Beaumarchais And Plautus The Sources Of The Barbier De Seville

Author : Florence Nightingale Jones
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331015970
Total Pages : 34 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (159 download)

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Download or read book Beaumarchais and Plautus, the Sources of the Barbier De Séville written by Florence Nightingale Jones and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Beaumarchais and Plautus, the Sources of the Barbier De Seville: A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Romance Languages On the title page of Reinhardstoettner's monumental work on the imitations of Plautus in the dramatic literature of Europe might well be written the warning: lasciate ogni speranza, 'abandon all hope' of finding a play of which the plot was not first conceived by Plautus. Be prepared to find that Falstaff strutted about and Scapin played his tricks in the days of Scipio Africanus, that Shakspere and Moliere, together with nearly every other writer of plays since the middle ages, have all been to a greater or less extent, plagiarists of Plautus. In many cases there has been direct, unmistakable imitation of a whole play of Plautus, such as the Clizia of Macchiavelli, imitated from the Casina; Shakspere's Comedy of Errors from the Menaechmi; Moliere's Avare, from the Aulularia, and Lessing's Der Schatz, from the Trinummus. Often a single scene from Plautus has furnished a later playwright with material for a whole comedy, as in the case of Regnard, whose Serenade is nothing but an amplification of the second scene of the fourth act of the Pseudolus. Plautus, it appears, is the chef who first discovered the art of concocting a Latin comedy. To the old Roman satura he added the 'attic salt' of Menander and Diphilus and thus produced a dish fit for Roman senators. Then for centuries the secret of comedy making was lost, until, with the Renaissance, the Latin authors were resurrected and the playwrights of the sixteenth century jumbled together scenes and characters from Plautus to form the olla podrida of Italian comedy. Their example was followed by all the playwriters of Europe, each adding to his Plautine model the flavor of his own individuality and nationality. In the history of French dramatic literature, the influence of Seneca in tragedy, and of Plautus in comedy, is to be reckoned with from the very start. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."