Review of Plato the Dramatist by N. G. Charalabopoulos

What is it about?

This review examines the case made by Charalabopoulos that Plato's dialogues have been misunderstood anachronistically as "philosophical" exercises in a modern frame of analysis, while in reality they were intended as a fourth genre of Greek drama (with tragedy, comedy, and satyr-play) and were culturally accepted as such and performed as such regularly for over a thousand years. He considers (admittedly scant) evidence that the dialogues were treated as plays in their own right, and that a tradition of their performance can still be discerned in the historical record. He also supplies a "metatheatre of dialogue," a theoretical account of how the plays worked as drama to achieve Plato's cultural and philosophical goals.

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Why is it important?

Plato's dialogues occupy a monumental position within Western thought, and continue to exert a powerful influence on modern thinking -- technical, fundamental, and profound -- on a wide range of scholarly and disciplinary themes (and more besides). It is therefore remarkable that there is no firm consensus among scholars as to the ultimate goals and mechanics of Plato's use of the dialogues to influence the thought of his own audience and subsequent generations. Research on this puzzle of "why Plato wrote dialogues" will not only affect our own ongoing reception of Plato's writing, but will reflexively inform our own disciplinary discourses as to fundamental questions about the nature of literature and of philosophy.

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