Resumo de The Merchant - Tittus Maccius Plautus

Napi?ite svoj sa?etak ovde.

Thanks to Publishing House Stylos from Novi Sad, since recently our reading
public is able of enjoying another Plautus? comedy, translated from Latin into
Serbian by Sladjana Milinkovic. One of the most famous and certainly one of the
most influential comedists at the European scene, before earning his fame as an
author, was of low origin and so poor that, at least while he was young, he was
forced to perform hard physical work (among other jobs, he worked in a mill),
and he used free time to write comedies. In that way he gained glory and wealth.
Such a picturesque modus vivendi and his common
origin provided him with an
intuition for the taste of his Roman public, his life experience enabled him
to, by looking closely at the inherited
Greek models, create vivid, humorous and unforgettable types of characters such
as stingy old man, crafty slave, parasite- bootlicker, shrewd pimp, money-loving courtesan,
cook-thief, a boastful soldier... The charm of his comedies lies on pretty
smart jokes, that are, though sometimes frivolous, very original, interesting
and likeable, even to a modern reader. Those jokes are written as a verse, quite
voiced and various, in a very beautiful, flexible but unusually rich language.
Plautus? comedy The Merchant is an adaptation of the comedy
by famous Greek comedist Philemon.The work was written probably about 212 BC.
It is one of the Plautus? less known comedies that, due to the renome attached
to it by some renowned and respectable researchers, remained so unnoticed. What
they find to be a silly, scribbled and unsuccessful comedy, for a modern reader
it actually represents the charm of an unjustifiably forgotten piece of work.
In this comedy of situation - intrigues, the scene is set up by atypical
character types: the old man is not a rough miser, but a naive jokester; the slave
is not so crafty to be shameless; the young man is in love, but not shrewd; the curtisan is neither silver-lover
nor selfish, and neither is the cook a real thief. The plot, a bit prolonged,
verbose and slow on first sight, is in reality unburdened of prosaic stags and
frivolous jokes, and thus the lack of fast and vivid dialogues for the benefit
of longer monologues actually present the more mature Plautus? character
formation. In The Merchant neither the language is so
vulgar, nor poor, but refreshed by neologisms and colloquial expressions. Even
if the reader could find the reason not to agree with such an opinion, it is
still worth reading the comedy first.

Resumos Relacionados