The theater is generally apprehended as the meeting of two spaces: a space with single or scriptural code (the text) and a scenic space with multiple codes which compose the voices, gestures and costumes of the actors, the place of the representation (theater ancient, Elizabethan, room with Italian, etc) supported by lightings and decorations. The convergence of the author, the actor and the spectator what is called constitutes usually the theater. It thus acts, for a share, of an easily locatable literary kind, registered like such in the general history of the literature and, like it, divisible in periods.

Last form of the oral literature, the theater produces the actor, alive incarnation of the characters imagined by the author and medium for the spectator. The role of this last diversifies according to the kinds, the places, the contents of the parts and the time. The history of the theater, in its will to reveal the origins of this specific form of the representation, always does not retain like relevant this description.

Thus, the partisans of a theater being limited to the text are numerous. Auguste Count, for example, thinking that the theater is resulting from the literature (traditional position since the Poetic one of Aristote), regards it as a secondary and provisional form of poetry. For Mallarmé, the multiplicity of the possible readings of a part opposes the restricted framework that any representation imposes by limiting virtualities of the text to a single vision. Contrary, authors as Antonin Artaud try to find the autonomous identity of the theater: the gestural movements and the dance would be the ancestors of the Eastern and Western theater.

One finds at the origin of the theater all kinds of rites and magic dances, having a religious role, and which still remain among certain people known as primitive. The use of the dance initially, with what it presents of challenge to temporality, is at the origin of the representation. Certain people express by ritual dances hunting, fecundation, the fertility. The song is only one manner of expressing, by a means other than those of the current communication, a frame of mind, a prayer. This mixture of crowned and layman (cf ritual orgies of the worship of Dionysos) is with the source of any stage performance.

The comedy was born initially from the censure (the orgies become meals where one sings licentious songs), and it by derision of is crowned that the use of the comic mask spread. But crowned is not therefore absent from the primitive comedy in which horns symbolize the forces of nature; later, with the Middle Ages, the representation of the devil by means of the horns is only one survival of the satyrs, fabulous animals, etc This persistence of crowned still meets in certain popular holidays where the dance and the mask are the two crucial factors. Thus the dance of Tarasque and the representation of the horse of Pézenas are the survival of old ritual habits of purely religious origin.

Little by little, the representation as such starts to be detached from its religious context to become a collective festival where each participant can express his frame of mind by the means of the body or the voice, by having however recourse to the use of a mask which makes of him either an actor but a supernatural character. The tragedy is born from this song and this experiment from lived, proposing to the assistants to reflect on the direction of their destiny, on the darkness of their future. It is in stain-removing of the liturgy, by means of access of a groundwork, then of an orally forwarded text (songs, legends, etc), that the theater becomes a representation where the psychology of the characters put in scene takes importance more and more. But there exists always a properly crowned theater, as the representations of the Hindu priests who consist, by means of theatrical ostentation, to teach with faithful the Brahmanic and Buddhist legends, making stage performance the means of expression of a god or a destiny.