Abstract

First of all, the contribution wants to distance itself from the cliché of the ‘continuous mobility’, ‘mutation’, ‘instability’ of the dramatic text. A philology of the theatrical text concerns the conditions of transmission (of copying, division into “partsµ and reunion) and – through a series of examples ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century – the question is placed in the overall framework of a system, or of various systems over time, of the European “commercial theatreµ, of its roles and tasks and of the division of labor in it.