The purpose of this research is to examine theatre and drama as forces that attempt to present, explain, or comment by means of artistic forms on human experience in historical and cultural context. The plan of the research will be to show how this force has functioned as dramatic art, as symbolic form and as material for and of aesthetic and social commentary, from the classical to the modern period, with a view toward under standing how the operations of drama and theatre interpenetrate and/or affect the shape of shared belief and experience.
Undoubtedly, the Poetics is the first great and systematic articulation of dramatic theory, so important to subsequent dramatic theory that it is almost a given or a postulate whence virtually all succeeding Western aesthetics proceeds. Or to paraphrase what Whitehead famously says of Plato, one could say that all Western dramatic criticism is a series of footnotes to Aristotle. But it seems also important to recognize that Aristotle himself is engaged in a project of footnoting Greek society as he finds it. In the Poetics, this takes the form of a serious axiological engagement with found society and culture. Aristotle uses the early chapters of the Poetics to describe the evolution of poetry from humanity's "instinct for imitation" and natural aptitude for rhythm and dance, through its progression through organized phallic songs, and toward the emergence of the "grandeur of tragedy" as features of refinements or embellishments of poetic method (Aristotle 35-7). The implicit analogy is to the increasing rationalization of Greek society itself, from primitive group behavior to the structures of culture and civil society with which Aristotle himself was sufficiently acquainted to undertake a systematic investigation of its various attributes. The evidence of the Poetics as its own artifact and as commentary on tragedy is that both tragedy and commentary had the effect of helping to explain how...