Édipo Réi, uma comicotragédia: tramas entre o trágico e o cômico

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study is to disseminate and promote the theatrical genre of Animated Forms, commonly known as Puppet Theater, through the assembling of a play inspired by Greek drama from the Classical Period — mainly the tragedy Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, and the Greek comedy Acharnians, by Aristophanes — aiming to unite tragedy and comedy, genres that seem very far apart, but that actually share many similarities. The play, Édipo Réi, was assembled in parallel with the thesis general studies and was articulated using several types of Animated Forms Theater: Puppet Theater, Masks, Shadow Theater, among others. Its main theme is a critique of the separation between Tragedy and Comedy and the fact that these genres are often treated as estranged, especially in academic research. To this end, an investigation was made into the possibilities of laughter in some Greek tragedies, based on their reception in individual or collective readings. When we talk about tragedy, we see, above all, a formal, serious and, why not, tragic tone (keeping in mind the current understanding of the word), but little is said about the possibilities of laughter, with the exception of a few works on some of Euripides' tragedies. In the study of these genres, since Aristotle, it is clear that comedy and tragedy have their well-defined differences, despite having some similarities, for example, in the context of staging. And these differences still distance these two genres in current theoretical studies: Tragedy and Comedy are researched separately, or at most, as the hybrid genre tragicomedy. However, despite the separation between Tragedy and Comedy, it is known that tragedians produced, in addition to the three tragic plays for festivals, a satirical drama (a genre much closer to comedy than to tragedy itself) that completed a tetralogy. Therefore, in order to advocate for the possibility of laughter in the tragedies, this thesis investigates passages that are able to provoke such laughter and, as a counterpoint, also analyzes moments of seriousness in comedies. To achieve this, it was necessary to reread all tragedies and comedies, in several translations, both individually and collectively, while seeking to find these scenes that evoke laughter in tragedy and seriousness in comedy. This investigation was undertaken from the perspective of reception, mainly on the studies of Lorna Hardwick and Anastacia Bakogianni, as well as on the work of the German philologist Bernd Seidensticker, Palintonus Harmony: Studies on Comic Elements in Greek Tragedy.