역사극, 무대로 나온 역사: 역사극의 기원, 개념, 범주

Abstract

It is true that the concept of the ‘historical play’ has been mostly researched through the viewpoint of play. But I, in this article, want to propose a little different approach to the conventional discussion, while supplementing the previous views and focusing on the play which might be newly constituted of the origin, concept and category of the historical play from the historical science. Nietzsche once said that the un-historical entity could be defined and that the historical entity only be interpreted as well. The meaning of historical play then should be explained by interpreting for the history of historical play. I would like to classify the periods of the history of historical play as three different ways, drawing the classification to my coined words of ‘history as a subject’ and ‘play as a predicate.’First, most historical plays of the traditional era were to show a sort of universal truth mainly through the performance of actors, that could be defined as the history as a predicate. The historical plays at this time were played to sublimate a particular fact into the universal truth through the modification of history as the play. Second, modern historical plays were born to change the conventional relationships of the ‘history as a subject’ and the ‘play as a predicate.’ Such historical plays dominated all of the stages of play with the meta-narrative of history. Third, in the modern time the contents of history began to determine the form of play. But the post-modern historical plays that I concerned here are in a sense to go back to the traditional time in which "theater plays with history."Historical play must be defined as calling the characters of the past out on the stage with one's historical imagination. We tell ‘the dreaming history' through the historical imagination, while breaking away from the yoke of 'the real history.' ‘The dreaming history' is not an anti-history, but is formed as a generator producing a called historical energy by which we create a new history of the future beyond 'the real history.'The historical play has its meaning when performed as the form of 'dreaming history' on the stage. To say, the postmodern historical play is all the plays performed on the stage for 'the historical effect'.