The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [78]
Apart from the important addition of the love element (which gives the story a much sharper, more personal focus), the actual shape of the New Comedy thus remains very similar to that of the Old Comedy. The story is still about the resolution of a conflict: some state of darkness and confusion giving way, through `recognition' and a change of heart, to reconciliation and light. In Plautus's Aurularia (The Pot of Gold), a typical story of two lovers prevented from marrying by an unrelenting father, we are still not far from the world of Aristophanes. Euclio is an obsessive old curmudgeon, reminiscent of Procleon in The Wasps, except that his obsession is with hoarding money rather than judging. His daughter wishes to marry the hero Lyconides, but the old miser is insisting that she marry one of his rich friends, for money. Euclio's state of darkness becomes even blacker when he loses his most precious possession, a pot of gold. But resolution begins when the gold is found by young Lyconides, who offers it to Euclio in return for permission to marry his daughter. In a change of heart similar to Procleon's the old miser `sees the light, recognises that his greed has turned him into a monster of selfishness, and not only gives the couple his blessing but the gold as well.
The second, crucially important element which came to the fore in the New Comedy concerned the nature of the `recognition' on which the resolution of the story turns: the nature of what it is that has to be discovered or made clear before a change of heart can pave the way to a happy ending. This centres on the revelation that someone's identity is different from what it seems.
In the Epitrepontes (The Arbitration) of Menander, who favoured the type of story based on a quarrel between the lovers themselves, we see a young husband and wife, Charisios and Pamphile, who have become violently estranged because, shortly after their wedding, Pamphile had given birth to a child. The baby has somehow been disposed of, but Charisios has been so enraged by this evidence of his wife's premarital carrying-on that he has left her. The action begins when a mysterious baby turns up, accompanied by various tokens, including a ring. The slaves of the estranged couple get together to discover the child's identity, and conclude that the baby's father can only be Charisios himself who, as his own personal slave remembers, gave this particular ring to an unknown girl he had made love to under cover of darkness at a public festival before his marriage. When the slaves confront Charisios with the proof that the baby is his, he is overwhelmed with remorse. He realises that he had dreadfully wronged his wife by berating her for a crime of which he had been just as guilty himself. But the slaves then tell him that, on the evidence of the other tokens, the mother of his child can be no one other than Pamphile: in other words, the girl he had ravished in the darkness was his future wife. The baby whose arrival had caused all the trouble had belonged to them both all the time. With this `recognition; the couple are joyfully reconciled, the slaves are rewarded with their freedom and the play ends in the usual general celebration.
What we see emerging here as a crucial, and from now on increasingly familiar element in Comedy is