THEA 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: How I Met Your Mother, Pantalone, Il Capitano
Document Summary
Roman comic playwright plautus adapted greek comedy, but omitted critical and satirical tones associate with aristophanes. Focused on the language of everyday people. Plautus"s comedies featured middle and lower class characters. Plautus created stock character types: braggart soldier/warrior, older miser, meddling/bumbling helpful servant, young lovers. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum by stephen sondheim: the braggart solder or miles gloriosus by plautus is main inspiration. The only storytelling we know of outside of religious miracle, mystery and morality plays are a return to oral tradition: bards, troubadors, minstrels, etc: they keep the stories going through the dark ages. Commedia percolates for a while before surfacing in historical records in the 1300s. Families toured europe as a theatre troupe. Scenarios were guidelines, not scripts, and the performers were expected to improvise to flesh out the story. Commedia dell"arte was not popular in england.
