Angeline
CHIU A Sense of Comic Timing: Temporal
Distortion, Plot, and Characterization in Plautus'
Amphitruo
In
the Amphitruo,
the mythical long night of Hercules's conception is
center stage. But the night is not merely the
prerequisite for a baby Hercules. Rather, this time
distortion is a defining principle of the play in both
plot and characterization. Instead of the carnival day of
Roman comedy (Segal 1987), the Amphitruo has a carnival night, in which all the
norms of common life are suspended, paving the way for
comic confusion. The play's distorted time also defines
the characters. Each one, in his/her reaction to the
temporal anomaly, clearly delineates his/her personality
and, more, sets up further comic chaos. For the gods
Jupiter and Mercury, the night is a plaything, and this
night marks the difference between gods and mortals;
divinities know the truth while befuddled humans do not.
Mercury takes gleeful pleasure in knowing (and
announcing) what his father has done to time (112-4).
Jupiter also knows; when he dismisses the night, he notes
that he will shorten the daylight hours accordingly
(548-9). That he is able to say so is a marker of the
gods' power over time and the mortals who inhabit it. As
for those mortals, they cannot pinpoint the preternatural
nature of the night, but each reacts to it differently.
Sosia, the clever comic slave, comes closest to grasping
the true nature of the night, peering at the
constellations and concluding, to Mercury's great
interest, that they have stopped (273-6). He displays his
openness to the supernatural, and this ability will
enable him to take the morning's confusion in better
stride than the rest of the cast. It will also put him
into direct comic conflict with his hard-headed, rational
master, Amphitryon, who is the aggravated straight arrow.
Significantly, he sends Sosia out on errands in the
middle of the night (164-5). Somehow he senses that the
night is taking too long and sends out Sosia, as if
trying to impose the order of ordinary life. He attempts
to control time, and the fantastic have no place in the
Pentheus-like Amphitryon's conception of the world. He
regards the night with peevish impatience (730-2), and,
unable to make sense of it, he becomes an iratus figure, primed for comic mix-up. Alcmena, after spending the
night with Jupiter, asks why he is going so
suddenly&emdash;tam subito (502). Despite her heavy pregnancy, Alcmena
reveals herself as wholly absorbed in the night's frankly
carnal purposes. More, her famous voluptas
speech (632-53) underscores her comic characterization as
a sexually insatiable voluptuary: she says that she has
had her husband for only one night&emdash;noctem unam
modo (638-9). Her view of time drives on her
later comic animosity with Amphitryon, as her confusion
and anger escalate their conflict to the point of
divorce. In sum, when day finally comes on stage, it does
so with rich complications set in place by the previous
supernatural night, which in ancient drama is unique in
its comic possibilities.