1

PRELIMINARIES: SEMIOTICS
AND POETICS

THE SEMIOTIC ENTERPRISE

Of all recent developments in what used to be confidently called the
humanities, no event 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 fifteen years
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 of meaning in society. As such it is equally
concerned with processes of signification and with those of
communication, i.e. the means whereby meanings are both
generated and exchanged. Its objects are thus at once the different
sign-systems and codes at work in society and the actual messages
Copyright © 2002. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

and texts produced thereby. The breadth of the enterprise is such

that it cannot be considered simply as a ‘discipline’, while it is too
multifaceted and heterogeneous to be reduced to a ‘method’. It is—
ideally, at least—a multidisciplinary science whose precise
methodological characteristics will necessarily vary from field to
field but which is united by a common global concern, the better
understanding of our own meaning-bearing behaviour.
Proposed as a comprehensive science of signs almost
contemporarily by two great modern thinkers at the beginning of
this century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the
American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, semiotics has since
had a very uneven career. This has been marked in particular by
two periods of intense and wide-based activity: the thirties and
forties (with the work of the Czech formalists) and the past two
decades (especially in France, Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union and

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 2 THE SEMIOTICS OF THEATRE AND DRAMA

the United States). The fortunes of the semiotic enterprise in recent

years have been especially high in the field of literary studies,
above all with regard to poetry and the narrative, (see Hawkes
1977a). Theatre and drama, meanwhile, have received
considerably less attention, despite the peculiar richness of
theatrical communication as a potential area of semiotic
investigation. The main purpose of this book is to examine such
work as has been produced and to suggest possible directions for
future research in so vital a cultural territory.

HOW MANY SEMIOTICS?

‘Theatre’ and ‘drama’: this familiar but invariably troublesome
distinction requires a word of explanation in this context, since it
has important consequences with regard to the objects and issues at
stake. ‘Theatre’ is taken to refer here to the complex of phenomena
associated with the performer-audience transaction: that is, with
the production and communication of meaning in the performance
itself and with the systems underlying it. By ‘drama’, on the other
hand, is meant that mode of fiction designed for stage
representation and constructed according to particular (‘dramatic’)
conventions. The epithet ‘theatrical’, then, is limited to what takes
place between and among performers and spectators, while the
epithet ‘dramatic’ indicates the network of factors relating to the
represented fiction. This is not, of course, an absolute
differentiation between two mutually alien bodies, since the
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performance, at least traditionally, is devoted to the representation

of the dramatic fiction. It demarcates, rather, different levels of a
unified cultural phenomenon for purposes of analysis.
A related distinction arises concerning the actual object of the
semiotician’s labours in this area; that is to say, the kinds of text
which he is to take as his analytic corpus. Unlike the literary
semiotician or the analyst of myth or the plastic arts, the
researcher in theatre and drama is faced with two quite dissimilar—
although intimately correlated—types of textual material: that
produced in the theatre and that composed for the theatre. These
two potential focuses of semiotic attention will be indicated as the
theatrical or performance text and the written or dramatic text
respectively.
It is a matter of some controversy as to whether these two kinds
of textual structure belong to the same field of investigation:

Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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 PRELIMINARIES: SEMIOTICS AND POETICS 3

certain writers (Bettetini and de Marinis 1977; Ruffini 1978; de

Marinis 1978) virtually rule out the dramatic text altogether as a
legitimate concern of theatrical semiotics proper. The question that
arises, then, is whether a semiotics of theatre and drama is
conceivable as a bi-or multilateral but nevertheless integrated
enterprise, or whether instead there are necessarily two (or more)
quite separate disciplines in play. To put the question differently: is
it possible to refound in semiotic terms a full-bodied poetics of the
Aristotelian kind, concerned with all the communicational,
representational, logical, fictional, linguistic and structural
principles of theatre and drama? This is one of the central
motivating questions behind this book.

THE MATERIAL
Given the unsettled and still largely undefined nature of the
territory in view here, the examination that follows is inevitably
extremely eclectic, taking into account sources ranging from
classical formalism and information theory to recent linguistic,
philosophical, logical and sociological research. The result is
undoubtedly uneven, but this is perhaps symptomatic of the present
state of semiotics at large. By the same token, the differences in
terminology and methodological concerns from chapter to chapter
reflect some of the changes that have registered in the semiotics of
theatre and drama in the course of its development.
As for the illustrative examples chosen, especially dramatic, the
Copyright © 2002. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

chief criterion has been that of familiarity, a fact which accounts

for the perhaps disproportionate number of references to
Shakespeare. Exemplifications of modes of discourse (Chapter 5)
are taken largely from English language texts in order to avoid the
problems presented by translation.

Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/yale-ebooks/detail.action?docID=181640.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2020-05-14 10:31:17.
 4
Copyright © 2002. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/yale-ebooks/detail.action?docID=181640.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2020-05-14 10:31:17.