Words Onstage

Samenvatting

Theatre can exist without words: theatrical words can exist without performance. This brief study looks at the æsthetic position of words in the theatre. To turn stage words into stage language, the former must function within the larger, polyphonic, context of the latter, construed by place, time, and gesture, in which the absolute meaning of words is directed to dramatic ends. Its concern is not the word as literary object but the word as dramatic motor.