The Semiotics Of Theatre And Drama - Masaryk University

New AccentsGeneral Editor: TERENCE HAWKESTHE SEMIOTICS OF THEATRE ANDDRAMA

IN THE SAME SERIESThe Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures Bill Ashcroft,Gareth Griffiths, and Helen TiffinLiterature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84 ed. FrancisBarker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana LoxleyTranslation Studies Susan BassnettRewriting English: Cultural politics of gender and class Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies,Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris WeedonCritical Practice Catherine BelseyFormalism and Marxism Tony BennettDialogue and Difference: English for the nineties ed. Peter Brooker and Peter HummTelling Stories: A theoretical analysis of narrative fiction Steven Cohan and LindaM.ShiresAlternative Shakespeares ed. John DrakakisThe Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir ElamReading Television John Fiske and John HartleyLiterature and Propaganda A.P.FoulkesLinguistics and the Novel Roger FowlerReturn of the Reader: Reader-response criticism Elizabeth FreundMaking a Difference: Feminist literary criticism ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia KahnSuperstructuralism: The philosophy of structuralism and post-structuralism RichardHarland

Structuralism and Semiotics Terence HawkesSubculture: The meaning of style Dick HebdigeDialogism: Bakhtin and his world Michael HolquistPopular Fictions: Essays in literature and history ed. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant, andPeter WiddowsonThe Politics of Postmodernism Linda HutcheonFantasy: the literature of subversion Rosemary JacksonSexual/Textual Politics: Feminist literary theory Toril MoiDeconstruction: Theory and practice Christopher NorrisOrality and Literacy Walter J.OngThe Unusable Past: Theory and the study of American literature Russell J.ReisingNarrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith RimmonKenanAdult Comics: An introduction Roger SabinCriticism in Society Imre SalusinszkyMetafiction Patricia WaughPsychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in practice Elizabeth WrightKEIR ELAM

THE SEMIOTICS OF THEATREAND DRAMALondon and New York

First published in 1980 by Methuen & Co. LtdReprinted twice Reprinted 1987Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis GroupThis 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 ofthousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” 1980 Keir ElamAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form orby any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, includingphotocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission 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 79–42666ISBN 0-203-99330-6 Master e-book ISBNISBN 0-415-03984-3 (Print Edition)

CONTENTSGeneral Editor’s PrefaceAcknowledgementsviiiix1 PRELIMINARIES: SEMIOTICS AND POETICS12 FOUNDATIONS: SIGNS IN THE THEATRE43 THEATRICAL COMMUNICATION: CODES, SYSTEMS AND THEPERFORMANCE TEXT4 DRAMATIC LOGIC5 DRAMATIC DISCOURSE6 CONCLUDING COMMENTS: THEATRE, DRAMA, SEMIOTICS206083129Suggestions for further reading131Bibliography138Index148

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACEHow can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task willhave been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions anddevelopments of what we already know. To some degree the unprecedented will alwaysbe 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 announcedquarry, the accents of the future the language in which we deal. So we have sought, andstill seek, to confront and respond to those developments in literary studies that seemcrucial aspects of the tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across ourculture. Areas such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, marxism, semiotics,subculture, deconstruction, dialogism, post-modernism, and the new attention to thenature and modes of language, politics and way of life that these bring, have already beenthe primary concern of a large number of our volumes. Their ‘nuts and bolts’ expositionof the issues at stake in new ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them hasproved an effective stratagem against perplexity.But the question of what ‘texts’ are or may be has also become more and morecomplex. It is not just the impact of electronic modes of communication, such ascomputer networks and data banks, that has forced us to revise our sense of the sort ofmaterial to which the process called ‘reading’ may apply. Satellite television andsupersonic travel have eroded the traditional capacities of time and space to confirmprejudice, reinforce ignorance, and conceal significant difference. Ways of life andcultural practices of which we had barely heard can now be set compellingly beside-caneven 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 thatmeans that we can also begin to see, and to question, those arrangements offoregrounding and backgrounding, of stressing and repressing, of placing at the centreand 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 theprecedented and at the limit of the thinkable: peering into an abyss out of which therebegin to lurch awkwardly-formed monsters with unaccountable—yet unavoidable—demands on our attention. These may involve unnerving styles of narrative, unsettlingnotions 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 noreassuring names.

In this situation, straightforward elucidation, careful un-picking, informativebibliographies, can offer positive help, and each New Accents volume will continue toinclude these. But if the project of closely scrutinising the new remains nonetheless adisconcerting one, there are still overwhelming reasons for giving it all the considerationwe can muster. The unthinkable, after all, is that which covertly shapes our thoughts.TERENCE HAWKES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSTHIS book has been read in typescript by a number of riends and colleagues, to whom Iwish to express my sincere gratitude. Marcello Pagnini, Alessandro Serpieri, Paola GullìPugliatti and Patrice Pavis all offered me illuminating criticism and stimulatingsuggestions, which I have taken into account in putting the book into its final form. Ishould particularly like to thank Terence Hawkes, the general editor, for his warmencouragement 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 memberof a research group, directed by Alessandro Serpieri and sponsored by the RizzoliFoundation 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 counseland good humour helped me through the sometimes difficult gestation of this book.KEIR ELAM 1979The author and publishers would like to thank the following individuals andcompanies for granting permission to reproduce material in the present volume:Indiana University Press for the diagram on p. 36, from Umberto Eco ATheory of Semiotics (1976); Professor Ray L.Birdwhistell for thediagrams on pp. 45 and 74 from his book Kinesics and Context: Essays onBody-Motion Communication, Penguin (1971); McGraw-Hill BookCompany for the table on p. 81 from J.L.Davitz The Communication ofEmotional Meaning (1964); and Librairie Ernest Flammarion for thereproduction of Souriau’s dramatic ‘calculus’ of roles in Macbeth on pp.127–30, from Etienne Souriau Les 200,000 situations dramatiques (1950).

1PRELIMINARIES: SEMIOTICS ANDPOETICSThe semiotic enterpriseOF all recent developments in what used to be confidently called the humanities, noevent has registered a more radical and widespread impact than the growth of semiotics.There scarcely remains a discipline which has not been opened during the past fifteenyears to approaches adopted or adapted from linguistics and the general theory of signs.Semiotics can best be defined as a science dedicated to the study of the production ofmeaning in society. As such it is equally concerned with processes of signification andwith those of communication, i.e. the means whereby meanings are both generated andexchanged. Its objects are thus at once the different sign-systems and codes at work insociety and the actual messages and texts produced thereby. The breadth of the enterpriseis such that it cannot be considered simply as a ‘discipline’, while it is too multifacetedand heterogeneous to be reduced to a ‘method’. It is—ideally, at least—amultidisciplinary science whose precise methodological characteristics will necessarilyvary from field to field but which is united by a common global concern, the betterunderstanding of our own meaning-bearing behaviour.Proposed as a comprehensive science of signs almost contemporarily by two greatmodern thinkers at the beginning of this century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand deSaussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, semiotics has since had avery uneven career. This has been marked in particular by two periods of intense andwide-based activity: the thirties and forties (with the work of the Czech formalists) andthe past two decades (especially in France, Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and theUnited States). The fortunes of the semiotic enterprise in recent years have beenespecially high in the field of literary studies, above all with regard to poetry and thenarrative, (see Hawkes 1977a). Theatre and drama, meanwhile, have receivedconsiderably less attention, despite the peculiar richness of theatrical communication as apotential area of semiotic investigation. The main purpose of this book is to examine suchwork as has been produced and to suggest possible directions for future research in sovital a cultural territory.