drama of ideas

5/28/2018 Drama of Ideas

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What is known as drama of Ideas? How do you classifyArms and the Man

as a drama of ideas?

Drama of Ideasor the drama of social criticism in the real sense is a modern

development. A number of contemporary problems and evils are subjected to

discussion and searching examinations and criticism in these plays. Thus in it, the

structure and characterization are of subordinate importance; it ids the discussion

that counts. Ibsen and then Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker were the chief

exponents of this realistic drama of ideas.

To Shaw, drama was preeminently a medium for articulating his own ideas

and philosophy. He enunciated the philosophy of life force which he sought to

disseminate through his dramas. Thus Shavian plays are the vehicles for the

transportation of ideas, however, propagandizing they may be. Shaw wanted to cast

his ideas through discussions.

Out of the discussions in the playArm s and the ManShaw breaks the idols

of love and war. The iconoclast Shaw pulls down all false gods which men live, love

admire and adore. By a clever juxtaposition of characters and dialogues, Shaw

shatters the romantic illusions about war and war heroes Shaws message is that

war is no longer a thing of banners and glory, as the nineteenth century dramatist

saw it, but a dull and sordid affair of brutal strength and callous planning out. The

dialogues of Bluntschli, Riana and Sergius go to preach this message with great

success. Here to quote Sergius who says, War is a hollow sham like love. One

thing however be remembered that inArms and the Man,Mr. Shaw does not, as

some imagine attack war. He is not Tolstoy an in the least. What he does is to

denounce the sentimental illusion that gathers around war. Fight if you will, says he

but for goodness sake dont strike picturesque attitudes in the limelight about it.
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View it as one of the desperately irrational things of life that may, however, in certain

circumstances be a brutal necessity. Bluntschli is the very mouth piece of the play

that exposes the dreamful reality of war. There is a lot of learning in the

disillusionment of Riana and Sergius.

But this is not the whole message Shaw intends to convey through his Arms

and The Man. In the play he has taken a realistic view not only of war and heroism

but of love and marriage. He has taken a realistic view of life as a whole. He has

blown away the halo of romance that surrounds human life as a whole. His message

in this play is, therefore, the destruction not only of the conventional conception of

the heroic soldier but of the romantic view of marriage, nay, of life as a whole. He

pleads for judging everything concerning human life from a purely realistic point of

view. This is the message he conveys through the play, Arms and The Man. The

hero Bluntschli here serves the mouth piece of the author. He is the postal of level -

headedness that sees through emptiness of romantic love and romantic heroism. He

towers about all others and shatters all the pet theories and so called high ideas, and

converts Raina and Sergius to his own views and succeeds in life because he faces

facts and his no romantic illusions about him.

Further, as all the propaganda plays goArms and The Manlacks action and

instead of action it contains plenty of dramatic dialogues. It is not a lie if we say

the Arms and The ManShaws a perfectcombination of the elements of action and

discussion. The conversation between Raina and Captain Bluntschli, for example in

the act-I, is extremely lively and through the mouth of the chocolate cream soldier.

Shaw gives expression to his own heresies about the glories of warfare. The fugitive

soldier talks to the universality of the flaying instinct, but his talk is not an end in

itself. He argues only with a view to persuading Raina to give him shelter and to
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protect him from the raids of Bulgarian soldiers. Thus there is not a scrap of

discussion for the sake of discussion. The action of the drama require that Rainas

hatred of a cowardly should be disarmed, her romantic notions blasted and

sympathy and pity aroused. As soon as this end has been achieved, the tired soldier

drops down fast asleep. He instinctively realizes that he has become Rianas poor

dear; and there is no need for further argument.

Ardhendu De

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drama-of-ideas-how-do.html#sthash.Av1K8MY6.dpuf
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Theater, Performance, Philosophy Conference 2014

Martin Puchner and the Drama of Ideas

Publi le 14 janvier 2014 parAnna Street

Martin Puchner has a track record of border crossingsin life as much as in

his prolific academic career. Born and raised in Germany, he exchanged his

undergraduate student life at the University of Konstanz for the University of Bologna

and later the University of California at St. Barbara and Irvine. Having studied

literature, history and philosophy, he ultimately earned his PhD in Comparative

Literature at Harvard University in 1998. Puchner first taught at Columbia University,

and since 2010 has been the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of

English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

His scholarship is wide-ranging and striking in the originality of its approach

be it to world literature, dramatic theory, or the nexus between philosophy and

theater. His three books The Drama of Ideas, Poetry of the Revolutionand Stage

Frightshare a common concern: they approach their subject from beyond its

disciplinary borders and seek to explode internally upheld categorizations. Stage

Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Dramaapproaches drama through its

otherliterature. The closet dramas of Yeats, Stein or Beckett are exceptional here

not because of their embrace but their resistance and indeed suspicion of the

theatrical situation. Ultimately, antitheatricality turns into the mode that offers new

impulses for the stage. In Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes, and the

Avant-Gardes, Puchner explores the border between aesthetic genre and political

action by reading the manifestos power as based on its literary qualities. The

manifesto becomes a testing case for how literature may insert itself and perform in

the world. The book was the winner of the James Russell Lowell Award.
http://tpp2014.com/author/anna-street/http://tpp2014.com/author/anna-street/


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PuchnersDrama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theatre and

Philosophyagain reads two archenemies together: theatre and philosophy. Platos

dialogues turn into dramatic pieces that embody the deep involvement of the two

disciplines with one another. The drama of ideas that Puchner sketches here is

ultimately not geared towards the sphere of corporeality but rather reveals the

possibility of staging thought rather than action. For the new discipline of

performance philosophy, Puchners book is a groundbreaking work because it opens

up new avenues for thinking philosophy through the theatre. The Drama of Ideaswas

awarded the Walter Cabott Channing Prize as well as the Joe A. Callaway Prize for

the Best Book on Drama or Theatre in 2012, and described by the jury as a work of

exceptional literary power and disciplinary consequence.Puchners interventions

continue to question and redefine disciplinary frames. He is at the forefront of

thinking about theories of the theatreand at yet another border: that of

performance and philosophy.

Martin Puchner is also the Director of the Mellon School of Theatre

and Performance Research at Harvard University, which offers emerging scholars

from around the globe a forum for exploring and contributing to the future of the

discipline. His output of edited volumes and sourcebooks is wide-ranging and

reinforces the interdisciplinary scope of his expertise, whether in political theory,

modernist aesthetics, metatheatre or, most recently, world literature.

Selected bibliography:

Puchner, Martin. Norton Anthology of World Literature. General Editor,

with Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Wiebke Denecke et. al. (New York: Norton, 2012)

Puchner, Martin. The Drama of Ideas. Platonic Provocations in Theatre

and Philosophy(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)


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Puchner, Martin. Norton Anthology of Drama. 2 vols. General Editor,

with J. Ellen Gainor and Stanton Garner, Jr. (New York: Norton: Norton, 2009)

Puchner, Martin. Modern Drama: Critical Concepts. Editor, 4-volume

anthology of critical writing (New York: Routledge, 2008)

Puchner, Martin.Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the

Modernist Stage. Editor, with Alan Ackerman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution. Marx, Manifestoes and the

Avant-Gardes.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

Puchner, Martin. Introduction to Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on

Dramatic Form, by Lionel Abel. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2003)

Puchner, Martin. Stagefright. Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and

Drama.(London and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)

[Written by: Ramona Mosse]

http://tpp2014.com/martin-puchner-drama-ideas/


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The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy(review)

Freddie Rokem

From:Comparative Drama

Volume 45, Number 4, Winter 2011

pp. 445-447 | 10.1353/cdr.2011.0030

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Since my warm recommendation of Martin Puchners new book appears on its

back cover, and he at the same time composed a text appearing on the back cover

of my own recently published Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking

Performance (Stanford University Press, 2010; reviewed by Lydia Goehr

in Comparative Drama), I hesitated to write this review when asked. But instead of

recusing myself, I thought this would be an opportunity to raise some general issues

concerning what I believe is a new direction (and perhaps even a new field) in the

research of drama, theater, and performance, as well as for a philosophy that draws

attention to the complex relationships between the discursive practices of these two

fields. Puchners contributions to this emerging area of research, to which he, in

different ways, has already drawn attention in his previous work, most prominently

in Poetry and Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2006), demand a thorough

engagement.

One of the key issues in The Drama of Ideas is how to read Platos dialogues

and how to understand their main character, Socrates. The question is not on what

grounds Plato will ban the arts from the ideal state and the (anti-theatrical) prejudices

to which this position has given rise. Puchners major concern is rather what kind of

texts Plato composed and in which sense many of his dialogues are actually

theatrical, not only in the sense that they are dialogical and can be performed, but
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mainly because they are profoundly connected to the theater of his own time. This is

not a novel idea as such, but Puchner forcefully advances this claim, turning it into

the intellectual and scholarly motor igniting a Platonic, alternative historiography of

Western theater, a dramatic Platonism even overshadowing the much more

canonized Aristotelean one. Puchner convincingly carves out a Platonic tradition

based on a dynamic combination of dramas where Socrates is the main character,

developing scenes in Platos dialogues and dramatic texts with a strong

philosophical basis, on the one hand, and philosophical writings (not necessarily

written as dialogues) of theatrical philosophers [who] think of drama and theater as

their primary categories (125) on the other.

One of the theoretical issues Puchner grapples with is how the genre of the

dialogues, in particular, the Phaedo and the Symposium, is constructed. This is an

extremely complex issue, because both works, which are indeed among the most

dramatic of Platos dialogues, are actuallyretold by a direct or indirect witness to a

curious listener who wants to learn what the participants at the occasions depicted in

these dialogues said and how they, in particular Socrates, acted and reacted. Both

dialogues (as well as The Republic, for example) are narrative reconstructions of

past events.

Thus, after providing an analysis of the poetics of the Platonic dialogue in the

first chapter (an issue to which I will return), Puchner surveys the hitherto unknown

history of what he terms the Socrates play, plays where Socrates figures as the

protagonist. This is an impressive collection of sometimes less exciting plays, but

they are important for a fuller understanding of the totality of the Platonic tradition. In

an appendix Puchner provides a bibliography of more than one hundred such plays,

indicating that more than half of them were written after 1900. The next stage in


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Puchners argument for a drama of ideas is a chapter devoted to a group of

modern playwrights, including Strindberg, Kaiser, Wilde, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht,

and Stoppard. Puchner argues that they can be understood as Platonic, not only

because they are non- or anti-Aristotelian, but also in their own right, relying in

different ways on Platos own dramatic practices where ideas become materialized

through scene, character, and (inter-)action. The materializer of ideas par

excellance is of course Brecht, and the question in which way his anti-Aristotelianism

turns him into a Platonist (not just the initiator of epic theater) needs to be carefully

studied, an endeavor for which Puchner provides a very useful starting point.

Mar t in Puc hne rThe Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in

Theater and Philosophy

Reviewed work(s): The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and

Philosophy. Martin Puchner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xii+254.

Markus Wessendorf

University of Hawaii at Mnoa

One of the dualisms that have informed the history of Western theater theory

since Greek antiquity is the opposition between Aristotles affirmation of theatrical

mimesis and Platos antitheatricalism. Whereas Aristotle, in hisPoetics(ca. 330

BCE), laid out the rules for a tragedys effective appeal to an audiences emotions,

Plato is mainly remembered as the philosopher who, in his Republic(ca. 375 BCE),

condemned theatrical representations as detrimental to society and demanded

that art should engage the intellect. Even though, in more recent times, Aristotelian

mimesis was rejected first by the theater avant-garde and later by postmodern

theorists, this has not led to a Plato Renaissance in recent practices, theories, and

histories of drama and performance. Martin PuchnersThe Drama of Ideas: Platonic


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Provocations in Theater and Philosophyaims to correct this situation by establishing

Plato as the foundational figure of an alternative history of Western theater that

unsettles the prevailing perception of the Greek philosopher as an enemy of the

theater. Even more ambitiously, Puchner intends to demonstrate the historical

impact and continuing relevance of dramatic Platonism with regard to modern

theater and philosophy.

Puchners revisionist approachproceeds from a dramatic understanding of

Platolets call it dramatic Platonism (33), that is, the assumption that Plato,

despite his reputation as an idealist philosopher, was first and foremost a playwright

who dramatized the tug-of-war between material reality and the realm of abstract

forms. Even though Platos dialogues evoke universal and unchanging forms, these

will never and can never appear by themselves; they manifest themselves by

indicating that whatever and whoever is present onstage is connected to forms and

thus cannot derive stability and identity from mere matter (33).

Puchner argues that Platos dialogues represent an alternative form of drama,

which reconfigures Aristotles notions for different philosophical ends.

PlatosPhaedo(ca. 385378 BCE), for example, appropriates the form of tragedy by

using a potentially tragic plot device, Socratess death, to teach Socratess own

untragic theory of forms, which implies the immortality of the soul and its separation

from the body. Puchner argues that the constant oscillation between human drama

and abstract argument in Phaedocompels the audience to alternate between

weeping and laughingthe first out of pity for Socrates, the latter because his

message has sunk in. In his Symposium(ca. 385380 BCE), on the other hand,

Plato not only portrays Socrates as a comic stage philosopher (64) but also points

toward comedy in his depiction of the pitfalls of love and the different ways in which


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bodily reality interferes with philosophical reflection. Contrary to traditional comedy,

which ridicules intellectual endeavors by confronting them with the material world,

Plato suspends his philosophical comedy between the pull of ideas and the lure of

bodies. Puchner also maintains that Plato, in addition to classical theater genres,

reassembles other aspects of Greek dramaturgy: character, action, and audience.

Platos dialogues are written in prose, instead of verse, and feature small casts of

characters, but no choruses. The dramatic action consists in philosophical

conversations of a didactic nature more likely to be performed as staged readings

rather than full theatrical productions. The climactic plot of Aristotelian tragedy is

replaced by a meandering and often inconclusive stop-and-go rhythm of questions

and answers (26). Platos intended audience is a small group of active listeners

intellectually capable of joining in the dialogue, thereby replacing the far larger and

more passive audience of the Greek amphitheater.

Puchner also recognizes the influence of Plato the dramatist in the history of

the Socrates Play (37), that is, a type of play that dramatizes aspects of Socratess

life (such as his trial and death and his relationships to Alcibiades and Xanthippe)

and occasionally even integrates passages from Platos dialogues. Although

Puchner acknowledges that the Socrates Play is a minor and neglected genre, he

nevertheless regards it as major evidence of Platos continued dramatic legacy since

the Renaissance. Since most of the discussed plays by Amyas Bushe, Jean-Marie

Collot, Francis Foster Barham, and others not only follow a conventionalthat is,

Aristoteliandramaturgy but also exploit the human interest in Socratess foibles,

they undermine rather than prove Puchners point. Generally, Puchner equates too

easily the dramatic value of Socratess life and personality with an interest in Platonic

philosophy.


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In his central chapter Puchner analyzes how dramatic Platonism, Platonic

dialogue, and the Socrates play have influenced the Drama of Ideas (73) of modern

playwrights from August Strindberg to Tom Stoppard. Puchners Plato-centric case

studies of these playwrights make for interesting reading and shed new light on

supposedly familiar material. Strindberg, for example, wrote his own Socratesplay

(1903), but it was marred by the same misogyny that characterizes many of his other

works. Georg Kaiser not only published a manifesto on Platos drama, in which he

argued that the play of thought should replace a theater based on viewing pleasure,

he also incorporated passages from the Republicand theSymposiumintoAlcibiades

Delivered(191719). A surprising spin on Platos philosophy of forms can be found

in Oscar Wildes dialogueThe Decay of Lyingfrom 1889, which inverts the

hierarchical relationship between art and nature byinsisting that nature imitates art

and that art itself is nonmimetic but directly related to ideas. Puchner also shows

how the Socratic figure of the comic stage philosopher reappears in George Bernard

ShawsMan and Superman(1903) and Tom StoppardsJumpers(1972). The plot of

Luigi PirandellosSix Characters in Search of an Author(1921) illustrates the Platonic

notion that the artist must impose form onto the chaos of ever-changing life. Bertolt

BrechtsThe Messingkauf Dialogues(193751) is conceived as a Platonic dialogue

between a philosopher and various theater practitioners, in which the philosopher

tries to convince the practitioners of his new theater concept by inviting them to view

theater through a philosophical lens.

Puchner claims that modern drama should be understoodspecifically as

Platonic (73), and all of the discussed plays are Platonic to the extent that they

involve theoretical debate and a non-Aristotelian experimentation with dramatic form.

Yet, despite the obvious interest in the realm of ideas, not one of the plays is


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invested in resuscitating Platos theory of abstract forms. Each one of the mentioned

playwrights adopts selected Platonic devices and concepts for a very specific reason

that transcends the notion of a return to Plato for Platonisms sake: socialism for

Shaw, aestheticism for Wilde, communism for Brecht, and so on. Unfortunately,

Stoppard is the only post-1950s playwright discussed in The Drama of Ideas. (Itamar

MosessOutragefrom 2003, for example, should have been included since it

features Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, and Brecht as characters.) Puchner

states that modern drama can be called Platonic also in its insistence that theater

be an intellectually serious undertaking, a theater of ideas (73), but his repeated

emphasis on a dramatic Platonism that will invoke abstract forms (33) also

suggests that only a modern theater continuing Platos legacy can be taken seriously

as a theater of ideasthereby excluding a wide range of intellectually demanding

works by Richard Foreman, Heiner Mller, Caryl Churchill, Rimini Protokoll, and

many others.

Puchner starts his chapter on dramatic philosophy with a discussion of Sren

Kierkegaard, who uses various dramatic aliases in his work and conceives of irony

as an abstraction from existence. Despite his avowed anti-Platonic position, Friedrich

Nietzsche uses the title character of Thus Spoke Zarathustra(188385) to present

his philosophy through dialogue and interaction, with speech being the main

dramatic action. Existentialism, with its notion that existence precedes essence,

suggests a new relationship between philosophy and the theater: Jean-Paul Sartres

main philosophical work, Being and Nothingness(1943), is often interrupted by

dramatic scenes that reveal a playwrights imagination; Albert Camus, on the other

hand, conflates existentialist act and theatrical acting, arguing that actors, despite

their recognition of the worlds hollowness and ephemerality, continue to act.


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Puchner considers Kenneth Burke the culmination of philosophys dramatic turn

(163) because of Burkes application of such dramatic concepts as agent, agency,

act, purpose, and scene to the analysis of major philosophical works. To Gilles

Deleuze, philosophy is contingent with the theater: his proposed Platonic theater no

longer represents ideas but provides a technique for generating endless series of

repetitions and proliferations of conceptual personae. Puchner also relates Alain

Badious critique of Deleuze as a Platonist in disguise, whose concern with

multiplicities conceals a Platonic conception of the One. Similar to Deleuze,

however, Badiou envisions a philosophical theatricality that defines the essence of

philosophy as an act. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Iris Murdochs

Platonic novels and plays and Martha Nussbaums revisionist reading of

the Symposiumas a philosophy of emotions.

Puchner convincingly demonstrates the dramatic traits of these philosophers,

but he fails to provide evidence for their interest in Platos abstract forms (with the

exception of Badiou). One major omission in this chapter are the Socratic dialogues

by Paul Valry (Dance and the Soul[1923]). Overall, Puchners return to Plato reads

like a classicists dream of returning to an irretrievable past when the validity of

Platos theory of forms was not yet undermined by language philosophy and

poststructuralism. Puchner attacks philosophies of relativism and a culturalism of

difference (197), but instead of critically engaging with these approaches and

proving them wrong, he takes Platos assertions that theremustbe an absolute

point of reference for knowledgetheremustbe a single idea of the good (195) at

face value. Puchners underlying motivation is extremely vague, namely, to imagine

a projective universal, a universalism to comethe possibilities that differences can

be bridged (197). Different from Badiou, however, this potentially totalitarian


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universalism to come is not tied to any particular political project. The dramatic

Platonism proposed by Puchner deconstructs itself given the extended and rather

contradictory notions that the concept is supposed to encompass. On one hand,

Puchner rejects the idealist Plato of uniform identity, contagious imitation, and

immaterial essence, thereby forfeiting any believable return to essentialism. On the

other hand, Puchner nevertheless insists that theater and philosophy point to truth,

the universal, the idea, even if these terms cannot and should not be filled with

content (198). Ultimately, the Platonic provocations promised in the title of

Puchners book turn out to be an empty gesture.


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The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy(review)

Nickolas Pappas

From:Modern Drama

Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2011

pp. 257-260 | 10.1353/mdr.2011.0024

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Plato the philosopher, meet Plato the dramatist. The philosopher's name has

come to mean idealism, asceticism, and conservatism: stern dogmas, rigidly held.

But the dramatist that this same Plato had been since his youth persisted when the

young man turned from tragedy to philosophy, embedding those severe tenets of

Platonism in a new literary form that blends dramatic genres; and this dialogue form

subverts Platonic dogmatism. If Plato's metaphysics leads the mind away from

human bodily contingency, his form of writing leads that same mind back into

particularities. The Forms may reside in Plato's heaven, but the dialogues draw their

readers back down to earth. Indeed, modern thinkers who understand their project

as the overturning of Platonism are late arrivals to that task; as Martin Puchner notes

in The Drama of Ideas, "[I]t was Plato's dramaturgy that effectively 'overturned'

Platonism" (171).

Some scholars read Plato as Puchner does, emphasizing Plato's mode of

writing if not to the exclusion of doctrine then at least so that drama undermines or

qualifies doctrine. In my opinion, the more closely you look at this approach, the

more problematic it becomes. Besides negating almost the entire tradition of

Platonism, this interpretation abandons too many unforgettable, bold, uniquely

Platonic proposals about reality and human nature, offering little in exchange but

truisms about the human need for stable moral discourse.
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The Drama of Ideas does not dwell on Plato himself. Four of its five meaty

chapters take the first chapter's conception of Plato the dramatist and trace his

modern influence. In Puchner's view, Plato the dramatist generated a subterranean

tradition that has run along beneath the philosophical tradition for five-hundred years.

Interestingly, though Puchner does not underscore this point, the underground

stream of Platonic writing begins simultaneously with the above-ground river's

reappearance in the modern west. Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato into Latin in

the fifteenth century, also inaugurated the genre of the Socrates play, with which the

legacy of dramatic Platonism begins.

Puchner identifies four phases or strands in the submerged tradition,

beginning (chapter two) with the Socrates play that put Plato's characters on the

modern stage, followed (chapter three) by the modern drama of ideas, the theatre of

Strindberg and Kaiser, Wilde and Shaw, and varieties of meta-theatre produced by

Pirandello, Brecht, and Stoppard. Then come two philosophical traditions in which

Puchner espies a slyer theatricality. Chapter four brings Continental thinkers

together under the rubric "Dramatic Philosophy," from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

through Sartre and Camus to Kenneth Burke and Gilles Deleuze. Those

philosophers are followed by another set: Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and Alain

Badiou, the "new Platonists" of chapter five.

It is not hard to see Socrates plays as Platonic. Puchner tells a fascinating

story about the authors who dramatized the trial and death of Socrates or

the Symposium's dinner party. But he turns from these clear Platonic inheritances to

figures in theatre and philosophy whose names are widely known, but not as

Platonists. Some of these inheritances are more plausible than others. As Puchner

notes, Walter Benjamin had already connected Brecht with Plato (106); and perhaps


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Wilde, Pirandello, and Stoppard do show the influence of the new possibilities that

Plato discovered in mimicking conversations. Even so, locating these playwrights in

a history of dramatic Platonism depends on Puchner's having described that

Platonism correctly in the first place. This is the book's weak point, because it relies

on a contentious and extreme reading of Plato. Puchner's Plato "is not an idealist but

rather a dramatist" (8), and the Socrates in his dialogues "not the historical Socrates

but a fictional character" (45). The Platonism in modern thought is not "traditional

Platonism" (74, 171). If Plato the dramatist proves to be, as I think he is, impossible

to square with the author who spells out arguments for specific doctrines, then

dramatists like Pirandello are misinformed about Plato rather than informed by him. It

might still be true that Puchner has assembled a group of playwrights who took

themselves...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_drama/summary/v054/54.2.pappas.html

drama of ideas

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