Eschil. Poezia spațiului (Aeshylus. The Poetry...)

This research forms part of the vast frame of theatre history, dealing with an aspect of the theatrical spectacle from the times of its beginnings, namely, the problem of the space in the Greek tragedy in the first third of the fifth century BC. Space is a intrinsic dimension of the dramatic discourse, that Aeschylus not only intuited, but also explored from a pragmatic perspective, with the stage and poetic means he disposed of. Our approach envisages the relationship between the space indicated by the dramatic text and the space of its representation on the stage of the Great Dionysia, the Athenian dramatic festival established in the sixth century BC and synonymous, all along the fifth century BC, with the period of growth and peak of the tragic genre. This undertaking is not singular, but has its points of reference in the researches that started to evolve after the World War II, and that enjoy continuity, at some dramatic academics and practitioners’s instance that bestow philological thoroughness on performance studies research. The novelty, if not topicality of this undertaking consists in its approach, an implicit «reading practice» that could seem a plain recurring to the text, since comprises the analysis of the means that serve the author in constructing the dramatic space. Is is not only a line by line analysis of the first two complete Aeschylus’ extant tragic texts whose date is established with certainty, the remotest, Persians (472 BC), respectively The Seven Against Thebes (467 BC), produced until Sophocles’ entering the Great Dionysia competitions, so till the encounter between Aeschylus and Sophocles, which, as any significant encounter, was to lead to mutual emulation, but a reconstructive exercise. Not of what could have had taken on scene, impossible restitution, but of a mode of articulation of the Aeschylean text with regard to the dramatic space, by the means the dramatist — by turns poet, director and actor — had at hand at that moment. If dramatic criticism is interested in the effect of the text performed on stage, in semiological aspects or in the ,,world created by the performed text”, our endeavor envisages the analysis of the strategies and poetical means of the construction of the fictional spaces and of the way these were communicated to the spectators, pragmatic and stylistic modalities immanent to and indissociable from the theatrical script, with special regard to the staging processes in those times.