language, which made his comedies even more influential as works to be read than as plays to be acted, his prologues dealing critically with the form or spirit of the drama, the absence of burlesque in his characters, and even the very names of his dramatis personæ,[1] show that we have left the popular spectacle and entered the refined theatre of an educated class.
§ 60. But in these thoroughly Greek associations of the Terentian stage we may close our brief review of the progress of dramatic art in Rome. Terence, the slave from Carthage, drawing exact pictures of Greek life in the language of Rome for the edification of an audience which thinks Greek, transforms the drama into as curious a literary exotic as can be easily conceived. If such was the end of Rome's rude native comedy, in tragedy the Romans were from the first dependent on the Greeks. Without common mythology, without bonds of common religion, the divided city of plebeian and patrician could feel none of the public sentiments out of which tragedy arose at Athens. If a tragedy based
- ↑ Many names of the Plautine characters explain themselves—such are Artotrogus, "Breadeater," the parasite in Miles Gloriosus; Polymachæroplagides, "Macmanyswordblows," the boastful soldier in Pseudolus; Anthrax, "Coalman," the cook in Aulularia. In Terence, on the contrary, the same name, "Chremes," for example, is used for totally different characters, and of course without any meaning being conveyed by the name. The dramatic use of names intended to convey their own meaning is, in fact, a sign that character-drawing is subordinated to types; hence the constant use of such names in Aristophanes. In Mr. Ruskin's extravagant attempt to find meanings in Shakspere's dramatic names—Desdemona, δυσδαιμονία, "miserable fortune," Hamlet, "homely," Iago, "the supplanter," and so on—we have much more than a "note of provinciality in the highest excess," as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said; we have in it a complete failure to grasp the difference between characterisation through the medium of types and characterisation through the medium of individual personality, the latter and not the former being the essential feature of Shaksperian art. The characters in the Canterbury Tales are indeed types of social life in the England of Chaucer; but in the England of Shakspere and on the Shaksperian stage men and women possess an individuality impossible in the days of medieval guilds and serfage.
