The Plays of Roswitha — Edition Insights

Comic Violence and the Grotesque

In Dulcitius, the governor Dulcitius attempts to seduce three Christian virgins in a storeroom, but in the dark he mistakes sooty pots and pans for the women, emerging blackened and mocked. The scene is played for farce: his wife sees him and cries, “What has happened to you, my lord? You look like a dirty Egyptian!” Roswitha uses physical comedy to humiliate the persecutor, but the humor is pointed—the virgins remain untouched, their purity preserved by a literal slapstick intervention. Similarly, in Callimachus, the pagan suitor’s lust leads to his own death and a near-resurrection, blending erotic tension with miraculous reversal. These moments of grotesque humor are not mere interludes; they are structural devices that invert power, allowing the weak to triumph through absurdity.

The Rhetoric of Seduction and Resistance

Roswitha’s dialogues often stage a contest between persuasive speech and steadfast will. In Abraham, the hermit Abraham and his brother Ephrem convince the young Mary to become a recluse by promising her a celestial bridal chamber where she will “sweep round the zodiac.” Mary’s initial ignorance—she asks, “How can such a poor thing as I am… shine like my name?”—gives way to enthusiastic consent: “Who but an ass would think little of such happiness!” Later, when a false monk seduces Mary, her fall is described through her own cries of despair: “She beat her breast and dug her nails into her face.” The play traces a full arc from persuasion to ruin to eventual repentance, showing Roswitha’s interest in the psychology of temptation and the fragility of resolve.

Naming as Destiny and Dramatic Irony

Throughout the plays, characters’ names carry explicit symbolic weight. In Abraham, Ephrem explains that Mary means “star of the sea,” a star that “never sets, but shines always in the heavens to show mariners their right course.” The name becomes a moral imperative: Mary must live up to it. This device recurs in Sapientia, where the mother’s name means Wisdom, and her daughters—Faith, Hope, and Charity—embody their virtues literally, enduring martyrdom. Roswitha’s audience would have recognized these allegorical cues, creating dramatic irony when characters fail to live up to their names. The tension between name and action drives the plot, as when Mary’s fall contradicts her stellar destiny, only to be restored through penance.

Readers approaching these plays should attend to the interplay between Roswitha’s stated moral purpose and her theatrical instincts. The prefaces claim to replace Terence’s lewdness with edification, but the dramas themselves revel in disguise, mistaken identity, and comic humiliation. The translation by Christopher St. John preserves the brisk, sometimes colloquial tone of the original Latin, making the plays feel surprisingly modern. A useful approach is to read each play’s argument first, then watch how Roswitha undercuts or complicates her own summaries through dialogue and stage business.

Something about Roswitha’s stubborn virgins and their quiet, comic defiance stayed with me long after closing the book. That blend of tenderness and wit felt almost like a secret shared between friends. I found a similar warmth in The Piccolomini: A Play — Edition Insights, where the human ache behind political maneuvering lingers in the same hushed, unshakeable way. Some stories simply sit beside you afterward, like a patient listener.