Plautus A Haunted House
Plautus, A Haunted House In the play, “Plautus, A Haunted House” starts off with a young man, Philolaches, whose his father has been away from town, has been partying and has been wasting his family fortune on his mistress. While the son is in no condition to talk to his father due to being intoxicated, his slave, Tranio comes up with a scheme to deceive the old man from catching his son from partying. Tranio, redefined his role as a trickster in the play and along with all his charisma made this into a countless comedy play.
In the final scene of The Haunted House, Plautus demonstrate the identity is destiny by representing the character types and personality and having them maintain their identity while everyone else goes back to status quos. Plautus, start of the play by introducing the characters types and their personality to the audience. He demonstrates how identity is destiny and how it relates to the characters in the play. To define identity is destiny it means that each character is given a role, and at the end of the play, the character keeps their identity and remains the same.
What this mean is Philolaches plays the irresponsible guy and Tranio plays the smart clever slave. Even though this was their identity in the beginning, at the end of the play their identity didn’t change at all. In the scene where Philolaches had his friend Callidamates come up to his father so that he doesn’t have to face him and beg for his forgiveness. Callidamates said, “ You know well that I’m the very closest friend your son has got. Since he’s too ashamed to set a single foot in sight of you, knowing that you know all that’s been done, he came and asked my help.
Now I beg of you, forgive his youth and folly-he’s your son. ” This scene shows that even though Philolaches is a spoiled wealthy kid, it shows that his identity will remain the same. He’s always going to be the irresponsible young man who asked Tranio and CALLIDAMATES to talked to his father because he was scared to get punished by his father. At the end of the scene, Plautus had the characters returned to their status quo. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are.
After all the tragedy that happened, at the end of the scene everyone went back to normal. In the beginning of the scene it talks about the identity of the characters and that no matter what the situation was, the character would still maintain their own identity. The phase Identity is destiny and status quos demonstrate that no matter what the character did in the play, their personality and their role will remain the same. Plautus did a great job of defining the characters traits and imputed comedian material to his play.
