The evolution of character in modern and postmodern theatre

The character, as the symbol of whole order of humanity, has experienced lots of evolution. What determines the function of character in dramatic structure and its relationship with the other tools of dramatic structure is the perception regarding the conceit changing in very era. In the historical classification carried out from Aristotle to Shakespeare and from Strindberg to Samuel Becket and to Heiner Müller, it follows that the character has evolved from the events to the mental conditions.The highborns who are led with their destiny within a fiction flowing from good to bad in tragedy become the center of dramatic structure in the period of Hegel. In place of the highborns, there are ordinary people at the stage in the 19th century, when subjectivism gained importance. The dramatis personas reflecting the World views of the realist authors make it possible for societal environment and the causal relationships to be analyzed. The realists demonstrate their dramatis personas by emphasizing historicity within the societal structure which conditions their attitudes together with their inner worlds. Epic theatre, which shakes the conventional rules and the understanding of drama from their souls, on the other hand, ends the supremacy of the character and demonstrates the individual within the societal relationships by employing the all of the other factors in the hegemony of thought when presenting the events in the form of episodes, each of which is completed in itself, in their historical developments.The character turns to itself in order to get rid of its conscious in the process that starts with theatre of the absurd. In this case, it does not advance but shows the mental situations. This transformation causes the character to lose its power in the profoundity of text. The character, in the plays composed hereafter, drifts apart from the physical area outside of mind and generally from being the symbol of the whole order of humanity. It is now related to the psychic and spiritual world in the mind.