Y a-t-il un auteur dans la pièce ? Ethos du personnage et “figure auctoriale”

The objective of this article is to demonstrate that in the dramatic genre, the authorial agent does not play any role in the text/reader communication. In the dramatic texts, dialogue is omnipresent, the narrative function disappears, each character builds an ethos ‘negotiated’ in the exchange, and no authorial ethos is to be found in the stage directions. A reminder of various stances on the question of the author as elaborated in the most striking theories of drama and in the semiotics of theatre is followed by a short analysis of To Damascus by Strindberg and of Corneille’s Cinna. The interplay of ethè is thus examined in a play where the protagonist has been perceived as a projection of the real author, and in a tragedy where this connection is impossible, in order to check whether they allow for any authorial figure or any ultimate warrant of the text’s meaning.