Dolly Levi: A modern parasite? (Thornton Wilder and Terence)

Dolly Levi: A Modern Parasite? (Thornton Wilder and Terence) JOHN E. ZIOLKOWSKI

In this article Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker is viewed as a modem example of New Comedy, a dramatic form popular in ancient Athens and Rome, since its plot, characters and humor closely reflect that tradition. The portrayal of its leading character Dolly Levi, moreover, reveals a striking parallel to the ancient figure of the "Parasite" especially as depicted in Terence's Phormio (161 BC). Like Roman comedies Wilder's play was an adaptation of an earlier play written in a foreign language. Unsuccessful when it first appeared in 1938 as The Merchant of Yonkers, it was presented again with only modest revisions sixteen years later (The Matchmaker, 1954) and was reincarnated as a very popular Broadway musical in 1964 (Hello, Dolly!). This comparison also considers interesting differences between ancient and modern light domestic comedy.

T horn ton Wilder has received little a t tent ion f rom classicists, despi te the fact that he is one of our mos t p o p u l a r Amer ican authors and was recipient of three Pul i tzer

Prizes. 1 Wilder was a Latin enthusiast , a c o m m e n t a t o r on classical texts, creator of two novels (The Woman of Andros and The Ides of Marchi and several p lays (The Alcestiad and some of the one-act p lays in The Angel That Troubled the Waters) based on themes f r o m Greek and R o m a n literature. Nonetheless , his w o r k has received ve ry little a t ten t ion in classical journals. His p lay The Matchmaker m a y be cons idered a m o d e m example of N e w C o m e d y , since its plot, characters and h u m o r closely reflect that tradit ion. The po r t r aya l of its leading character, moreover , reveals a str iking paral lel to the ancient f igure of the "Parasi te ." In honor of the recent centennial of Wi lder ' s birth, it is app ro - pr ia te to consider this compar i son b y reference to Terence 's Phormio, which depicts the mechana t ions of a classical Parasite, since such a compar i son also reveals interest ing differences b e t w e e n ancient and m o d e r n light domest ic comedy .

Thorn ton Wilder was bo rn in 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin. By the age of sixteen he was a t tending Berkeley H igh School in California, whe re he received the h ighes t g rades a w a r d e d in Latin and math . He then enrol led in Ober l in College, bu t t rans-

1.

I would like to thank Alexandra Barazzone as well as the anonymous readers for IJCT who made valuable suggestions for improving an earlier version of this paper. See, however, Sander M. Goldberg's article "The Woman of Andros: Terence Made Wilder," in Helios 5.1 (1977), pp. 11-19; and references to The Alcestiad in G. Karl Galinsky's The Herakles Theme: The Adaptations of the Hero in Literature from Homer to the Twentieth Century, (Totowa, N.J. 1972), p. 79, 218-20. A recent guide to writings about Wilder may be found in Claudette Walsh's Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide, 1926-1990 (New York 1993).

John E. Ziolkowski, Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 20052, USA.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 5, No. 4, Spring 1999, pp. 549-560.

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ferred to Yale after two years, graduating from there in 1920. Some years later he wrote an editorial in the New Haven paper on "the Passing of Latin" with an eloquent argument for the retention of the ancient languages in the Yale curriculum which influenced the university to stay its hand before throwing out the classics. 2 He spent most of the year after graduation at the American Academy in Rome as a special student. From all indications this was a crucial period for Wilder's s tudy of the classics especially his life-long devotion for Vergil. 3 He left Rome after eight months because his father had found a position for him at the Lawrenceville Boarding School (in New Jersey) teaching French, and so he made a short visit to Paris to get a better grasp of that language. In 1925 he took a leave of absence from the Lawrenceville School to study for a Master's Degree in French at Princeton. His real motive seems to have been the desire to finish a manuscript about his impressions of Rome. The result was The Cabala, Memoires of a Roman Student, a contemporary novel published in 1926. 4 This work did not cause much excitement at the time, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which appeared the following year, won a Pulitzer Prize. Three years later he finished The Woman of Andros, a novel about antiquity based upon Terence's play The Andrian Woman. From 1930 to 1936 he was a lecturer on classics of world literature at the University of Chicago.

Returning from a trip to Europe in 1935 Wilder brought back drafts of several plays in various states of completion, including his reworking of an old play written almost one hundred years earlier by the Viennese actor-manager, Johann Nestroy. This little farce became, in its various incarnations, both his most disastrous failure and his greatest popular success nearly a quarter of a century later. It would be interesting to know where he obtained the Viennese play, why he chose it and whether he used a translation for its difficult dialect. 5 He called his adaptation The Merchant of Yonkers.

Nestroy's play (1842) also had been an adaptation of a short skit entitled A Day Well Spent, written seven years earlier by John Oxenford, drama critic of the London Times. Transforming this skit to suit his own company, Nestroy called his four-act play Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen ("He Wants to Have A Fling"). Praised as the "Aristophanes of Vienna" by his contemporaries, 6 Nestroy followed Oxenford's plot, which depicted the antics of two country boys escaping to town for a day of illicit freedom, adventure and narrow escapes from discovery, but embellished it with satirical social comment, clever songs and expanded dialogue, with emphasis on the Viennese argot.

When Wilder returned from Europe with his own version of this story, he made no secret of his use of his predecessors (acknowledging both in the program notes). His adaptation transformed Nestroy's satirical-comic play into a farce that parodied nineteenth-century theatrical realism, which he felt had the effect of devitalizing the theatre by its emphasis on a specific time and place. As Wilder wrote in the Preface:

2. See Amos Niven Wilder, Thornton Wilder and his Public (Philadelphia 1980), p. 54. 3. See Richard H. Goldstone, Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait (New York 1975), p. 21, and

Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 195-200. 4. See William L. Vance's discussion of this work and Wilder's classicism in America's Rome,

vol. 2: Catholic and Contemporary Rome (Yale University Press 1989), pp. 256-61. 5. In his Introduction (p. 8) to On the Razzle (London 1981) Tom Stoppard quotes one critic

who claims that Nestroy is "untranslatable, even into German." 6. According to Klaus D. Hanson, s.v. "Johann Nestroy," in Frank N. Magill's Critical Survey of

Drama; Foreign Language Series, vol. 4 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1986), p. 1416.

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This play parodies the stock-company plays that I used to see at Ye Liberty Theatre, Oakland, California, when ! was a boy. I have already read small theses in German comparing it with the great Austrian original on which it is based. The scholars are very bewildered. There is most of the plot (except that our friend Dolly Levi is not in Nestroy's play), there are some of the tags; but it's all "about" quite different matters. My play is about the aspira- tions of the young (and not only the young) for a fuller, freer participation in life. Imagine an Austrian pharmacist going to a shelf to draw from a bottle which he knows to contain a stinging corrosive liquid, guaranteed to remove warts and wens; and imagine his surprise when he discovers that it has been filled overnight with very American birch-bark beer. 7

In 1938, however, when The Merchant of Yonkers was produced, it was not a success. Much of the difficulty was said to be the fault of the European director, Max Reinhardt, and his failure to understand its special American qualities, but it may simply have been that it did not match the temper of the public at that time.

Sixteen years later Wilder joined forces with Tyrone Guthrie to produce a play for the 1954 Edinburgh International Festival. For this occasion he made some minimal revisions in his Merchant of Yonkers and renamed it The Matchmaker. This time it was a big success. A recent critic has suggested that the success was due both to improvements in production and the greater sophistication of the American public after World War II. 8 Wilder made very few changes, bringing a few idioms up to date and slightly rear- ranging the dialogue. The only significant differences were doubling the length of Dolly Levi's monologue in the fourth act and adding some farcical stage directions, presum- ably a contribution of the director Guthrie. The production was so successful that it was transferred to London with the same cast, and the next year moved to New York.

A decade later the musical comedy version brought Wilder a sizable fortune. Thus The Merchant, which closed after twenty-eight performances, enjoyed a second reincarnation as the 1964 Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! In 1969 the movie version (with Walther Matthau and Barbra Streisand) set a record as the most expensive musical film ever made up to that time.

The story of the curious transformations of this plot does not end there. In 1981 Tom Stoppard presented his play On the Razzle at the Edinburgh Festival, where Wilder had presented The Matchmaker twenty-six years earlier. This too was an adaptation of Nestroy's famous piece, but much closer to the plot than Wilder's had been. Stoppard claims not to have known that Wilder's play was an adaptation of the Jux and says that when he learned this he first tried to find another Nestroy play to adapt, but soon returned to Jux because his director Peter Wood wanted to do it and because, he says, Wilder's temperament, "which serves The Matchmaker so well, made gentler and more dignified use of the original than I intended, while, furthermore, his adapta-

7.

8.

Wilder's preface, p. xi of the HarperPerennial edition, Thornton Wilder 3 Plays (New York 1985), the edition of The Matchmaker cited in this article. The preface was originally published in the Bantam Books edition, Three Plays by Thornton Wilder (New York, 1958). Maria P. Alter ("The Reception of Nestroy in America As Exemplified in Thornton Wilder's Matchmaker," Modern Austrian Literature 20.3/4 [1987], pp. 39-40) suggests that after the great depression, along with the provincialism and xenophobia of "the unsettled 1930s," Americans had grown more sophisticated and open-minded due to travel experience abroad "by courtesy of Uncle Sam."


t ion of the plot was rather more free. "9 With his non-s top series of puns, p ranks and gags, S toppard offers an almost Plautine contrast to Wilder 's Terent ian t rea tment of this Viennese farce.

From our survey of this series of plays we m ay observe that this his tory is reminiscent of the origins of ancient Roman comedies. Terence adap ted Greek originals for his Roman audiences of the second century BCE, traveled to Greece in search of new material, and combined scenes f rom different earlier plays in his o w n creations, for which (contaminatio) he received criticism from some of his contemporar ies and de- vo ted his pro logues to justifying this practice as quite normal. 1~ Of the six plays that he wrote before his early death in a shipwreck, the Phormio, first p resen ted on the Roman stage in 161 BCE, is typical and contains all the elements regarded as character- istic of this genre: "love intrigue; mild social satire; rapid, wi t ty dialogue; and re- s trained but still delightful humor . The stock characters are all present and accounted for: the lovelorn and not very enterpris ing you n g man; the s tubborn and self-willed bu t still k indly father; the clever slave; the shrewish and garrulous wife; even the p imp and the "pa ras i t e " - - tha t out-of-pocket member of a decayed aristocracy w h o l ived precar iously by cadging invitations to d inner f rom his more for tunate friends. The p lay is, in fact, n amed after its "pa ras i t e " - -o r " m a n - a b o u t - t o w n ' . . . . ,,11 Terence 's play, like all extant Roman dramas, was based on a Greek original, in this case a c o m e d y by a certain Apol lodorus called The Claimant or Litigant (not extant today). The Roman vers ion retains the setting and characters of the original.

Plot of the Phormio

Phormio is the story of two fathers who leave a slave in charge of their sons while they go off on separate trips. The sons fall in love wi th ineligible y o u n g w o m e n and the Parasite Phormio helps them obtain their objectives. This brings h im into conflict wi th the fathers on their return. Phormio does not exactly know h o w things will w o rk out but he is confident that "one thing will lead to another" and he will be able to take advantage of the situation.

The basic problem is that the sons are terrified to confront their fathers and they have no m o n e y to arrange their own affairs. Phormio takes care of all this b y mak ing threats of lawsuits and cajoling m o n e y out of the old men. At one point he is able to create a smokescreen about the girl's father "Stilpo," whose n am e Phormio m a d e u p on the spur of the momen t and which later turns out to be the name that one of the fathers used as his identi ty in a second marr iage which he had concealed for years. Near the climax of the p lay the mother and daughte r sudden ly arrive looking for him. Phormio discovers this and of course uses this information. He is able to keep the

9. Stoppard's Introduction (p. 8), On the Razzle (London 1981). 10. Cf. the charges of plagiarism leveled against Thornton Wilder that so intimidated the Crit-

ics Circle of New York that they denied The Skin of Our Teeth their annual award in 1943. (Gilbert A. Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder [New Haven and New York 1983], p. 233.)

11. Frank O. Copley's introductory note, p. 59, to his translation in The Comedies of Terence (New York 1967). Also see R. G. Bury's note (The Symposium of Plato, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1932) on 174B (p. 7): "The jester (gelotopoios) who frequents feasts as an uninvited guest seems to have been a stock character in Epicharmus . . . . Araros the comic poet was, apparently, the first to dub them parasitoi."

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money and persuade the fathers to abide by the sons' love interests. As is usually the case in Terence, one of the women turns out to be an eligible wife while the other one is only a lowly harpist who maintains her girlfriend status. The Resolution at the end provides for a wedding and clears up the manifold confusion that is the mainstay of the plot. The Parasite finally gets invited to dinner.

Plot of The Matchmaker

There is no explicit evidence that Thornton Wilder knew the Phormio, since it is not mentioned in his journals or other writing. But it is not unreasonable to assume that he was familiar with it since he based his early novel The Woman of Andros on another of Terence's plays.

As in the Phormio and other Roman comedies the "old man" or senex of The Matchmaker issues orders in an effort to control the lives of his family and takes a trip that gives the young people an oppor tuni ty to defy his wishes. The merchant Vandergelder forbids his niece Ermengarde to marry the penniless artist Ambrose Kemper. Before leaving for New York to interview a prospective wife for himself, he has made certain arrangements to hide his niece, but Ambrose overhears the address. Dolly Levi, the impoverished matchmaker who "arranges things", arrives to tell Vandergelder about their appointment with the widow Irene Molloy. Before the end of Act One she has revealed her plan to improve everyone's life, including her own, by intimating that she will get Vandergelder for herself.

At this point Wilder includes a scene based on Act II, Scene VI of Moli6re's L'Avare (The Miser), where Frosine, identified by Moli6re as une femme d'intrigue ("a designing woman"), is trying to arrange a match for the miser Harpagon. 12 Frosine, who previously had described herself as one who tries "to render myself serviceable to people, and to profit as much as possible by the small talents of which I am possessed" since "in this world we must live by our wits, and that to persons like me, Heaven has given no other income than intrigue and industry", tells Harpagon how well he looks:

Frosine: "You are made of the stuff to live a hundred . . . . Show me your hand. Good heavens, what a line of life!"

This is the corresponding passage in Wilder:

Mrs. Levi: "You're the sort that will be stamping about at a hundred . . . . Show me your hand . . . . Lord in heaven! What a life line!"

Frosine then goes on to describe the young lady who has been brought up accustomed to strict economy and the utmost simplicity. In her aversion to young men her own age she keeps a picture of Saturn, King Priam and old Nestor on her wall. "Ernestina Simple," the corresponding creation of Mrs. Levi, also "has a positive horror of flighty, brainless young men" and keeps pictures of Moses and Methuselah surrounded by his grandchildren on her wall. Both of these matchmakers even have stories of wretched lawsuits on their hands as a ploy to get a little advance out of the old men. That ploy

12. See Donald Haberman, The Plays of Thornton Wilder. A Critical Study (Middletown, CT, 1967), p. 127 ff., who discusses this comparison in detail.


does not work for Frosine, but Vandergelder begrudgingly forks over one-half of the fifty dollars that Mrs. Levi requests for her legal bills.

Wilder himself acknowledged this source in a listing of various literary loans: "the third act of Our Town," he informed a correspondent, "was based on a subject treated in The Woman of Andros; the closing first act speech of Our Town could be found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the catalogue of Emily's goodbyes was after that of Achilles in the underworld; the character of Mrs. Levi in The Matchmaker was borrowed from Moli6re's The Miser. 'q3 It is well known that The Miser (written in 1668) was based on Plautus's Aulularia ("Pot of Gold") and that in the source for this scene, Megadorus' older sister Eunomia is giving him some advice about getting mar- ried to a younger woman.

Act Two moves away from Yonkers to the world of commerce and "adventure." Unlike classical comedy where all the action is presented on the street, modern stage drama can take advantage of changes in setting to add variety to the situation. An- other significant change is the depiction of the young people in their relations with the opposite sex, whereas Roman comedy deals primarily with the complications resulting from these affairs. Following the exposition in Act One, Act Two presents the complication resulting from the coincidence which occurs when the young men hide in the millinery shop where their boss Vandergelder has an appointment with Mrs. Molloy. (They had seen him sitting on a bench and ducked inside to avoid being seen by him.) Thus the two women and the timid young men, all yearning for excitement, meet one another and-- in the course of humorous scenes of hiding, covering up, overhearing conversations and misunderstanding and deception--fall in love. Dolly Levi of course figures out what is going on and uses this knowledge to her advantage. Playing along with the idea of Cornelius' double life she makes the humble clerk out to be a veritable man-about-town when he is in New York. The idea that Mrs. Molloy is hiding a man in her cupboard convinces Vandergelder that he should have nothing more to do with her and he storms out, with Dolly reminding him that "Ernestina Simple is waiting for us!"

The crisis of the play comes in the Third Act when all the main characters meet in the Harmonia Gardens restaurant and amidst the confusion of the evening Vandergelder dismisses or fires everyone--his niece, his "bride" and his clerks. He even loses his purse, which allows the desperate young men to pay for their extravagant dinner. By the stock motif of eavesdropping, Dolly is able to take advantage of the situation and prepare the way for Vandergelder to marry her. By gesture ("You go your way, and I'll go mine": pointing in the same direction, The Matchmaker p. 204) and by her reac- tions she drives the exasperated Vandergelder to escape before his inevitable capitula- tion to her. Like Geta in Phormio she is adept at robbing one purse to fill another and like Phormio himself she admits that she "likes to know everything that's going on; who likes to manage things" (p. 205).

The resolution of this comic predicament comes in the last scene in the apartment of Flora Van Huysen, "a friend of all young lovers" whose unfulfilled life prompts her to encourage the rapturous beginnings of the young people's relationships. 14 Several

13. 14.

Quoted from Harrison's The Enthusiast (see n. 10 above), p. 234. Instead of following the New Comedy precedent of introducing a relative at the end of the play to clear up the situation, Wilder brings the cast to the relative; but rather than clarify- ing the situation Miss Van Huysen further misinterprets the relationships. But it is her good will and determination that help unravel the complexity and bring about the resolution.

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times she intones "the story of my life" as she realizes the loneliness that comes from refusing to take what excitement life has to offer. Two by two they arrive: first Cornelius and Barnaby (still wearing a dress that he had hastily donned as camouflage) are brought by Malachi with a letter of introduction from Vandergelder so that Miss Van Huysen mistakes them for Mr. Kemper and Ermengarde. The confusion thickens when the real Ambrose Kemper arrives with Ermengarde. Next to arrive are Irene Molloy and Minnie, accompanied by Mrs. Levi who is immediately recognized by Miss Van Huysen as an old friend of Vandergelder's wife. Offstage Vandergelder is heard bel- lowing for help to pay for the cab. Mrs. Molloy rushes out to pay with the money from Vandergelder's purse. He enters and promptly discharges her again. In the end under the gentle influence and generous hospitality of Flora, Vandergelder forgives everyone and even makes Cornelius Hackl his partner. Dolly also undergoes a kind of transformation when in a soliloquy she explains to her dead husband why she will marry Vandergelder (for his money) and how she plans to use it "to make things grow. 'q5 Dolly accepts his marriage proposal with assurances that he will transform himself into a great benefactor in Yonkers. As a matchmaker par excellence she has arranged not only her own marriage but also that of three other couples.

Thus in both Terence and Wilder the plots proceed from an exposition of the conflicting desires of the main characters to complication, crisis and resolution with a happy ending in marriage. There is in both a combination of misogamist jokes with the firm belief that marriage is the normal and ideal conclusion for such affairs. As domestic comedies, the major concerns are money and the proper behavior of one's children.

Many correspondences could be found among the chief characters in the two plays, but a brief comparison will make the point. Horace Vandergelder, for example, is a typical senex, defined by the author as "sixty, choleric, vain and sly". He is given the Roman name "Horace" along with a family name that contains a reference to money or "geld" (like Chremes in Greek). Although Vandergelder does not have any children, he is guardian for his twenty-four-year-old niece Ermengarde. Cornelius Hackl and Barnaby Tucker combine the roles of Roman slaves and adulescentes. The servae are Miss Flora van Huysen's "Cook" and Vandergelder's eighty-year-old housekeeper Gertrude (who also has certain features of a Roman matrona). The women who play the equivalent of Roman meretrices or "girl-friends" are Mrs. Irene Molloy and her assistant Minnie Fay. Ambrose Kemper is the corresponding amatus of Ermengarde. Thus the casts of characters match easily. (See the Chart of "Dramatis Personae" be- low.)

Tuming to other traits common to the two plays, we see that scenes of deception 16

15. To further her vocation to spread enjoyment around, Dolly must first tutor Horace to adopt a proper attitude toward money; for her, money must be spread about "like manure" (p. 222) if it is to encourage life and growth. According to Donald Haberman (see n. 12 above), p. 81 and n. 13, this comparison of money to manure comes from Francis Bacon, "Of Sedition and Troubles": "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread."

16. Scenes of deception, e.g., when the senex tries to deceive the adolescent, who discovers the secret: Geta finds out that Chremes is the father of Antipho's wife (Phormio 872 = Copley translation [see n. 11 above], p. 104). In The Matchmaker Ambrose finds out where Vandergelder is sending his niece (Act One, p. 260); the young men hide from the old man with the assistance of Dolly who covers for them (in Mrs. Molloy's shop, Act Two, p. 311; also in the restaurant, Act Three, p. 364).

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a n d confus ion , 17 e a v e s d r o p p i n g 18 a nd un l ike ly co inc idences 19 are bui l t in to the plots . There are even sententiae, 2~ "doub le t s "21 a nd the o ld - f a sh ioned pract ice of a d d r e s s i n g the a u d i e n c e at the end. 22 Some features of N e w C o m e d y plots ( found for e x a m p l e in Te rence ' s Andria) do no t appea r in ei ther p lay: the a n n o u n c e d p r e g n a n c y of the girl- f r iend; the b i r th of the baby ; the s u d d e n arr ival of a re lat ive to clear u p the s i tuat ion.

17. Scenes of confusion (throughout both plays, especially near the end). Also, slapstick and other silly action: Terence does not tend to include as much of this as Plautus does, but two examples are (a) the scene in the last act where Chremes is trying to convey an embarrass- ing secret to his brother while his wife is present; and (b) the final scene where Chremes and Demipho try to haul Phormio off to court before he calls out Nausistrata to tell her about the secret life of her husband. In The Matchmaker there is more of this kind of slapstick: e.g., the tomato cans exploding (at end of Act One); or the young men sneezing in the cupboard while hiding in Mrs. Molloy's hat-shop (Act Two, p. 326). There is much more in Stoppard's On the Razzle.

18. Eavesdropping, whether accidental or not, is as common as intentional deception. Slaves often discover crucial information by this technique, or one of the young men overhears and misinterprets some action. In The Matchmaker Vandergelder has to endure insults while eavesdropping on his niece arriving at the Harmonia Gardens with the forbidden Ambrose in the company of Dolly, who however soon realizes this in time to rectify the situation (Act Three, p. 336 f.). Thus the conniver outfoxes the senex in his spying efforts, as often happens in Roman comedy.

19. Unlikely coincidences are common in this kind of comedy; e.g., Chremes meets the nurse of his daughter just as he returns home. In The Matchmaker, the boys duck into Mrs. Malloy's hatshop quite by accident just as Vandergelder and Dolly are arriving. One of the most significant examples is Phormio's ingenuity in stumbling upon the very name that Chremes had used to conceal his double life ("Stilpo"). Dolly Levi creates her appropriate altera ego with "Ernestina Simple." In Moli6re's play Frosine does not name the young lady she extolls.

20. Two famous "one-liners" (sententiae) from Terence's play: Fortisfortuna adiuvat (Phormio 203, translated by Copley as "The gods help those who help themselves, you know," p. 69), uttered by the slave Geta when Antipho has just learned about his father's return and is terrified); and ah, dictum sapienti sat est (line 541 = Copley's "Go on! A word to the wise is sufficient!", p. 86), Antipho's comment to Geta as an incentive to get his help. Examples of Wilder's sententiousness may not be selected for Bartlett's Quotations: "There are no free countries for fools" (Vandergelder, Act One, p. 258); or "One vice at a time" (Malachi, Act Three, p. 358). The young men's curious nickname of "Wolftrap" for Vandergelder is oddly reminiscent of Antipho's description of his troubles: auribus lupum teneo (Phormio 506 = Copley's "I 've got a wolf by the ears," p. 84). Tom Stoppard's comedy, on the other hand, is full of puns: e.g., the following exchange early in Act I of On the Razzle (p. 12) between Zangler and Sonders: "Unhand my foot, sir! .... I love your niece." "My knees, sir?"

21. Doublets are an interesting aspect of New Comedy. In both Terence and Wilder there are two servants, two couples and two young men. Wilder, however, avoids a sub-plot which would complicate the relationship between his two young men. Moli6re is closer to Roman comedy in this and many other ways. On the other hand, Vandergelder gives two reasons for re-marrying (Act One, p. 270) and Mrs. Molloy gives two reasons for marry ing Vandergelder (Act Two, p. 297). Dolly arranges two ladies for Vandergelder. (She gives two reasons for marrying the fictitious Ernestina Simple.) Also there is the double life attributed to both Chremes (on the island of Lemnos) and Cornelius (as a playboy in New York).

22. In Roman comedy the cantor usually has the last words bidding the audience vos valete et plaudite (line 1055, in Copley's translation, "Goodbye, al l --and give us a good hand!", p. 112) Of the m o d e m playwrights considered here, Wilder alone follows this precedent. He

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Given all this that is similar be tween modern plays and Roman plays like Terence 's Phormio, we ma y also see significant differences caused b y changes in social arrangements since antiquity. Slaves no longer do the work in our society, bu t their place is taken by lowly clerks such as Mr. Vandergelder employs. The p rob lem of f inding a suitable spouse for one 's children focuses more f requent ly on our daughters in today ' s d rama than in Roman comedy, where the senes w o r r y about the behav ior of their sons and their engagements . It is no longer the young w o m a n ' s (non-Athenian) social status that is the obstacle to marriage, bu t the y o u n g man ' s (Ambrose 's) lowly social status and consequent insufficient income. And it is not wi th professional cour tesans that the adulescentes dally when they disobey their elders, bu t (in The Matchmaker) with pre t ty milliners in N e w York, who are thus "unavai lable" as marr iage par tners for y o u n g m e n f rom Yonkers. 23 One might say that it is the feminizat ion of the plot that accounts for m a n y changes in m o d e r n versions of N e w Comedy. The fathers ' concern for their daughters , the increased impor tance of the roles of w o m e n and especially the subst i tut ion of a w o m a n for the role of the Paras i te--a l l attest to this tendency. Fur- thermore , our theatre is not restricted by the convent ion of present ing all the action ou tdoors in front of one of the houses, as in most Greek and Roman plays. These are some of the reasons w h y our domestic comedies on the surface m a y seem unre la ted to their ancient predecessors.

The Character of Dolly Levi

Dolly Levi is the principal character in The Matchmaker, the one w h o plays the role of the "conniver ." A d d e d by Wilder f rom Moli6re's p lay to his original adapta t ion of a Viennese farce, she eventual ly assumed the title role, as indicated b y the shift in the title w h e n Wilder "on ly slightly modi f ied" The Merchant of Yonkers. 24 In Terence 's Phormio the main character is described as someone w h o "lives b y his wits "25 and enjoys conning people for the pleasure of it. His only practical goal is to get a free meal out of a rich man; hence, the name Para-sitos (one w h o is "seated a longside" the other guests at dinner). 26 Early in the p lay (342) Phormio refers to the " w o n d e r - d i n n e r " (cena dubia) that is his cus tomary reward: a d inner "where y o u w o n d e r wha t to take first" (Copley's translation). And at the end of the p lay he is invi ted in to d inner b y Nausistrata , the wife of the man he has duped. Typical ly the Parasite is involved in, or

gives the final words to Barnaby after Dolly says that the youngest person present ought to tell what the moral of the play is: "Oh, I think it's about adventure . . . [etc.] So that now we all want to thank you for coming tonight, and we all hope that in your lives you have just the right amount of--adventure."

23. Thornton Wilder declines to exploit the comic possiblities of father and son both courting the same woman, as in Moli6re's The Miser.

24. Wilder's preface (see n. 7 above), p. xiii. Coincidentally, Terence states in the prologue of his Eunuchus (20-34) that one of the changes he made in his adaptation of Menander's Eunouchos was the addition of the parasite figure from Menander's Kolax ("Flatterer").

25. Copley's translation for Terence's parasitus, p. 122; Douglass Parker (The Complete Comedies of Terence, edited by Palmer Bovie [New Brunswick, N.J. 1974], p. 242) translates the term as "sponger."

26. A good recent survey of the ancient history of Parasites may be found in P. F. McC. Brown, "Menander, Frgs 745 and 746 K-T, Menander's Kolax, and Parasites and Flatterers in Greek Comedy," Zeitschriftfiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 92 (1992), pp. 91-107.


threatens to bring, a lawsuit. Phormio is given a large sum of money to settle his alleged expenses, which he uses to help out his young friends, the sons of the old men.

Dolly Levi belongs to this tradition, by way of Moli6re's Frosine, and perhaps with even a direct tie to Terence. Dolly is not at all the voracious hanger-on of ancient drama, to be sure, but there are many similarities. Like Phormio (and Frosine), Dolly ekes out a living by arranging things for people, and she too alludes to a fictitious lawsuit. Like Phormio she resorts to creating an ingenious false name in a frantic attempt to stay in control of the situation. They both reveal the double life of one of the characters and they are both invited to dinner. Like Phormio, Dolly helps change the uncle's mind and unite the lovers, benefiting herself in the process.

The hallmark of the classical Parasite was "his obsession with food, "27 and as the scene in the Harmonia Gardens Restuarant attests, Dolly also likes good food. As a modern female conniver, however, instead of an invitation to dinner as her ultimate reward she desires marriage. Parasites of Classical drama were similar to slaves in their conniving cleverness, delighting in intrigue for its own sake, but they differed from slaves by being free. They were entitled under Athenian law to serve as a patron of an heiress, as Phormio does. Though typically impoverished, they were motivated not so much by money as by the good things that money could buy (the rich patron would pay the bill); nor were they in fear of being discovered and beaten, like slaves, but only of lawsuits if their deceit were detected. The dramatic Parasite was also noted for his amusing and ironic manner of speech, as he supported his patron with ambigu- ous witticisms. 2s Dolly Levi's behavior and language follow these traditional charac- teristics.

In his adaptation of this ancient dramatic figure Wilder has created a modern persona in keeping with his "very American birch-bark beer." Her name and that of her previous husband may have some bearing on Wilder's intentions (see again his Preface, quoted above p. 551): by heritage she seems to be American-Irish while her husband Ephraim Levi was originally Viennese (thus a bow to Nestroy). At one point she refers to a Bible in which she placed an oak leaf on the day her husband proposed to her. Eventually realizing that she has become as faded as that leaf, she decides to rejoin the human race and look for another husband. Wilder appears to be weaving in allusions to the Old and New Testaments in connection with Dolly's rebirth. 29 Perhaps by adding this bi-cultural figure to his European sources Wilder wanted to American- ize his play, creating "the vivacious, witty, and incomparable Dolly Levi, who thinks on her feet and gives the farce its American flavor. "3~ As Sander Goldberg said in reference to Our Town, "Like Terence, Wilder created a play of s imple language and domestic action which uses generalized types to examine everyday values and to reveal them as universal qualities. "31 It is noteworthy that Wilder omits all villainous

27. Ibid. p. 98. 28. See W. Geoffrey Arnott, "Phormio Parasitus/' Greece and Rome 17 (1970), pp. 32-57. 29. In support of this interpretation is the name that Wilder chose for Nestroy's newly hired

apprentice Melchior. Wilder changed it to Malachi, perhaps an allusion to the last book of the Old Testament. The name (meaning "messenger") is appropriate for a character whose first task is to go on an errand for Mr. Vandergelder, to whom he brings a message of greeting from his previous employer.

30. Alter (see above, n. 8), p. 38. 31. Goldberg (see above, n. 1), p. 17.

Ziolkowski 559

characters, such as the pimps and money-lenders of Roman comedy (see Chart p. 560) who exert pressure on the young lovers and their supporters. The threats in The Matchmaker come from Vandergelder himself as he finds out how he has been de- ceived.

According to Thomas Whissen, "It is Dolly Levi's return to the world that is at the heart of the play . . . . By adding the character of the matchmaking widow and shifting the focus of the play to her 'return to life,' Wilder transformed a hackneyed farce. �9 into an affirmation of life in an age of doubt and confusion. "32 At first her part in the play seems almost incidental; "she appears to be simply a comic character whose interfer- ing is pleasantly annoying and whose pursuit of Vandergelder is fairly obvious. L a t e r . . . she reveals herself less as a manipulative businesswoman than as a woman with a heart whose purpose is to nudge destiny toward happy resolutions." In her Wilder combines his optimistic themes of "rejoin[ing] the human race" and using money for "the four or five human pleasures that are our right in the world" (Dolly's last soliloquy). Thus through his transformation of a classical figure Wilder has created a bright new character who presides over this modem counterpart of Roman New Comedy, in which we may observe many updated aspects of an enduring dramatic form.

32. Frank N. Magill, Masterplots II. Drama Series, vol. 3 (Pasadena, CA, 1990), p. 1067 (also the source for the next quote).


Appendix: Dramatis Personae

The following chart gives a synoptic v iew of the Dramat is Personae of Terence 's Phormio, Wilder ' s The Matchmaker, Stoppa rd ' s On the Razzle, Nes t roy ' s Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen, and Moli6re 's The Miser (L'Avare).

On the Razzle / Character Type Phormio The Matchmaker Jux The Miser

Senes (Old Men) Demipho Horace Vandergelder Zangler Harpagon Chremes = Stilpo Anselme

Adulescentes Antipho Cornelius Hackl Weinberl Valerius, son of Anselm

(Young Men) Phaedria Barnaby Tucker Christopher C16ante, son of Harpagon

(Young Women) *** Ermengarde, niece Marie Sonders Elise, his daughter

Servi (Slaves) Davus Cornelius & Barnaby Melchior La Fl~che, valet Geta Malachi Stack Philippine Brindavoine,

valet Gertrude (housekeeper) Lisette La Merluche

Gertrud Harpagon Mistress Claude

Meretrix Pamphila *** *** *** (Courtesan)

"Unacceptable Phanium Ambrose Kemper Mme Knorr Mariane Mates" (= Stilpo's Mrs. Irene Molloy, a Mrs. Fischer

daughter) milliner = "Ernestine Simple" Minnie

Matrona (Wife) Nausistrata *** *** ***

Nutrix (Nurse) Sophrona Miss Flora Van Huysen Miss Blumenblatt ***

Parasitus Phormio Mrs. Dolly Levi *** Frosine, "femme (Parasite) d'intrigue"

"Villain" Dorio *** *** *** (Pimp or Moneylender)

"Extras" (Doctor, Hegio Joe Scanlon, barber Belgian Hupfer Master Jacques Friends, Cook) Rudolph and Augustus Coachman Master Simon

(Waiters) German couple, Commissary etc. & clerk

Documents

Dolly Levi: A modern parasite? (Thornton Wilder and Terence)