Catholic and Protestant views of real presence are still opposed and played with by the most surprising of authors, who surely would rebel against the idea of being cast in theologians’ roles. But here is for instance Segal, a specialist of ancient theater:

The major interpretative division that affects (and afflicts) classicists … is that between a historicist and a linguisti-semiotic model. In the former the text contains a message (however complex) about a world outside itself that the critic can discover. In the latter the text is a construct of conventions and operations which relate to other families of texts (other such constructs) rather than to a final historical truth. Meaning, in the semiotic model, is not something immanent in the text itself; it is a construct dependent on the context(s) into which the interpreter decodes the text’s networks of relations (psychological, political, sociological, etc.).^[1]

It is a language of theologians! The fire and smoke—more of the second than the first—of structuralism, post-structuralism and post-modernism have dissipated. The fundamental problem remains: does the rose have a smell, that I recognize and yet find potent and mysterious in the act of smelling it (and calling others to share), or is it all a figure of un-reachable realities (still, Lutheran or Kantian realities)? Real presence or pure figuration?