The Dating of Plautus' Plays

Abstract

Although much has been written in the attempt to date individual plays of Plautus—too often, unfortunately, an attempt to make bricks without straw—little has hitherto been done to determine the approximate chronological sequence of the plays as a whole. Yet this appears the most obvious necessity if any advance in scientific criticism is to be made. Not till this is done can we see the bearing of the innumerable facts which have accumulated in the extensive Plautine literature of the last fifty years. No one would dream of a scientific criticism of Shakespeare which did not take into account the chronology of the plays. This is equally true (for example) of Tennyson and Browning, though the method has not yet been as systematically applied to literary as to musical criticism. Think of a writer on Bach or Mozart, Beethoven or Schumann, who mixed up indiscriminately early and later work! If we could only arrange Plautus' plays in something like chronological order, a flood of light would be thrown on details of technique which at present escape us; the utility of the Lexicon Plautinum would be doubled.

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