Analisi delle interazioni conflittuali nelle commedie di Plauto: la relazione asimmetrica nel matrimonio romano

In Plautus’ theatre there are themes and stylistic criteria which come from the ancient traditional dramaturgy, and are ascribable both to the Greek Nea and to the Italian theatre of improvvisation. Furthermore, Plautus inserts in his characters’ speeches parodic variations which come from more elevated genres such as the tragedy (Euripide’s one in particolar) and the epic poem, in order to create a type of theatre scattered with literary references. Plautus’ production is indeed the result of a complex operation of contamination, original and innovative in all its parts; it operates on the structures of the plot and the dialogue, up until it determinates a proper metamorphosis in the singular personae and their way to manage relationships and interactions in which they are involved. In the analysis of the collision between two characters, in order to avoid inferential and discriminating blunders, it is required to try to understand if you are dealing with a “tout court” recall of situations which exist already in Greek scripts, or with contaminated forms, justified by dramaturgic and comical reasons, and for that created in order to make the public laugh, or again with proper and structured conflicts, which imply levels of criticality related to relationships and antropological connotations between the characters. In order to accomplish this, an in-depth analysis of the concept of conflict has been necessary, as well as trying to include within the modern categories of analysis, only those which got along with the Roman antropological code and with the perception of conflict according to the ancients; moreover, particular antropological criteria have been taken into account, those that Plautus give glimpses of from the conventional or unconventional forms of his personae. The dramatic text, ultimately, has been analized using the pragmatic of communication, whose categories allowed to give back to the theatre its performativity, shaped in different dialogic contexts, in step with the semiotic studies of the theatre. Regarding the conflict situations between Plautus’ characters, subject of this research, they are present in large numbers in Plautus’ corpus and for this reason it has been necessary to focus on the analysis of a few dialogues, which involve the main characters of one of the most important relationships of the Roman culture, the one concerning marriage, which consists of a wife and an husband as the main actors. The relationship between spouses appears rather unstable and swings back and forth between complementarity, imposed by tradition, and pseudosymmetry, determined by the new status of uxores dotatae, following the matrimonium sine manu spread in Rome. The conflictual dynamics in Plautus’ theatre, as it has been possible to deduce from the analysis of the conflictual interactions between husband and wife present in the Amphitruo, in the Asinaria and in the Menaechmi, appear to be swinging between farsical quarrels and proper conflict, which is produced by the collision between different willings and conceptions, or by the violation of the rules in the sphere of the social way of living.