Roman comedy and the final dance

Abstract

Dance pervaded Roman theater, and in Plautus’ Persa, Pseudolus, and Stichus characters refer explicitly to their own dancing very near the end of the play. Of the remaining twenty-three extant plays of Plautus and Terence, twenty include scenes of lively motion performed in accompanied meters either in their final scenes or just before, or at the moment of the play’s climactic crisis or its resolution. These scenes of lively motion near the ends of plays often share metrical features with the scenes of explicit dance, and some plays may include metatheatrical allusions to a final dance. It therefore seems very likely that Roman comic playwrights almost always made a point of including an exuberant dance at a significant moment at or near the ends of their plays.