Terence: The Mother-in-Law (Hecyra)

SUMMARY:

Unlike his other comedies, Terence doesn't mention his critic and rival in his prologue to The Mother-in-Law. Instead, he finds something else to bitch about: the fact that in the play's previous two performances, the audience walked out for hope of finding something more entertaining. He pleads that the play receive a proper hearing at this, its third, performance.

The play opens on a conversation between an old woman, Syra, and a young hooker, Philotis. Syra advises her to use men for what she can, and not to get attached. Konstan notes in his analysis that this scene, entirely separate from the subsequent action of the play, sets the ironic tone for the manner in which love will be dealt until the play's end.

The main plot, in short, runs like this:

Pamphilus was married to Philumena against his will; he accepted out of obligation to his father. He had loved the courtesan Bacchis, yet has grown to love Philumena over time (and eventually, after a couple of married months, even had sex with her). Turns out Philumena was pregnant before she got married. Her mother tries to hide her disgrace, inventing a tension between Philumena and her mother-in-law Sostrata as an excuse to bring her daughter home.

Pamphilus figures out what's going on; he vows to split with his wife, under the auspices of respecting his mother. Even when Sostrata decides to move to the country to avoid being a nuisance, he sticks to his guns (but is under oath not to admit why). His father, Laches, and father-in-law, Phidippus, are convinced that he's still seeing Bacchis, and bring her to the scene to admit her sinful influence. She arrives, admits nothing. Yet through a ring that she was given by Pamphilus, Philumena's husband is recognized as her sexual assailant. Hence the baby's legit. Happy Ending.

NOTES:

--This play has little use for the scheming slave. Here Parmeno, who we would assume to fill this place, doesn't really do much...yet at the play's end, he admits to Pamphilus that he knew what was going on all the time. An odd transformation of this whole god-slave controller thang...Parmeno is powerless, unlike the other slaves, effects little change upon the scene, and yet is somehow omniscient...

--The schemer in this play is in fact identical to both the lover and the lover's "blocker" (to borrow Konstan's term), Pamphilus!

--Konstan's analysis focuses on the ambivalent and ironic presentation of the Roman distinction between pietas, filial obilgation, and amor. Terence has Pamphilus twist the traditional uses of these two concepts for his own selfish purposes (exactly what these are, Konstan never states; probably just has something to do with his feeling of betrayal by Philumena...). He subjugates amor to pietas (passion, traditionally, should be uncontrollable), and then changes the motivation of pietas (from obeying the orders and wishes of his parents to some abstract obligation to their honor, which the parents themselves do not recognize...).

--Konstan states that "the ideal reconcilliation between all claims and all parties, between passion and duty, cannot be achieved." And even though "the inversions and reversals in the story come near to stripping this [traditional moral] code of all normal sense," Terence delivers a comedy by the same arbitrary method which Plautus used in the Prisoners, barely avoiding a tragedy...