Author and Authorship in MIchek de Ghelderode\u27s Theatre. On the Social Origins of Drama

The purpose of this article is to analyse the figure of "the playwright" in some of Michel de Ghelederode’s plays (from Escurial to L’école des bouffons onwards). Far from being self-evident, the figure mirrors the position of a dramatist discovering his role as a creative artist weakened by the ever-growing importance of both the director and the actor. The analysis allows us to identify one typical situation in the Ghelderonian drama, a mise en abyme of the new codes of interaction between theatre artists (sometimes even including the public). It consists of a theatrical competition between one or more characters and an "Other" (a "deviant" element, sometimes an artist) on whom they play a cruel joke, a farce eventually ending by his physical or symbolical death. In Ghelderode’s dramas, this reoccurring situation points out at a particular vision of the theatre where the dramatic art is seen as an art originated in and building on the relative violence of social interaction