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Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents. London: Methuen, 1980. 248 pp. $16.95, $7.95 paper.
Elam's book is an important contribution to the field as a condensed survey of the diverse strains that go into the semiotics of the written and performed drama. It is welcome as the first English-language book on a subject which has received comparatively little study. The author's guiding question is whether it is possible "to refound in semiotic terms a fullbodied poetics of the Aristotelian kind, concerned with all the communicational, representational, logical, fictional, linguistic and structural principles of theatre and drama" (p. 3).
The chapter "Foundations: Signs in the Theatre" begins at the historical beginning of the subject with the Prague Structuralists, who realized that all discrete objects, sounds, movements, utterances, etc., take on a signifying function on the stage. Not only does any one of these recognizable elements signify a class to which it belongs, but it may also enter into a second-order semiosis of connotation. Thus a certain costume may connote the wearer's character as well as denote a historical period. One object, say a sword, may have several sign functions, and conversely several objects may have the same sign function.
Throughout the rest of the book Elam's purpose is to review critically and reconcile, when possible, the theories and the practice of semioticians of the field-mostly European-rather than to present his own theory, in keeping with the design of the New Accents series. The central chapters are "Theatrical Communication: Codes, Systems and the Performance Text," "Dramatic Logic," and "Dramatic Discourse." The first of these takes its point of departure from Umberto Eco's fundamental distinction between signification and communication, or codes and sign systems; the first term refers to social possibility and the second to...