As it stands, though, the play reveals Plautus’ secure grasp of the conditions of his theater. Plautus’ Brothers Menaechmusis, today, the most familiar of his comedies, not least due to Shakespeare’s amplified revision in T he Comedy of Errors, itself the source for Richard Rodgers’s and Lorenz Hart’s 1938 Broadway musical, T he Boys from Syracuse. Of his many plays, the best known today are Ampnitrui, Bacchides, Menaechmi, Miles Gloriosus, and Pseudolus the 1962 Broadway musical A Funny hing Happened on the Way to the Forum (music by Stephen Sondheim, book by Burte Shevelove and Larry Gelbart) adapts Plutarch’s Pseudolus and elements of other plays.
When Plautus died in 184 BCE, he had acquired, lost, and regained a large fortune from the stage, but was renowned as Rome’s preeminent playwright. Indeed, Plautus’ rambunctious comedies were written during a period of strict morality in the Roman republic, exemplified by the Lex Oppia, or sumptuary laws enacted in 215 BCE, and perhaps typified by the rise of Marcius Porcius Cato (234-149 BCE), known as “Cato the Elder,” or “Cato the Censor” to power. Plautus’ plays represent the largest canon of any classical play- wright, and are the earliest remaining Roman literature at the same time, his plays openly- and brilliantly-appeal to the taste for broad humor of a perhaps drunken, certainly festive audience, and have relatively recently gained deserved appreciation for their mastery of the stage. Indeed, at the height of his career, Plautus was hugely popular, and other playwrights and companies vied for success by producing plays under his name Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE), writing roughly a century later, attempted to sort the authentic Plautine plays from impostors, and the twenty-one plays he attributed to Plautus are generally accepted today. He began adapting Greek comedies for the Roman the- atre sometime before 215 BCE and quickly became the standard against which other comic playwrights were compared.
Titus Maccius Plautus (254-184 BCE) is thought to have been born in Sardinia because the name Maccius recalls the stock glutton of Atellan farce, Plautus may have acted as an itinerant actor, and he served in the Roman army as well, returning to Rome more or less penniless.