The decorum in Plautus' discourse before a distracted reception: the design of a cavea ridensin Stichus

Abstract

Facing an audience with unpredictable interests, Plautine statements are in charge of producing a spectatorial attachment of the actio with rhetoric operations aimed to capture and maintain the attention of the audience. Thus, the interaction scaena / cavea is sustained by linguistic, pragmatic and compositional devices from the fabulae. The play Stichus is a paradigm of such procedures, displayed in a fictionis dispositio apparently anomalous. From a performatic perspective, that presumed abnormality could be analyzed as a deliberate procedure that deals with the discontinuity of the audience’s attention and proposes a scenic enunciation adapted to its aesthetic consumption.