(Umschlagtext hinten) On March 16, 1978, the former prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, and what followed - the fifty-five days of captivity that resulted in Moro's murder - constitutes one of the most striking social dramas of the twentieth century. In this compelling study of terrorism, Robin Wagner-Pacifici employs methods from sociology, symbolic anthropology, and literary criticism to decode the many social "texts" that shaped the event: political speeches, newspaper reports, television and radio news, editorials, photographs, Moro's letters, Red Brigade communiques, and appeals by various international figures. The analysis of these "texts" calls into question the function of politics, social drama, spectacle, and theater. Wagner-Pacifici provides a dramaturgic analysis of the Moro affair as a method for discussing the culture of politics in Italy. Drawing on Victor Turner's categories of social drama - Breach, Crisis, Redress, and Reconciliation or Schism - she charts the event through the actions of the players. The protagonists - the political parties, the mass media, Moro, the Catholic church, the ultraleft, and the Red Brigades - in attempts to claim "ownership" and control over the outcome, were preoccupied with issues of a theatrical nature. While the same players were responsible for carrying forward the plot, each was constructing a story based on distinct political agendas. The author examines the significance of these stories and how the audience is moved to affirm or deny the political legitimacy of each protagonist. She expands her analysis to illustrate how individual theatrical agendas, with their unique aesthetic imperatives, dialectically interact with the political and moral imperatives of the event. The failure of the dramatic protagonists to create harmony from discord in the Moro social drama can be explained not by the fact that a theatrical idiom dominated their presentation of the event, but rather by the fact that they made a certain kind of theater. It is this relationship between society's theatrical and political heritage that is drawn into focus. What becomes clear is the connection between good theater and good politics, bad theater and bad politics, with the two ends of the continuum represented by tragedy and melodrama. The Moro Morality Play illuminates the power of discourse to give shape to our understanding of such political crisis as terrorism. At its heart, it is a study of the production of history. As a work on the aesthetic dimensions of politics, it is a sustained tour de force.