(no subject)

We’re still in Act 2 of Casina, here. Myrrhina has just gone back into her house, as Cleostrata’s husband, Lysidamus, was seen approaching. I’m not sure if Roman theater had the same constraints on number of actors on stage at the same time as Greek tragic theater did, but I would assume that they’d keep the number down anyway if only to make it easier to reuse actors and keep everything clear. So at this point, there are three people standing there: Cleostrata (mother of our purported romantic lead, who never appears in this play); her husband Lysidamus (rival for possession of Casina, who also never appears in this play); and her handmaiden Pardalisca, who hasn’t spoken since her brief line at the beginning of this act.

(The skipped numbers in the scenes are because I’m not bothering to mark every “scene change”, as they’re being used every time someone new steps onto the stage. I’m just using them here for my own reference. All of the act and scene divisions were added after the fact, anyway; these sorts of things, like the cast list, don’t appear in Plautus’ time, and probably not even in the time when the title acrostic and/or prologue were added.)

( Act 2, Scene 3 )