Ne mox erretis: la convenzione della maschera nel teatro romano dal III secolo a. C.

There is no agreement among scholars on the use of masks in the time of Plautus. While the ancient evidence on the subject is very contradictory, the sources seem to state that masks were introduced earlier at Rome. Modern proponents of the view that masked performances already existed in the time of Plautus have often raised the issue of how twins’ roles could be performed unmasked in plays like Amphitruo and Menaechmi: but in modern drama, as shown in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or The Comedy of Errors, the roles of doubles can also be played maskless. However, this issue still deserves further investigation. If twins had been staged by maskless actors, it would not be clear, then, why Plautus uses some signs to differentiate between doubles in the eyes of his audience: the signs are needed in a theatre that makes use of masks to ensure the recognition of the twins by the audience. The signs are absent in Shakespeare, whose twins were recognized by the audience precisely because not perfectly identical. Moreover, this work also attempts to account for why the use of masks in the early roman theatre is denied by the ancient sources: in the Roman antiquarian tradition the idea that the theatre had evolved from a primitive form (unmasked) to a more advanced form (masked) comes from the Greek scholarly tradition, according to which actors played maskless at the beginning (some sources date back to Aeschylus the use of wearing masks).