Studies for Theatrology: contemporary possibilities of apprehension and understanding of the old Greek scene

Abstract

During the last milennium, it was a triteness to state the special consistence of Greek tragedy. Its happy fortune, however, became a problematic one when its analysis lost its naïve acceptance, i.e., when its methods were put in question, and put in question the original motives that provoked its appearance and unquestionable prestige. Surely, it was already known that its historical situation had to be scrutinized, and its symbolic universe had to be recognized. The difficulty was just starting, since we own only remote conjectures about it: the Greek theater arises from a context which worked, at the same time, as a cause and a consequence. In this interconection, it becomes impossible to try to simplify the question by claiming, as its was done by the Romantics, that Greek tragedy was the atemporal blossom of a trancendent human genious. The strange fascination it has carried out during the Western history of humankind and on its own development cannot be explained by its symbolic universe, since this is quite unknown to us. For this reason, since centuries, the right attention had displaced itself from its genuine object to the contemporary scene, i.e., to the diversity of its analytic views, methods and fields of intellectual exploration, which, however, in nowadays must agree with the requirements of scientificity and historicity. In short, in the modern world, the ancient time appears by exchange, intervention, and interference, although the scholars recognize that they are acting in a frail terrain, in which the use of the words "tragedy"; and "tragic" risk to be quite unable for a plausible understanding of his object, the Greek scene. Instead of looking for a homogeneous and consensual view, it is required that knowledge in general and specially this one, enclosed in the remoteness of time, supposes its previous mapping. And this means to establish a previous dialogical situation, as a precondition for a tensional state and, if we are lucky, a subsequently better result.