The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (New Accents)

173 Pages·1990·1.63 MB·English

by  Keir Elam

New Accents
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
THE SEMIOTICS OF THEATRE AND
DRAMA
IN THE SAME SERIES

The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84 ed. Francis
Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley
Translation Studies Susan Bassnett
Rewriting English: Cultural politics of gender and class Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies,
Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedon
Critical Practice Catherine Belsey
Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett
Dialogue and Difference: English for the nineties ed. Peter Brooker and Peter Humm
Telling Stories: A theoretical analysis of narrative fiction Steven Cohan and Linda
M.Shires
Alternative Shakespeares ed. John Drakakis
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam
Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley
Literature and Propaganda A.P.Foulkes
Linguistics and the Novel Roger Fowler
Return of the Reader: Reader-response criticism Elizabeth Freund
Making a Difference: Feminist literary criticism ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn
Superstructuralism: The philosophy of structuralism and post-structuralism Richard
Harland
Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes
Subculture: The meaning of style Dick Hebdige
Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world Michael Holquist
Popular Fictions: Essays in literature and history ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant, and
Peter Widdowson
The Politics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon
Fantasy: the literature of subversion Rosemary Jackson
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist literary theory Toril Moi
Deconstruction: Theory and practice Christopher Norris
Orality and Literacy Walter J.Ong
The Unusable Past: Theory and the study of American literature Russell J.Reising
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith RimmonKenan
Adult Comics: An introduction Roger Sabin
Criticism in Society Imre Salusinszky
Metafiction Patricia Waugh
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in practice Elizabeth Wright
KEIR ELAM
THE SEMIOTICS OF THEATRE
AND DRAMA

London and New York
First published in 1980 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
Reprinted twice Reprinted 1987
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.”
© 1980 Keir Elam
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Elam, Keir The semiotics of theatre and drama.
—(New accents). 1. Drama 2. Semiotics and literature I. Title II. sries 808.2′01 PN1631 79–
42666
ISBN 0-203-99330-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-03984-3 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface viii
Acknowledgements ix

1 PRELIMINARIES: SEMIOTICS AND POETICS 1
2 FOUNDATIONS: SIGNS IN THE THEATRE 4
3 THEATRICAL COMMUNICATION: CODES, SYSTEMS AND THE 20

PERFORMANCE TEXT
4 DRAMATIC LOGIC 60

5 DRAMATIC DISCOURSE 83
6 CONCLUDING COMMENTS: THEATRE, DRAMA, SEMIOTICS 129

Suggestions for further reading 131
Bibliography 138
Index 148
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

How can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will
have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions and
developments of what we already know. To some degree the unprecedented will always
be unthinkable.
The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation around that paradox,
turning it, over the years, into the central concern of a continuing project. We are obliged,
of course, to be bold. Change is our proclaimed business, innovation our announced
quarry, the accents of the future the language in which we deal. So we have sought, and
still seek, to confront and respond to those developments in literary studies that seem
crucial aspects of the tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across our
culture. Areas such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, marxism, semiotics,
subculture, deconstruction, dialogism, post-modernism, and the new attention to the
nature and modes of language, politics and way of life that these bring, have already been
the primary concern of a large number of our volumes. Their ‘nuts and bolts’ exposition
of the issues at stake in new ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them has
proved an effective stratagem against perplexity.
But the question of what ‘texts’ are or may be has also become more and more
complex. It is not just the impact of electronic modes of communication, such as
computer networks and data banks, that has forced us to revise our sense of the sort of
material to which the process called ‘reading’ may apply. Satellite television and
supersonic travel have eroded the traditional capacities of time and space to confirm
prejudice, reinforce ignorance, and conceal significant difference. Ways of life and
cultural practices of which we had barely heard can now be set compellingly beside-can
even confront—our own. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have inherited;
to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate, continuing construction. And that
means that we can also begin to see, and to question, those arrangements of
foregrounding and backgrounding, of stressing and repressing, of placing at the centre
and of restricting to the periphery, that give our own way of life its distinctive character.
Small wonder if, nowadays, we frequently find ourselves at the boundaries of the
precedented and at the limit of the thinkable: peering into an abyss out of which there
begin to lurch awkwardly-formed monsters with unaccountable—yet unavoidable—
demands on our attention. These may involve unnerving styles of narrative, unsettling
notions of ‘history’, unphilosophical ideas about ‘philosophy’, even un-childish views of
‘comics’, to say nothing of a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no
reassuring names.
In this situation, straightforward elucidation, careful un-picking, informative
bibliographies, can offer positive help, and each New Accents volume will continue to
include these. But if the project of closely scrutinising the new remains nonetheless a
disconcerting one, there are still overwhelming reasons for giving it all the consideration
we can muster. The unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our thoughts.
TERENCE HAWKES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS book has been read in typescript by a number of riends and colleagues, to whom I
wish to express my sincere gratitude. Marcello Pagnini, Alessandro Serpieri, Paola Gullì
Pugliatti and Patrice Pavis all offered me illuminating criticism and stimulating
suggestions, which I have taken into account in putting the book into its final form. I
should particularly like to thank Terence Hawkes, the general editor, for his warm
encouragement and shrewd advice at every stage of the writing of this work.
Various sections of Chapter 5 reflect my experience, from 1977 to 1978, as a member
of a research group, directed by Alessandro Serpieri and sponsored by the Rizzoli
Foundation of Milan. I happily acknowledge my debt to my colleagues in the group.
My thanks go out, above all, to my wife Silvana, whose tireless support, wise counsel
and good humour helped me through the sometimes difficult gestation of this book.
KEIR ELAM 1979
The author and publishers would like to thank the following individuals and
companies for granting permission to reproduce material in the present volume:
Indiana University Press for the diagram on p. 36, from Umberto Eco A
Theory of Semiotics (1976); Professor Ray L.Birdwhistell for the
diagrams on pp. 45 and 74 from his book Kinesics and Context: Essays on
Body-Motion Communication, Penguin (1971); McGraw-Hill Book
Company for the table on p. 81 from J.L.Davitz The Communication of
Emotional Meaning (1964); and Librairie Ernest Flammarion for the
reproduction of Souriau’s dramatic ‘calculus’ of roles in Macbeth on pp.
127–30, from Etienne Souriau Les 200,000 situations dramatiques (1950).