Ludic Lessons: Roman Comedy on Stage and in Class

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. The pedagogical and research aims that underpin the 2012 NEH Summer Institute on Roman Comedy are part of a broader academic trend towards analyzing dramatic works in terms of performance, not just in terms of literary genre. This "performative turn," as it is now known, began in the early twentieth century with Herrmann, a German literary historian and theatre theorist who argued that the ephemeral act of staging a play was the most crucial element of any play's meaning. Herrmann differentiated between drama, which he defined as "the literary creation of one author," and theatre, which for him resembled a game involving both actors and spectators, with each group participating in equal if different ways to develop the play's various and ever-shifting connotations. 1 Under this rubric, the study of "drama" implied traditional, author-centered literary criticism, founded on assumptions about the intent of individual playwrights and the primacy of the written word. By contrast, the interconnected disciplines of theatre and performance studies treated plays as physical and temporal events, in other words, as performances. These same disciplines emphasized the audience's role in producing the overall aesthetic experience that constitutes a "play."A similar division, between theatre as text and theatre as event, emerged in U.S. universities during the 1910s and 20s.2 It has led over time to the development of independent Theatre and/or Performance Studies departments, most of which offer practical training in dramatic production alongside more theoretical study.3 Courses in Drama, on the other hand, approach plays primarily as texts, and are more likely to be offered as a subset of English or Comparative Literature. The 2012 NEH Summer Institute is best understood against this historical background, because by conducting empirical research into the performance of Roman palliatae, the scholars involved in this project have made a definite methodological statement about the value of staging dramatic literature, for pedagogy and for research. To engage in performance for the purpose of academic analysis is to believe that besides comprising a script, theatre also comprises costumes, props, actors, sound, light, stage space, and audience. Moreover, using performance as a pedagogical tool has two major advantages: it offers a means of bridging the divide between teaching and research, and it helps students develop their own research projects by encouraging them to engage with Roman Comedy at a pe...