Games People Play: Metatheatre as Performance Criticism in Plautus' Casina

Abstract

Casina is one of Plautus' most metatheatrical comedies. Self-reflexive role-play, plays within plays, explicit references to theatrical context or convention are usual in Plautine drama. In Casina they constitute much or most of the dramatic action. During the prologue the audience is encouraged to sit back and enjoy the games (23ff.); whereas by Act 5 it is the play's women who have come out ‘to watch the wedding games out here on the street’ ( Judos visere hue in viam nuptialis , 856). The stage-set, which the audience accepts implicitly as ‘a street’, has been turned back into a stage-set. The women converse like a regular audience: Myrrhina in particular has ‘never laughed so much in one day’ ( numquam … ullo die risi adaeque , 857) and thinks theirs the equal of any play ever written (860f.). Moreover, when Olympio enters, he acknowledges the ‘real’ audience with his narrative of events inside Alcesimus' house, but seems oblivious of the on-stage audience—which is dependent for its early information concerning Olympio's wedding night on his relations to the former, real audience. What is involved here is a complete reversal of the conventions of illusionistic theatre, in which the audience finds out about off-stage action from the conversation of characters inside the drama. Pardalisca's interruption restores the conventional order: the remainder of Olympio's narrative is told, ostensibly, to her; the audience is returned to the condition of unseen eavesdroppers.