منصور الرَّحباني مسرحيّ وشاعر وموسيقيّ لبنانيّ )1925 -2009) ألَّف مع شقيقه عاصي الأغاني والمسرحيَّات الغنائيَّة والأفلام والمسلسلات التلفزيونيَّة والسكتشات الإذاعيَّة الَّتي كانا يوقِّعانها دائمًا تحت اسم الأخوين رحباني . لكن مع وفاة عاصي عام 1986، انتهت مسيرة الأخوين وبدأت مسيرة منصور الفرديَّة الجديدة، فافتتحها بـصَيْف 840 (1987) الَّتي كانت أوَّل مسرح
Mansour Rahbani (1925-2009) was a Lebanese playwright, poet and musician who wrote and composed with his brother Assi songs, musical plays, films, television series and radio sketches which were all signed under the name of the “Rahbani Brothers”. However, after the death of Assi in 1986, the Rahbani Brothers’ career came to an end and Mansour embarked on a new solo journey. He wrote eleven plays between 1987 and 2008 and they were all signed under the name of “Mansour Rahbani”. However, many criticized Mansour’s plays and claimed that the Rahbani Brothers’ works were better because Mansour adapted historical topics that, in their opinion, neither affected the audience nor lingered in their thoughts as they believed to be the case with the Rahbani Brothers’ theatre. In Poetics (4th century B.C.), the earliest work of theatre theory, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) defines tragedy and its six elements: “action”, “character”, “thought”, “diction”, “song”, and “spectacle”, and highlights the importance of catharsis which is the aim of tragedy and which arouses the emotions of pity and fear in the audience. Since there are no academic studies in Arabic that academically analyze Mansour Rahbani’s dramatic works, this study aims to shed light on Mansour Rahbani as a playwright by evaluating his plays as dramatic texts and by analyzing them in view of Aristotle’s theory of good tragedy. We limited our study to three plays: Şayf 840 (1987), Mulūk At-Ṭawā‘if (2003) and Zanūbyā (2007) which belong to different time spans in Mansour’s solo career (beginning, middle and end) and which are all based on historical events. In the introduction, we set the background of the study by highlighting what critics said about the Rahbani Brothers on one hand and what they said about Mansour on the other. In the first chapter, we lay out the importance of the study