SOURCE: “The Significance of a Comic Pattern in Plautus and Beaumarchais,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 88, No. 6, December, 1973, pp. 1262-87.

In the essay below, MacCary compares Plautus's play Casina with The Marriage of Figaro, arguing that the plays are structurally and thematically similar.

In writing the introduction for a new edition of Plautus' Casina,¹ I was concerned to show by analogy with more familiar material the sorts of changes the Roman poet worked in his Greek original, Diphilos' Kleroumenoi (The Lot-casters). I took my cue from E. Fraenkel, who compares Plautus' technique of transforming Greek speeches into Latin songs to Da Ponte's adaptation of Beaumarchais' Figaro for Mozart's opera.² In developing this comparison—Diphilos is to Plautus what Beaumarchais is to DaPonte and Mozart—I was most concerned with the expansiveness of the lyric mode, the fact that arias or songs, by their very nature, do not advance...