David Christenson All’s Well That Ends Well? Old Fools, Morality, and Epilogues in Plautus Epilogues, like prologues, are rhetorically privileged moments in drama. While a prologue gets the first word in about the play to follow, an epilogue is positioned to influence an audience’s assessment of that play once its action is finished. An epilogue effects the transition from the fictional world of the play to the everyday world of the play’s spectators (and actors), 1 and in Plautus an epilogue is always combined with an appeal for applause. More specifically, epilogues seek to smooth over a play’s dramaturgical rough spots, anticipate potential objections to its content, offer projections about the characters’ post-play prospects, or they simply may tease the audience. In these and other ways epilogues shape audi- ence members’ thoughts and discourse about what they have just seen; as Ennis/ Slagle summarizes the function of epilogues in 18 th -century English theatre: ‘they work in combination with the play … to complete meaningful aesthetic and ideo- logical work among the theater patrons.’ 2 As the ultimate point of intersection between a play and an audience’s recep- tion of it, the epilogue constitutes a playwright’s final attempt to control the spectacle, and amounts to his talking over the play. In early Roman theater more than a playwright’s hurt feelings over a panned play was at stake, as there was the additional factor of state sponsorship looming over a performance and a playwright’s hope for future contracts. 3 Epilogues were charged liminal moments for low- or no-status Roman actors, 4 which marked their removal from the exhila- rating realm of Plautine comedy in which they became someone else, 5 and their return to dreary reality, including the very real possibility of a beating for failing to deliver a successful performance. 6 It thus is appropriate that in the manu- scripts of Plautus some epilogues are assigned to the grex, 7 which suggests that || 1 As Slater 2000, 55 notes, ‘ ... the epilogue stands with one foot in the world of the play and one foot in the world of the spectators. A mediator is needed between the two worlds, and as the prologue led us in, so the epilogue leads us out again’. 2 2007, 21. 3 Manuwald 2011, 41–54 provides an overview of the production process. 4 For the status of actors see Richlin 2014, 210–14 and n. 29 below. 5 As the prologist of Poenulus notes: 126 alius nunc fieri uolo. 6 For actors’ vulnerability see Moore 1998, 10–12 and Christenson 2000, 141. 7 For the problems associated with identifying the speakers of epilogues see Sharrock 2009, 251– 58. Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 29.03.16 13:00