“Who’s there?” : On the Crisis Structure of Entrances in Drama and Theater

Abstract

This article examines the act of making an entrance as a constitutive but long-neglected formal device of drama. Against an Aristotelian view that considers plot the central dramatic device, it draws attention to the fact that dramatic texts are composed of entrances and arrivals. It starts from the premise that appearing is a political and rhetorical act through which a character takes shape in public, yet it is also a crisis of figuration, whose success and outcome are all but certain. As the article demonstrates using examples from antiquity and Shakespeare, dramatic entrances produce questionable shapes, whose formal, semiotic, and ontological nature is instable. Dramatic texts thereby explore the liminal zone between on and off, nothing and something, in which dramatic figuration takes place or fails.