Concluding note

Summary

We have reached the end of our survey, having covered in a systematically coherent fashion the main structural aspects of dramatic texts and theatrical communication. The scope of our study has been vast indeed, as we have tried to do justice to both the dramatic and the theatrical dimensions of plays and to illustrate the range of structural possibilities through examples taken from the main periods of Western drama. Thus, if not a history of drama and the theatre in itself, the study provides the structural tools for the writing of such a history, or rather, such histories. Within the grid of its systematic categorisations history has inscribed itself, and even if the often drastic juxtapositions of Latin comedy and the Theatre of the Absurd, of Shakespeare and French classical tragedy, may occasionally have created the impression of a violently a-historical, if not anti-historical, slant to this book, its dedication to the study of individual texts in their historical specificity and of drama and theatre history in general should by now have become clear. System and history, systematic categorisation and historical interpretation, are not mutually exclusive, but presuppose and depend upon each other.