The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [79]
There is almost no moment we see more often in comedy than the discovery, to everyone's astonishment, that the true origins of one of the characters are in fact quite different from what had been generally supposed: usually that he or she is in fact the long-lost child of someone of elevated social position. When this device first appeared in the New Comedy, it was almost invariably the heroine who was belatedly discovered to be of higher social origin than anyone had been aware of, thus dispelling the objections to her union with the hero. In Terence's Andria (The Woman of Andros), for instance, the hero's father is violently opposed to his son marrying a poor courtesan, until it is revealed that she is the long-lost daughter of one of his rich friends. The father is of course delighted and at once withdraws his opposition to the match.
So important to the New Comedy was this element of ignorance as to people's true identity and the need to establish who everyone really is as a prelude to reso lution that some plays were concerned with very little else: even the love interest taking second place, or disappearing altogether. Plautus's Menaechmi, for instance, the play on which Shakespeare was to base his Comedy of Errors, introduces perhaps the ultimate variation on the confusion arising from mistaken identity: the story of two identical twins being repeatedly taken for each other without either being aware of the other's existence. The hero arrives in a strange town, looking for his long-lost twin brother Sosicles, at just the moment when, after a row with his wife, Sosicles is storming out of his house to take refuge with his mistress. There follows a crescendo of increasingly contentious misunderstanding as the twins are constantly mistaken for each other by everyone else: Sosicles's wife, mistress, servants and friends. Only when the knot of confusion has reached strangulation point, with Sosicles about to be arrested as a madman, are the brothers finally brought face to face. `Recognition' makes clear all that has happened, and the play ends on the usual note of rejoicing: although noticeably the central point of union is the bringing together of the two long-parted brothers, rather than the reconciliation of Sosicles with his wife.
By the end of the great age of classical stage Comedy in the second century BC, many of the basic features had already been established which were to be the mainstays of Comedy for the next two thousand years. Even the stories themselves were to be revived to entertain audiences of later ages. Moliere was to adapt the Aurularia in his L'Avare (The Miser); while the Menaechmi's direct descendants have included not only Shakespeare's version, but in the twentieth century a Laurel and Hardy film Our Relations and a successful Broadway musical, The Boys from Syracuse.
Before the Graeco-Roman world came to an end, however, there was a further landmark in the history of Comedy which was to have significance for later ages. This was the moment when, for the first time, the plot moved off the stage to become the inspiration for another kind of storytelling altogether. In the second and third centuries AD there was a vogue for a new kind of prose story. Sometimes described as `the first novels, these were somewhat lurid tales of adventure, centred on a hero and heroine - but their plots followed a formula with a familiar ring. As one authority puts it:
`the usual pattern is that the hero and