The hermeneutic approach to theatre and drama

Elinor Shaffer

pp. 120-144

in: Julian Hilton (ed), New directions in theatre, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

Abstract

"Hermeneutics", or the art of interpretation, today more precisely the theory of interpretative methods in the humanities and social sciences, has emerged as one of the most stimulating and productive of several new directions in recent criticism. It is hardly a complete newcomer: traditionally associated with techniques of exegesis or explanation of individual passages of the Bible and the classics, it has since the late eighteenth century been increasingly applied to a wide range of texts. One of the steps in this direction was the perception that the Bible was not a uniquely inspired or revealed text, but itself literary in character; thus techniques for explicating the Bible became fully available for explicating literary texts generally, and these techniques in turn underwent a sea-change as what we would now call "literary criticism" began to be formulated and practised.