SOURCE: "Plautus," in A Handbook of Classical Drama, Stanford University Press, 1944, pp. 333-74.

In the following excerpt, Harsh provides a survey of Plautus's major plays.

The twenty extant plays of Plautus constitute an astonishingly varied collection of good, bad, and indifferent comedies. Even the worst, however, usually have one or more effective scenes, and most of the indifferent ones doubtless were successful in his theater. For modern dramatists, good and bad alike have served as a continually plundered storehouse of interesting comic characters and amusing situations. The structure of the Amphitryon, for instance, is not well proportioned, to say the least; but the play's situation is so infallibly amusing that it has attracted innumerable adapters. Nor have imitators been frightened away from the Twin Menaechmi merely because its basic situation is fantastically improbable. The Braggart Warrior is very poorly constructed, but its title character remains eternally popular. The...