{"id":21220,"date":"2011-02-28T00:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-28T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=21220"},"modified":"2011-02-28T00:00:37","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T05:00:37","slug":"zero-mostel-and-tricky-slaves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/02\/28\/zero-mostel-and-tricky-slaves\/","title":{"rendered":"Zero Mostel and Tricky Slaves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QPds0-hZ1tM\">httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QPds0-hZ1tM<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>New Comedy in a nutshell &#8212; including a brother and sister kidnapped in infancy by pirates &#8212; from <\/em>A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. \u00a0<em>This clip includes Mostel as Pseudolus (right), Jack Gilford as Hysterium (left) and Buster Keaton (centre) as Erroneous. \u00a0(Michael Hordern makes a brief appearance as Senex.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Today is the great comic actor <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Zero_Mostel\" target=\"_blank\">Zero Mostel<\/a>&#8216;s birthday (1915-1977). His performance as Pseudolus in Richard Lester&#8217;s 1966 film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Funny_Thing_Happened_on_the_Way_to_the_Forum_(film)\" target=\"_blank\">A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum<\/a> <\/em>nicely represents\u00a0the <em>eiron<\/em> character Frye in <em>Anatomy<\/em> calls the &#8220;tricky slave.&#8221; Then again, the plot of <em>A Funny Thing<\/em> is a playbook for the formulaic conventions of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/New_comedy#New_Comedy_.28nea.29\" target=\"_blank\">New Comedy<\/a>, to the extent that two of the characters bear the names of the types Frye identifies them by: Senex and Miles Gloriosus.<\/p>\n<p>From the &#8220;The Mythos of Spring&#8221; section of &#8220;Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Another central <em>eiron <\/em>figure is the type entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero&#8217;s victory. \u00a0This character in Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (<em>dolosus servus<\/em>). . . . The vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a comic dramatist because he acts from pure love of mischief, and he can set a comic action going with the minimum of motivation. . . One of the tricky slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he is the <em>architectus<\/em> of the comic action: such a character carries out the will of the author to reach a happy ending. \u00a0He is in fact the spirit of comedy itself. . . . (CW 22, 161)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QPds0-hZ1tM New Comedy in a nutshell &#8212; including a brother and sister kidnapped in infancy by pirates &#8212; from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. \u00a0This clip includes Mostel as Pseudolus (right), Jack Gilford as Hysterium (left) and Buster Keaton (centre) as Erroneous. \u00a0(Michael Hordern makes a brief appearance as Senex.) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,5,8,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anatomy-of-criticism","category-anniversaries","category-archetype","category-comedy"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Zero Mostel and Tricky Slaves - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/02\/28\/zero-mostel-and-tricky-slaves\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Zero Mostel and Tricky Slaves - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QPds0-hZ1tM New Comedy in a nutshell &#8212; including a brother and sister kidnapped in infancy by pirates &#8212; from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. \u00a0This clip includes Mostel as Pseudolus (right), Jack Gilford as Hysterium (left) and Buster Keaton (centre) as Erroneous. \u00a0(Michael Hordern makes a brief appearance as Senex.) 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