31 pages • 1 hour read
PlautusThe Brothers Menaechmus
Fiction | Play | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Food and Drink
Food and drink have significant roles in the characters’ preoccupations and motivations. Peniculus’s goal is to secure his place at Menaechmus and Erotium’s feast, while Menaechmus II is persuaded to throw Messenio’s caution to the winds partly because of the prospect of a lavish meal. Not only does this contribute to the carnivalesque, excessive materiality of the comedy, it also signals the chasm between the play and the audience’s reality. Much of the food that Menaechmus orders, for example, was explicitly banned in the abstemious, austere Rome of Plautus’s day, in an indication of the dissolution of Epidamnus in particular, and Greece in general, to Roman eyes (210-11).
To strengthen the connection between feasting and entertainment, Plautus also uses the language of food and drink to characterize the play itself. When he is introducing the play, the Chief Actor announces that he will “pour a lot of plot for you. / Not just a cupful, fuller up, more like a pot / […] brimming full of plot!” (14-15). He thus imagines the play as a vessel and the plot as wine. Moreover, the language itself echoes and enhances the imagery, with the assonance, alliteration, rhyme and repetition allowing the words to bubble over in creative wordplay.
The Dress
One of the few props in the play, the dress Menaechmus steals from his wife is a near-constant presence on stage. On the one hand, it is an emblem of the everyday concerns of the characters: they boast about the theft of the dress and argue about its return; when Menaechmus asks his wife “what’s the matter,” she replies, “Just a dress” (609). Since it belongs to Menaechmus’s wife but is a gift for Erotium, it signifies the two worlds of the stage–that of duty, in the wife’s household, and pleasure, in the lover’s–and shows how dramatically Menaechmus is pulled between the two. It also gives rise to several puns: Menaechmus quips that it is a “dress addressed” to Erotium (191), before joking that he needs to “redress” his mistakes (195). Further, Peniculus warns Menaechmus that he is in for “a dressing-down” from his angry wife (610).
On the other hand, the dress also represents the power of theatre to transform reality into illusion, or to alchemize an actor from “pimp to papa, or to lover pale and wan, / To pauper, parasite, to king or prophet”, as the Prologue explains (75-76). When Menaechmus enters the stage wearing the dress as a costume and performing the role of a mythical lover, he draws attention to the fact that this is a play and that he is an actor. Just by putting on a different costume, he can transform himself and transport the audience to new worlds.
Twins and Pairs
Underpinning its thematic exploration of a pair of twins separated in childhood, the play hinges on pairs and reflections on a structural level. Just as the stage itself is literally divided into two halves through the use of the doorways, the action takes place primarily between pairs of characters. The twosome of Menaechmus and Peniculus is matched by the twosome of Menaechmus II and Messenio, a structure replicated in the Erotium-cook relationship and in the doctor-old man pairing. When these pairs split and come into contact with one another, the confusion and comedy begin (e.g. when Peniculus is detached from his Menaechmus and comes across Menaechmus II).
After structuring the play through this twofold motif, Plautus then builds up to the final reconciliation of the most important pair of all: Menaechmus and his twin. In contrast to the dichotomous nature of the play so far, a unified whole is finally created through this recovery, as if the two sides of the stage’s mirror are coming together at last. Given the audience’s position of knowledge throughout the play–as the third party to each set of pairs, we understand the root of the confusion–this reunion brings with it a sense of relief and finality.
