Word: plautus
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...Plautus was the Neil Simon of Rome. When the tired businessman of the Eternal City trudged home from his officina on one of the seven hills in his sweat-stained toga and quaffed a quick goblet of Falernian, his wife probably said, "Carissime, in thealrum eamus...
...Plautus novam fabulam dat." Wise woman. The old dramatic farceur manufactured situations that have kept audiences laughing for 23 centu ries. This is not news on New York's Via Magna Alba. Ten years ago, Burt Shevelove's and Larry Gelbart's free adaptation of Plautus' plays convulsed playgoers for 964 performances. At that time Zero Mostel pranced onstage like an elephant with a hotfoot in the star ring role of Pseudolus, a slave with a passion for freedom as avid as that of all 1 3 original colonies. He was gloriously funny, and in this...
...these cataclysms. So unique is the Wodehouse brand of humor, however, that to describe it is as thankless and bootless as describing the taste of the perfect martini. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) can be compared to no other novelist, living or dead. His literary ancestor, instead, is the Roman dramatist Plautus, and, like Plautus, he is the manufacturer of a thousand comically crossed connections...
...song is not through the cleverness of the rhyme but by what you're saying. The biggest laugh in Forum is the line in the warriors' song: "I am a parade." That's a brilliant line-and it's not mine, it's Plautus...
...take the easy way out and put the blame on the playwright. For A Midsummer Night's Dream was the finest comedy in the English language until Shakespeare himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots...