Harpax plot. Simia, whose name suggests his capacity to mimic, is to play the role of Harpax. As he tells Pseudolus, ‘numquam edepol erit ill’ potior Harpax quam ego’ (line 925) (‘No one will make a better Harpax than I’, author’s trans.). Ballio’s complete seduction and his reaction to the true Harpax whom he believes to be an impostor bear out this boast. The confrontation between the true Harpax and Ballio is filled with irony since the pimp believes he has caught Pseudolus in the act, whereas we know that Ballio is already victim of the very trick he thinks he is exposing. In this interchange Harpax reacts as we have seen other characters react when their identities are questioned: he accuses Ballio of madness and dreaming and appeals repeatedly to the facts of his name and rank as proof of his identity.
The Pseudolus, with its series of soliloquies in which the slave describes his intrigues, suggests the importance of such set speeches to characterization. Whereas realistic drama expresses the content of such speeches by a variety of techniques – gesture, stage movement, eloquent silences, directly presented action, counteraction and the like – rhetorical drama, the drama of Greece and Rome and of the Renaissance, expresses character through language. Menander and Plautus make wide use of set speeches to reveal character, to show a character recognizing his limits and failures and moving toward some greater understanding. Terence, however, except in the Adelphoe, rarely uses set speeches and his comedies neither portray the inner life nor parody it. Their popularity in the Renaissance as school texts and the influence of the Terentian commentaries on dramatic practice, however, require that we look at Terence in our consideration of comic characterization.
Renaissance commentators recognized the Adelphoe as exceptional in Terence’s comic practice because Demea changes, but they also realized that his change of heart was very probably ironic. Donatus glosses line 992: ‘hie ostendit Terentius magis Demeam simulasse mutatos mores quam mutavisse’ (‘here Terence shows Demea to pretend to changed habits rather than to be changed’, author’s trans.).7 There is never any suggestion that Terence became fascinated with a character, as Plautus did with his Pseudolus, and allowed him to escape above the chain of events in which he functioned.8 Characters in Terence are generally subordinated to the needs of plot, but commentaries on Terence, because they represented a codified body of knowledge about ancient comic practice and were used so widely in Renaissance schools, illuminate the sixteenth-century view of comic characterization. Donatus was undoubtedly the most important of the commentators; his work includes two essays on comedy, the first of which we now attribute to Evanthius, but which Renaissance scholars believed to be his, and a line-by-line commentary on five of Terence’s six plays. The commentary went through numerous editions and printings from the time of its rediscovery by humanists in the fifteenth century until well into the seventeenth. Baldwin suggests that the sixteenth-century editions alone numbered close to a thousand.
The introductory essays formed critical thinking about comedy in the Renaissance. Toward the end of his De Fabula, Evanthius provides a short summary of the differences between tragedy and comedy which highlights the main features of comedy as he saw them:
inter tragoediam autem et comoediam cum multa turn imprimis hoc distat, quod in comoedia mediocres fortunae hominum, parvi impetus periculorum laetique sunt exitus actionum, at in tragoedia omnia contra, ingentes personae, magni timores, exitus funesti habentur; et illic prima turbulenta, tranquilla ultima, in tragoedia contrario ordine res aguntur; turn quod in tragoedia fugienda vita, in comoedia capessenda exprimitur; postremo quod omnis comoedia de fictis est argumentis, tragoedia saepe de historiafide petitur.9
In this short paragraph we find brought together many of the clivhés about comedy which are reiterated throughout the Renaissance and even today. Comedy deals with men of lower fortunes, an interpretation of Aristotle’s statement that comedy deals with characters who are worse than the average. In the sixteenth century, commentators often interpreted Aristotle to mean that comedy deals with characters who are guilty of minor offenses rather than grave crimes, and certainly Evanthius’ words allow for such an interpretation. We also find a brief description of comic structure – comedies begin with conflict and end in happiness and tranquility – and a rather interesting and strikingly modern phrase, that whereas in tragedy life is fled, in comedy it is seized.
Jodocus Badius Ascensius’ prefatory essay to his 1502 edition of Terence’s plays is the longest and most complete critical essay to accompany any of the Renaissance editions of Terence.10 He remarks that all characters in comedy go through considerable delusion and anxiety before the happy outcome of comedy is reached; he explains that Evanthius’ phrase vitam capessendam means comic characters reform after error. Ascensius’ remark is interesting in two respects – on the one hand it suggests a perceived comic structure of change and development important to my argument; on the other it indicates what will become an increasingly important feature of Terentian commentary, its emphasis on the moral utility of his plays. Comedy teaches moral lessons, as Renaissance reformers such as Erasmus, Melanchthon and others reiterate. They draw the lessons or places which specific plays and characters represent, the examples of prudent behavior to be emulated, imprudent behavior to be avoided.
Finally Evanthius makes the old distinction, also derived from Aristotle, that comic plots are based on fiction whereas tragic plots are based on history. This claim militates against Cicero’s equally influential statement that comedy is the imitation of life, a commonplace Donatus will quote in his own essay which follows. This conflict between the Ciceronian notion of comedy as an imitation of life and the Aristotelean description of the comic plot as fiction was resolved through the notion of probability or vraisemblance. Comedy is fictitious, but it must have a probable relation to the real. Donatus claims that this probability, which is based on recognition of the lifelike, constitutes the pleasure a reader or viewer takes in a play.
Evanthius’ summary does not mention the laws of characterization so important both to the commentary itself and to Renaissance drama, but elsewhere he praises Terence’s adherence to the rules of decorum, his diligence in attributing the appropriate traits to his personae according to their natures (habitus), ages (aetas), and fortunes (officium). The principle of decorum entails finding diction appropriate to the sex, rank, age, fortune and circumstances of a particular type. Evanthius attributes the dramatist’s success at making the fictive arguments of comedy fidem veritatis to his attention to decorum in character and plotting. In his esay which follows, Donatus enumerates the types commonly found in Terentian comedy, both the major characters, the senex, adulescens, and servus, and the minor types, the miles, leno, puella, meretrix and parasitus. Terence was widely recognized for his superiority at creating characters whose language and behavior represented the types described by Aristotle and Theophrastus and passed on to Quintilian and Cicero. Terence’s typical double plots required individualization within the types; the two fathers of the Adelphoe, for example, or the two young men of the Andria, were differentiated within the broad confines of their types. More importantly, Renaissance commentators recognized that in particular comic plots a character type inevitably becomes dynamic rather than static because the movement from a turbulent beginning to a tranquil end, as Evanthius puts it, or from error to reform, as Ascensius describes it, or from confusion to discovery, entails change.
Most of the work on dramatic characterization in Renaissance drama has focused on types and decorum, but by doing so, critics have been blinded to some important issues that deserve clarification.11 We need to distinguish between decorum, which in the Renaissance represented a code for portraying various types onstage, and the actual means of rendering their speech. Speeches which manifest characteristics of dialogue such as those we have analyzed in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, in Menander, and even in Plautus, create or represent an inner life regardless of how typically they may code information concerning sex, rank, fortune, or age. Instead of reciting the rules of decorum, we need to look at what Renaissance commentators have to say about the production of character.
Our judgment of a character’s lifelikeness depends, as I have argued, not so much on his character traits as how those traits are presented through language. It may not be true, for example, that old men are avaricious and young men carried away by their desires – we may know of countless examples from life which refute such generalizations. Our perception as spectators of the lifelikeness of a character is determined not by its relation to what we know of life, but how the character is presented onstage, whether the techniques the dramatist uses make it believable. Cicero himself recognized this when he said in De Senectute that a person’s traits depend not on his age, but on his character. Typically, he uses a literary example to prove his point: the opposing old men of the Adelphoe.
In De Ratione Studii, commonly regarded as an important shaping influence on the English grammar school, Erasmus says there are two decorums. Writers and commentators after him pick up on this distinction. One he calls commune, which is what we usually regard as decorum. It is general and requires that a character conform to the commonly recognized characteristics of his age, class, fortune, sex. But there was also what Erasmus called peculiare, or individual decorum. He, like Cicero, takes Terence as his example, arguing that the dramatist individualizes pairs of all three major types – old men, young lovers, slaves. In the De Copia Rerum he remarks that comic poets especially seem to have striven for variety in creating characters of the same type. Erasmus also noted that this pairing was not simply a function of Terentian double plots because Terence also distinguishes among type characters from play to play. The notion of individuation, of creating individualized characters, is not as foreign to the Renaissance as the emphasis given to decorum by modern critics makes it seem.12
Renaissance commentators and rhetoricians generally agree that impersonation is the most effective technique for creating character regardless of what name they give the figure. In our discussion of Menander it is called prosopopoeia, as it was by Aphthonius and Quintilian (IX, ii, 29–32), but Willichius, for example, called it dialogismos, while Donatus named it mimesis. All three terms, however, are illustrated with similar examples in which the author or a character impersonates the words of another character or person through an imaginary dialogue. A commonly cited example from the Adelphoe is Micio’s impersonation of his brother in the plays opening monologue. There we learn that Demea and Micio have opposite notions of child-rearing, one strict and even harshly austere, the other overly kind, even indulgent. Micio distinguishes between pater and dominus, claiming he is a father rather than a master to his son. The brothers, as Renaissance commentators recognized, are individualized representatives of a common type, the senex. To emphasize the contrast between them, Terence uses a conventional country/city dichotomy: Demea lives in the country, which represents thrift, sound values and hard work; Micio in the city, which typifies licentiousness and luxury.
Terence distinguishes between the two throughout the play: at I; ii, for example, Micio says to his brother, ‘natura tu illi pater es, consiliis ego’ (line 126) (You’re his father by blood; I’m his father at heart).13 Consilium here means ‘understanding,’ though Copley translates it as ‘heart.’ Micio and Aeschinus are not bound by nature, since Aeschinus is actually Demea’s son whom Micio has raised, but by a shared understanding and sense of purpose. But when Demea leaves the scene, we learn that Micio is more upset than he has let on; with his brother he has assumed a casual unconcern, but the latest of Aeschinus’ escapades has begun to shake even his firm faith.
In the last act, Demea assumes Micio’s fatherly role, forcing his brother to recognize the limitations of his method of child-rearing. Demea has pleaded throughout the action that Micio be as strict with Aeschinus as he is with Ctesipho; when Micio will not comply, Demea self-consciously assumes his brother’s identity and thereby pushes Micio into his: ‘nunc tu germanu’s pariter animo et corpore’ (line 957) (Now you really are my brother, body and soul, p. 165). Terence represents both characters as learning that they must balance an understanding of the humanness of their sons’ behavior with a sense of parental responsibility and authority. Hegio, friend to both fathers and common moral denominator for both, tells us the young men’s actions are only human (pp. 470–1).
The didactic function of the Adelphoe and of Terentian comedy generally made Terence a favourite of Renaissance scholars whose commentaries become increasingly moral and didactic in the course of the sixteenth century. Whereas Donatus glosses primarily explain usage, quote from other Latin and Greek authors, and explicate particular words or meanings, Renaissance commentators increasingly use the plays to illustrate moral lessons, most certainly a habit which derives from Erasmus. The distance between the plays themselves and the moral lessons they are said to demonstrate grows steadily. An excellent example is the handling of Terence’s treatment of the courtesan. Evanthius, who praises Terence’s success at creating characters who conform to their types, points out that his courtesans, as in the Andria, instead of being immoral, avaricious and vulgar, are sometimes virtuous. He hastens to add that the dramatist is always careful to motivate such divergences from the type. Renaissance commentators repeat this exception, but not always with Evanthius’ perspicuity. As the fervor to use plays for demonstrating moral lessons grows, commentators such as Willichius dispute this sympathetic portrayal by assuring their readers that the courtesan’s positive character is artful; hers is only a seeming virtue.14 In other words, the generic conventions for the rendering of types, which after all conform to socially coded rules or perceptions of behavior shaped in this period by the moral climate of the Reformation, obscure the actual presentation of character in Terence’s plays.
Whereas Menander seeks to portray an individual’s learning process within the structural conventions of the comic plot, and Plautus uses such themes primarily for comedy, Terence is preoccupied with dramatizing familial and social relationships. In the Hecyra for example, instead of the individual’s ethical and moral journey toward self-knowledge, Terence dramatizes familial relationships, filial duty and loyalty. In that play, the mistakes the fathers make about their wives show Terence altering conventions of characterization. The matrona in the Hecyra is not at fault through her meddling or dislike of her young daughter-in-law, just as Bacchis, despite the opening scene’s unfavorable portrayal of courtesans, turns out to be moral and virtuous. Finally the slave in this play is not responsible for the deception or the discovery.
Though Terence does not endow the Adelphoe themselves with the rhetoric of consciousness we find in Menander and Plautus, his use of the double plot and juxtaposition of the brothers’ two opposing points of view creates a dialogue which serves to individualize his characters. As audience we come to know each brother and to have a sense of both as individuals despite their conventional types and attitudes. Baldwin and others have argued persuasively for the influence of Terentian double plots on Shakespeare’s dramatic structure; though Terence does not attempt to create an inner life for his characters through soliloquy and the rhetoric of consciousness, his plays and their commentaries demonstrated to the Renaissance playwright how he might individualize his personae within the confines of their types by juxtaposing two examples of the same type endowed with distinctive characteristics. His double plots and type characters are not simply a mechanical innovation, but a technique which has profound effect on meaning and interpretation in Renaissance drama. In sixteenth-century comedy such doubling, as in As You Like It, makes for psychological complexity and what we call lifelikeness even without the rhetoric of consciousness we find in Menander, in Plautus, and later in Shakespeare.
The general revival of classical studies and the fifteenth-century manuscript discoveries contributed to the dramatic revival of the Italian Renaissance. Italian drama influenced by Plautus and Terence falls into three categories: comedies in Latin modeled at least in part on ancient plays; performances of Plautus and Terence onstage; and most important, vernacular Italian comedies or commedie erudite based on Latin models. The English playwrights derived their dramatic models in part directly from Roman drama, but also in part from continental European drama, especially the Italian. In order, therefore, to understand the uses to which Shakespeare puts the conventions of mistaken identity and the rhetoric of the inner life he inherits from the ancients, we must examine representative Italian plays which illustrate and develop such rhetoric and conventions.