When reading a historical drama which is a discursive construct, context surrounding the text is as important as the text itself. This paper examines the historical dramas performed by the National Theater Company from1950s to late 1970s using the New...
When reading a historical drama which is a discursive construct, context surrounding the text is as important as the text itself. This paper examines the historical dramas performed by the National Theater Company from1950s to late 1970s using the New Historical methodology that explored the intertextuality between the text and context. Historical drama was perceived as the mediummost suitable to incorporate nationalist discourse. That is, it was a theatrical formthat connected past and present with the code of national identity and reresented nation through visualization.〈Wonsullang〉, which was the first play performed by the National Theater Company of Korea in 1950, was in continuance with colonial historical dramas, in that it summoned history as an allegory for the existing historical reality, and was a visualized melodrama. In this historical drama which was triggered by the solidification of national divide between North and South Korea, Silla was established as the origin of ``what is uniquely national. Numerous changes started to take place in the historical perception and the manner of writing after 1960s. Texts representing the war memories occupied majorities of works performed in the 1960s. What became problematic In those works was the otherness that was at work in the act of memory. The stylized anti-communist drama since the mid-1970s was an example of a dominant discourse operating repressing a total thinking. What characterized the 1970s` historical drama of the National Theater Company was the history of national hardship and emergence of national heroes. One was the ``politics of monument`` reprented by the General Yi Sun-sin and the other was the narrative of independence fighters during the colonial period. Historical dramas that summoned national heroes took on the role of unifying Korea as a nation and constructing national subjects by internalizing national/state discourse. At the same time, 1970s` historical drama was the sight within which discursive struggles took place. State discourse would at one point join hands with the discourse of people, and compete with it at another. Historical dramas depicting subalterns emerged which were based on the perspective of ``history from bottom up.``〈Guest House〉 (1979) was a case in point, where female subject led the narrative and took on the perspective of ``history from the bottom up.`` However, nationalist discourse that homogenized different groups into a nation as one subject worked as the dominant discourse that repressed the diversity and multiplicity within a nation.