CHAPTER II

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

1. PRELIMINARIES: SEMIOTICS AND POETICS

 THE SEMIOTIC ENTERPRISE

Semiotics can best be defined as a science dedicated to the study of the production of meaning in
society. As such it is equally concerned with processes of signification and with those of
communication, i.e. the means whereby meanings are both generated and exchanged. Its objects
are thus at once the different sign-systems and codes at work in society and the actual messages
and texts produced thereby. The breadth of the enterprise is such that it cannot be considered
simply as a ‘discipline’, while it is too multifaceted and heterogeneous to be reduced to a
‘method’. It is— ideally, at least—a multidisciplinary science whose precise methodological
characteristics will necessarily vary from field to field but which is united by a common global
concern, the better understanding of our own meaning-bearing behaviour.
The fortunes of the semiotic enterprise in recent years have been especially high in the field of
literary studies, above all with regard to poetry and the narrative, (see Hawkes 1977a). Theatre
and drama, meanwhile, have received considerably less attention, despite the peculiar richness of
theatrical communication as a potential area of semiotic investigation. The main purpose of this
book is to examine such work as has been produced and to suggest possible directions for future
research in so vital a cultural territory.

2. FOUNDATIONS: SIGNS IN THE THEATRE

 PRAGUE STRUCTURALISM AND THE THEATRICAL SIGN
The year 1931 is an important date in the history of theatre studies. Until that time dramatic
poetics–the descriptive science of the drama and theatrical performance–had made little
substantial progress since its Aristotelian origins. The drama had become (and largely
remains) an annexe of the property of literary critics, while the stage spectacle, considered
too ephemeral a phenomenon for systematic study, had been effectively staked off as the
happy hunting ground of reviewers, reminiscing actors, historians and prescriptive theorists.
The sign
Prague structuralism developed under the twin influences of Russian formalist poetics and
Saussurian structural linguistics. From Saussure it inherited not only the project for analysing
all of man’s signifying and communicative behaviour within the framework of a general
semiotics but also, and more specifically, a working definition of the sign as a two-faced
entity linking a material vehicle or signifier with a mental concept or signified. It is not
surprising, given this patrimony, that much of the Prague semioticians’ early work with
regard to the theatre was concerned with the very problem of identifying and describing
theatrical signs and sign-functions.
Semiotization
It was above all the folklorist Petr Bogatyrev, formerly a member of the Russian formalist
circle, who undertook to chart the elementary principles of theatrical semiosis. In his very
influential essay on folk theatre (1938b), he advances the thesis that the stage radically
transforms all objects and bodies defined within it, bestowing upon them an overriding
signifying power which they lack—or which at least is less evident—in their normal social
function: ‘on the stage things that play the part of theatrical signs… acquire special features,
qualities and attributes that they do not have in real life’ (pp. 35–6
Connotation
Every aspect of the performance is governed by the denotationconnotation dialectic: the set,
the actor’s body, his movements and speech determine and are determined by a constantly
shifting network of primary and secondary meanings. It is an essential feature of the semiotic
economy of the theatrical performance that it employs a limited repertory of sign-vehicles in
order to generate a potentially unlimited range of cultural units, and this extremely powerful
generative capacity on the part of the theatrical signvehicle is due in part to its connotative
breadth.
The transformability of the sign
The mobility of the sign may be a structuralist principle, but it is by no means a recent
discovery. In a metadramatic exposition in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the clown Launce
confronts the problem of the semiotic economy of the performance, having to decide which
signified dramatis personae he must assign to his paltry set of sign-vehicles (of whom only
two are animate and only one human):
Foregrounding and the performance hierarchy
In terms of the performance structure, the automatized state of affairs, in the Western
theatrical tradition, occurs when the apex of the hierarchy is occupied by the actor, and in
particular the ‘lead’ actor, who attracts the major part of the spectator’s attention to his own
person. The bringing of other elements to the foreground occurs when these are raised from
their ‘transparent’ functional roles to a position of unexpected prominence, i.e.
TYPOLOGIES OF THE SIGN
Natural and artificial signs After the promising charting of the territory by the Prague School
structuralists in the 1930s and early 1940s, little work of note dedicated to the problems of
theatrical semiosis was produced for two decades. Roland Barthes suggested provocatively in
1964 that the theatre, marked by ‘a real informational polyphony’ and ‘adensity of signs’,
constituted a privileged field of semiotic investigation: ‘the nature of the theatrical sign,
whether analogical, symbolic or conventional, the denotation and connotation of the
message—all these fundamental problems of semiology are present in the theatre’ (1964, p.
262). Barthes failed, however, to follow up his own provocation.
Icon, index and symbol
An icon is a sign which refers to the object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of
its own, and which it possesses…. Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or
law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it. (Peirce
1931–58, Vol. 2, § 247)
The index. Indexical signs are causally connected with their objects, often physically or
through contiguity: ‘An Index is a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of
being really affected by that object’ (Vol. 2, § 248).
The symbol. Here the relationship between sign-vehicle and signified is conventional and
unmotivated; no similitude or physical connection exists between the two: ‘A symbol is a
sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of
general ideas’ (Vol. 2, § 249).
Metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche
When the stage representation of actions is more than purely symbolic or metaphorical—
when, for instance, a ‘murder’ is apparently enacted rather than being reported or suggested
by means of conventional symbols—there is always, none the less, an assumption that the
audience will agree to take the motions that the actors go through, which do not in
themselves add up to anything, as the impersonation of the complete act (the wielding of a
stage knife as an assassination). (See pp. 113–14 below.) Finally, as has been emphasized,
since objects on stage function semiotically only to the extent that they are, in Umberto Eco’s
words, ‘based on a synecdoche of the kind “member for its class”’ (1976, p. 226), it can be
argued that the theatrical sign is by nature synecdochic
Ostension
Eco has argued that this elementary form of signifying is ‘the most basic instance of
performance’ (1977, p. 110). Semiotization involves the showing of objects and events (and
the performance at large) to the audience, rather than describing, explaining or defining them.
This ostensive aspect of the stage ‘show’ distinguishes it, for example, from narrative, where
persons, objects and events are necessarily described and recounted.
Beyond the sign The discussion of theatrical signs in this chapter has been concerned not
with entities but with functions, some of which (e.g. ‘foregrounding’, ‘indices’ and
‘ostension’) to a considerable extent overlap (they are different ways, as it were, of looking at
the same phenomena). The various sign-functions mentioned here are to be considered
complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and they certainly do not exhaust the range of
signifying modes of which the theatre is capable. All that these semiotic categories indicate is
certain ways in which the formidable task of describing and classifying so complex a matter
as the production of meaning on stage has been initiated.
 3. CONCLUDING COMMENTS: THEATRE, DRAMA, SEMIOTICS DRAMATIC
TEXT/PERFORMANCE TEXT

The written text constrains the performance in obvious ways—not only linguistically in
determining what the actors say, and proairetically in establishing the structure of the action, but
also, in varying degrees, across the range of theatrical codes by indicating movement, settings,
music and the rest. Since, chronologically, the writing of the play precedes any given
performance, it might appear quite legitimate to suppose the simple priority of the one over the
other. But it is equally legitimate to claim that it is the performance, or at least a possible or
‘model’ performance, that constrains the dramatic text in its very articulation. The
‘incompleteness’ factor considered in the last chapter—that is, the constant pointing within the
dialogue to a non-described context—suggests that the dramatic text is radically conditioned by
its performability. As Paola Gulli Pugliatti has said, the dramatic text’s units of articulation
‘should not be seen as “units of the linguistic text translatable into stage practice”’, but rather as
‘a linguistic transcription of a stage potentiality which is the motive force of the written text’
(1976, p. 18). What this suggests is that the written text/performance text relationship is not one
of simple priority but a complex of reciprocal constraints constituting a powerful intertextuality.
Each text bears the other’s traces, the performance assimilating those aspects of the written play
which the performers choose to transcodify, and the dramatic text being ‘spoken’ at every point
by the model performance—or the n possible performances—that motivate it. This intertextual
relationship is problematic rather than automatic and symmetrical. Any given performance is
only to a limited degree constrained by the indications of the written text, just as the latter does
not usually bear the traces of any actual performance. It is a relationship that cannot be
accounted for in terms of facile determinism.

A UNITED ENTERPRISE?
These considerations lead us back to the issue raised in Chapter 1: to what extent does the broad
and heterogeneous range of objects and concepts, rules and practices, structures and functions
discussed in this book make up a single field of investigation? Can a semiotics concerned at once
with theatrical communication and dramatic principles, performance and written play, hope to be
a coherent project? In particular, there appears to be little dialogue at present between
semioticians working on the performance and its codes and those whose principal interest is in
the dramatic text and its rules. But it is very difficult, on the other hand, to conceive of an
adequate semiotics of theatre which takes no account of dramatic canons, action structure,
discourse functions and the rhetoric of the dialogue, just as a poetics of the drama which makes
no reference to the conditions and principle of the performance has little chance of being more
than an eccentric annexe of literary semiotics. The aim of this book has been to sketch out in a
very provisional fashion the territory of a dialectical and, at present, unsettled enterprise—a
semiotic poetics concerned with the widest possible range of rules governing our understanding
of theatre and drama—but without claiming that this constitutes, as yet, a comfortably
established intellectual field. What emerges is an area of inquiry whose complexity may be
daunting but whose very openness makes it peculiarly inviting and challenging.
 CHAPTER III
DISCUSSION
Strength and weakness

1. Strength
a. The identity of the book is Complete
b. The structure of the Book is Arranged neatly
c. Each subtitle is related to each content.
2. Weakness
There are some sentences that use some difficult words, those making the reader
difficult to understand some of the contents of the Book.