The ancient world, particularly ancient theater, there were certainly identifiable tropes and cliches, but these weren’t viewed as wholly negative in the same way we do, in large part due to differing attitudes toward reception and originality. While ancient authors do make a big deal of signaling their own originality and deviation from established precedent, they do so within set generic frameworks (i.e. this is a comedy, these are the types of characters that appear in comedy, these are the types of things those characters can do, and so on), using the tools available to that genre, and responding to the models of other works and authors within that tradition. One good place to see this in action is in Roman comedy, because the playwrights, borrowing from Greek sources, are very aware of their own moment of reception, that they are both re-treading old plots and creating something entirely new by making it Roman.

In the Republican period, Roman authors start translating Greek forms for their literature, and as part of that also translate specific works. For a long time, this meant that scholars read Roman comedies only as a way to access the Greek originals they claimed to translate and tended not to think that there was anything at all Roman about Roman comedy. Roman playwrights were seen as not doing anything new. They were merely translators, and Roman audiences at the time already knew the plays they went to see. And, even worse in the eyes of critics, they were translations of Greek New Comedy, devoid of politics and full of stock characters and predictable, cliche plots that centered more around domestic life. What of value could these plays possibly have to offer? This attitude has, thankfully, changed, thanks to early efforts like the seminal Plautinisches im Plautus, more recently translated into English as Plautine Elements in Plautus, which looked to identify what was specifically Plautine about Plautus’ plays, and we now study Roman comedy on its own merits, independent of failed attempts at reconstructing Greek source materials (‘translating’ meant something very different for the ancients than it does in the modern world), and for us here they offer an interesting look into how Romans viewed originality and authorship.

Roman comedy likes to be able to say “I’m going to act just like all those other character just like me, and I’m going to do X” or “I’m not going to act just like all those other characters just like me, and I’m not going to do X, I’m going to do Y instead”, but in order to be able to make those claims the audience has to be operating on a shared set of expectations about what’s going to happen in the play. One of the ways the plays do this is through the recognizable stock characters that appear in these plays (the miles gloriosus, the servus callidus, the parasitus, etc.), groups of characters who are all expected to have certain qualities and act a certain way. A servus character can do the servus currens stock routine, but the adulescens can’t — or, rather, he shouldn’t — and so if he does, it’s a meaningful deviation from the norm. Not the adulescens, but something similar happens in the Amphitruo at 984-987. Mercury, a god, in disguise as the play’s actual servus character, playing the role of the servus callidus, repeatedly called servus by Jupiter, even though the really shouldn’t be one, comes on stage and asserts that it’s alright for him to do the servus currens, ‘running slave’, stock routine just like an actual servus. Admittedly, the Amphitruo is a little wild and crazy and weird about stock characters and identity, and it’s because of elements like this where characters act the part of stock roles they aren’t supposed to be. Jupiter, who is actually a tragic character and not a comic one, is acting the part of the comic senex. The matrona is actually a meretrix. The servus callidus has his identity stolen by doppelgänger Mercury ("he's more similar to me than I am") and instead starts acting like a parasitus to miles gloriosus Amphitruo, who isn’t very good at it, while Mercury starts becoming more servus callidus than god. The characters and routines are set and predictable, so comedies can play with and manipulate them.

Roman comedy likes to talk about itself, and it likes to talk about itself as dramatic performance, as literature, which makes it a good place to see the plays engage with audience expectations, and there are two prologues I want to mention here that show a little of how these stock characters were treated in the actual plays. Prologues by convention allow for quite a bit of metatheatrical flourish, and these two don’t disappoint. The first is Plautus’ Menaechmi (the basis of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors):

Now take in the plot and pay attention: I’ll give it to you in as few words as possible. Now here’s what poets do in comedies: they claim that everything happens in Athens, so that it seems more Greek to you; now I will say that it happened nowhere except where it is said to have happened. This city is Epidamnus, at least as long as this play is being put on: when another play is being staged, it’ll become some other town. The households will change too: just now a pimp lives here, now a young man, now an old man, a poor man, a beggar, a king, a parasite, a soothsayer. And while this plot summary plays at being Greek, nevertheless it doesn’t make itself Attic, but Sicilian.

The changing household and changing scenery is a reference to multiple plays being put on with the same staging setup. The particular characters who inhabit it change play to play, but they’re perfectly recognizable. The audience doesn’t require any introduction to know what the pimp is like, because he’s a stock character and the audience already knows what the stock character is like. On the other hand, there is something of a claim to novelty here, a distinction from the cliche. The prologue speaker is claiming that while everyone else’s plays take place in Athens, in order to seem Greek, this one is going to take place someplace different, in Epidamnus. It’s fairly tongue-in-cheek, since the repeated mention of ‘seeming’ Greek and playing at being Greek just emphasizes that, actually, while all of these plays use Greek source material they aren’t Greek in the slightest, and in that way the Menaechmi is actually just like every other comoedia palliata (Roman comedy in Greek dress).