The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Book

Second Review: Although a lot of what I wrote in my original review is still correct, I think it was somewhat uncharitable. This time I read through the entire book, and while it is an overview of things that are dealt with in more depth in other places. But in fairness, that is pretty much the purpose of the New Accents series. The book presents a wide variety of issues facing the drama theorist, including issues of enunciation, gesture, and both social, theatric, and ideolectic codes. One of the principle points made throughout this book is the number of challenges inherent in semiotic analysis of theatre as live performance, partially because of the singularity of live performance, and partially because of the multiple semiotic codes working simultaneously in theatre.


Original Review: It's more like I stopped reading this than that I actually finished. A drama professor told me that Elam's book is good for what it does, which isn't much. From what I read I agree. From what I read, Elam seems to take the principles of semiotics--which one can get pretty thoroughly from a book like Barthes' Elements of Semiotics--and apply them to the theatre as a complex system of signs borrowing from multiple sub-types of semiotic study (e.g., linguistics, fashion, kinestic studies of posture, gesture, and positioning). But as far as I can tell, other than pointing out that theatre is not a simplistic semiotic discipline, this book doesn't really add much original insight or new information to the field of semiotics or the field of theatre studies.