The Mother-in-Law

Terence's The Mother-in-Law finishes up the Plautus and Terence collection, and while it wasn't the worst, it was probably the least memorable. At 50 pages, it's fairly short, and there's not much of a story to speak of- the setup is that a young man has been forced into marriage with the girl next door, and eventually does learn to love her, which is complicated by the fact that she's been hiding a pregnancy from 2 months before they were wed. Most of the play deals with the families of the two assigning blame to pretty much everyone, which boils down to a lot of name-calling and whining. Thr truth is, not one of the characters was sympathetic throughout the play, even the clever slave, a character who usually appears to be "above it all." The jokes worked adaquately, but even though I only read this two days ago I honestly can't recall any of them. This means there's really not much to say about The Mother-in-Law that I haven't already said about the rest of the works of Plautus and Terence, which has me thinking that I could be going about logging these collections of plays all wrong- I think for the rest of them I will just read an entire book at once and adress 3 or 4 plays in a mega-post. But until that mega-post comes, I've got more logging to do.