THREE

Dramatic Literature
and the Theater

3.0. Theater is not literature, and, in all strictness, one should not speak of it in a discourse such as this, which focuses upon literature as its specific object. However, since a large part of the theater belonging to our cultural tradition is committed to and handed down by means of written texts, and since these written texts are treated by literary critics as literature—although of a particular genre, that of “dramatic literature”—this seems an opportune place to clarify some points on the question of the written dramatic text and its relationship to the staged representation.

3.1. To consider the written text as “literature” is to postulate that it is autonomous and an end in itself; or, if it is not an end in itself, but a text that is waiting to be staged, that its staged representation is nothing more than a “variable,” in a certain sense accessory to an “invariable,” the text itself.

These two assumptions ignore the following facts: (a) The written dramatic text is destined to be transformed into spoken and acted text—which means its translation from one channel to another as the written word is given expression in voice and action; (b) it is conceived to be only one part—although in most cases a conspicuous one—of that great heterogeneous complex of information channels that constitute the scenic representation in its totality; and (c) it is this heterogeneous totality, knowledge of the written text not at all a condition of its comprehensibility, that constitutes theater as a complete and autonomous fact in itself.

3.2. All this considered, it is legitimate to recognize the written text as autonomous and an end in itself only (a) in the few cases in which the author may never have destined the text for the stage, but for the reader, even though it is in dramatic form (as happens, for example, in Goethe’s Faust and in some other Romantic works), or (b) in those ambivalent cases in which the author may have foreseen the two functions: literary and theatrical.

Such is the case of the great English dramaturgy which flourished during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Generally destined only for the stage, and therefore directly consigned, handwritten, to the theatrical company, at a certain point the texts began to appear in print in prized editions, beautifully and carefully reproduced (the works of Ben Jonson, for instance, which appeared in folio in 1616, and those of Shakespeare, which were posthumously published in folio in 1623). Evidently such publications were not brought out for practical reasons, that is, to fix authoritatively “signed” texts, in a period in which the copyright did not prevail, in order to prevent eventual pirated or arbitrary productions. Their authors must have aspired to free their work from the theatrical event, from a life like that of the poor player “who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more,” to see it achieve a worthy place of its own in the land of letters, taking its place upon library shelves beside the immortal literary works. In this way, it acquired not only historical duration but, and this above all, became the object of the scrupulously close readings performed by expert scholars. (Some of George Chapman’s plays are called “both a Poem and a Play”; but John Marston asserted in the preface of Parasitaster that dramas “are to be spoken, not read.”) It is obvious that in cases such as these, one can and must speak of a “dramatic literature,” but only in these, and as absolute exceptions to the rule.

The appearance of the written text in print, and in well-edited editions, understood to constitute the text, or, if you will, the authoritative pre-text, the archetype of productions to come, is tied to the institution of the “repertory,” as defined (and dated: 330 B.C.) by Cesare Molinari (1978); that is, to the possession of texts by one or more companies “in expectation of any representation whatsoever.” Repertory theater is distinct from the improvisatory theater, which continues even today, in which a performance is born in a single productive operation, the verbal text formed together with the non-verbal components. Clearly, this second kind of performance—historically speaking—cannot repeat itself: it constitutes a single event. Repertory implies—as, for example, in the revival of classical antique dramas—a series of different performances dependent upon a fixed written text, but consequentially offering fresh interpretations realized both in acting and staging. The historically prevalent practice in cultivated theater, that is, the textual reinterpretation that accompanies consecutive presentations, treats the written text as a first field of hermeneutic exercises before the actual production. Such treatment, because of the scriptural nature of the text itself, had—and has—much in common with literary interpretation. Thus, the conception of the production as of a kind of “interpretation” of the scriptural matrix inevitably prevails. Even the loosest, most aberrant modern realizations of traditional texts are taken as “readings.” With regard to his Romeo and Juliet, Carmelo Bene declared that it represents a “critical essay on Shakespeare.” The passage is worth citing extensively:

Shakespeare and Marlowe . . . were the greatest of poets and as such remain the foremost exponents of English literature. But to put their theater on the stage today, however it is “revisited” or “rewritten,” means to fall into equivocation. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet have been theater, and just for this reason are no longer, can no longer be so. I do not put Shakespeare on the stage—I’ve said so many times—nor one of my interpretations or readings of Shakespeare, but a critical essay on Shakespeare (1977, 19–20).

Carmelo Bene’s is an extreme case, and among other things, the distinction that he makes between “interpretation” and “critical essay” would have to be clarified. But even for a less radical director like Peter Brook—to name only one among the many who share the same conviction—the “classics” must in any case be “revisited.” Brook sustains that archaeology has never made good theater and that a director has a right to extrapolate a reading in keeping with the demands of his time.

For this reason, it is permissible, at least in theory, to distinguish two phases in the gestation of the production (improvisatory theater excepted): In the first phase, one must take paradigmatic possession of the text; in the second, one must mount the production. The first can indifferently be done by either litterateur, director, or actor: the interpretative act—finding a hermeneutic paradigm—can be applied with equal benefit to any literary writing. The second phase will require the special skills proper to theater people, and of this it will be necessary to speak in detail.

The “written text” is transformed into the “spoken text,” which then becomes part of the “stage text,” by which we mean the contextuality of the spoken text with the other concurrent texts: those of gesture, facial mimicry, costume, spatial dynamics of bodies, scenic space, scenographic illusions, light, color, sound, and so forth. The word “text” is then no longer used with reference to the verbal structure, but to indicate the set of the macrotextual components—structured/structurable—independently of their physical nature. The best approach to the script-stage rapport is to see the script as a particular structure originally written with a view to its transformation into a spoken and acted structure (vocal stress of the speech, direct syntactic comprehensibility in speech dynamics, potentiality for paralinguistic expressivity, capacity for insertion into the action, etc.), over and above the characteristics of dramatic language itself, which mimes natural discourse, as Alessandro Serpieri, following the categories of speech-act linguistics, has well observed in his “deictic-performative” approach (1977). Transformed into spoken and acted text, the deictic-performative structure is macrostructured in a “montage” with all the other non-verbal structures of the production.¹

In the abstract, there is nothing different here from what also occurs—as we have seen—in the literary text, which itself results in a set of structured/structurable texts (levels, isotopies, cultural systems, etc). Julia Kristeva (1970, 67–69), in order to characterize the literary text, spoke of “intertextuality.” But in the theater, this “intertextuality” is of a physical heterogeneity unknown to literature, which does use a great variety of structures, but always translates them into the single system of language. In place of what in narrative, for example, would be “description,” in the theater we have “ostension.”

The process of putting on a production brings with it a series of “receptions,” which are transformed into “messages” (communicative/stimulative), or better, which merge into the scenic macrotext, which then constitutes the text of the “public reception.” Director, actors, and technicians receive the written text (given, of course, that the text is something that “precedes” the staging process, and some mode of textuality is always precedent where there is no question of on-the-spot improvisation), and produce the “scenic macrotext” that becomes the publicly received text. The director-actor-technician trio then completes the two operations I spoke about above; but the second is a very complex one that without difficulty can be defined as “authorial,” insofar as it sends its own messages and comes to be inserted in the scheme “author” which the receiver of the stage-text imagines as “internal sender.” The public, in fact, has before it a “composite sender,” formed of the author inasmuch as s/he has written both the words pronounced in the stage discourse and the instructions in the stage directions, through which s/he is the inductor, by means of textual implications, of the non-verbal part of the performance, and formed also of the director, actors, and technicians, inasmuch as they interpret the script and put on the production. The director is charged with producing the theatrical event in all its co-textuality; s/he must follow and guide the realization of the spoken and acted text, preside over the formation of all the production’s other non-verbal texts in order to bring all the dramatic components within a structured complexity. In doing this, s/he often makes modifications, cuts, and integrations on the “sides” used by the various actors. Mukařovsky noted the mutation of these “sides,” saying that “the actors’ scripts very rarely pass onto the stage without a dramatic adaptation, and the expression ‘stage interpretation of the play’ is usually only a euphemism that masks the tension between theater and literature” (1966; 1973, 308). In addition, the director tasks him/herself to establish an active rapport (this being his/her particular form of phatic contact) with the spectator, a practice of an artistic nature that consists in making sure that the audience, without excessive effort, will understand the laws of the communicativestimulative macrostructure. As the author has already done at the moment of planning the text, the director imagines an “addressee,” who, here too, will naturally be historical and contingent, but different from that of the author who may not have written for the same public (a very rare case), and establishes with it his/her other-oriented automessage.

The actor, beyond following directions, contributes to the production through a special compromise constituted by the rapport between his/her own “personality” and “role.” The actor is an “I” who works within a fantasy of being a “s/he,” the particular statute that permits us to distinguish the performative deictics of dramatic art—that is “simulation” (Eco, 1973b; Gulli Pugliati, 1976, 183 et seq.)—from the performative deictics of ordinary linguistic behavior in practical life. To the character outline formed in the words of the written text, or, more precisely, in the interpretation of the text’s words and of the play’s paradigmatics, the actor contributes his/her own concrete individual nature, made up of a certain particular sensibility, voice, body, mimicry, as well as the dynamic and physical stature of his/her own body (the plasticity of the actor has much in common with that of sculpture and dance). S/he substitutes, in brief, a complete and particular person for the character-type that emerges from the dialogue.

Director, technicians, and actors, then, offer a text. While interpreting the master-script, they situate certain aspects of its potentiality in the foreground and relegate others to the background. While staging the drama, they collaborate to make concrete all texts—spoken and unspoken—that constitute the production. And this text of the theatrical event, unique and irrepeatable, is then offered to the interpretation of a public which recognizes the “intentional” parts and hazards itself in the non-structured zones, intent to structure them itself. And that will accomplish—again—now an ingenuous interpretation, that follows above all the thread of the action, suffers and enjoys empathetically events and situations, identifying itself with characters, now a specialist interpretation that ventures into the hermeneutics of the co-textual complex.

The “prefiguration” of the addressee in theatrical communication is much more concrete and precise than that formed in the mind of the author of literary works. It consists of audiences that are not only historically delineated, not only culturally defined, but also empirically present at the enunciative act. In the theater, the characteristics of the communication model come closer to those of the ordinary communication model. The sender (in this case director, actors, and technicians) and addressee (the audience) are physically each before the other. And the rapport of otherness, for this reason, is a good deal more alive and operative than in literature. Directors know that, from performance to performance, actors “feel” the public to such an extent that their behaviors are modified on the basis of the contingent and live reception. The direction itself can be transformed in the course of a performance cycle.

Naturally, the theater manifests the oblique reception of the message. Moreover, as I said initially, it is in all probability the prototype of all literary expressions. Of course, this holds true as well for the monologue and the direct apostrophe to the audience, since each has a formal character. The actors send each other reciprocal messages, and the apron, or in any case the scenic space, represents the breach that allows an audience to be present at a closed structure of relationships. One recognizes there the objectual signicity that the theater ostensively manifests since all that one sees on the stage—together with what one feels—is “artifact” sign. Still, there exists a state of being present that carries a direct “response,” a kind of “interlocutoriness,” that the actor is aware of, perhaps on the faces or in the gestures of the people in the audience in the case of a “reading,” and that s/he otherwise intuits by a kind of heightened psychic awareness and also officially receives in the symbolic forms that the classical theater allows: clapping, whistling, laughing, and a few words denoting praise or displeasure.

Finally, to bring our discussion back to “cultural systems,” it remains to be said that director, actors, and technicians insert and superimpose their behaviors in and upon the systematics that the author of the play had realized on his/her own account. The director not only takes note of cultural systems that have preceded the master-script’s structuration (historical and philological activity in the case of heteroeval texts, undertaken of course with reference to the available dramatic criticism), but also keeps in mind contingent cultural systems which characterize the episteme and the theatrical practice of his/her own time; and s/he carries out yet once more, as the author has done, in the limits of his/her own field, passive actualizations, transformations, or innovations. Director, actors, and technicians all behave in reference to (not necessarily, I repeat, in obedience to) a behavioral systematics either of their own time or of tradition. This does not mean—as we well understand—that they always give the public what the public may expect, on the basis of its own cultural systems, but that they also establish a tensive rapport, contesting, provoking, or imposing upon the audience. They present codified together with non-codified parts. For every aspect of the stage event, there does not always exist a structure of signifiers linked/linkable with conventional structures of signifieds. What happens in literature also happens in the theater: some part of the textual material always exceeds intentionality.

This direct rapport with the contingent public brings me to a brief reflection on the representation of theatrical works belonging to diverse and distant cultures. I certainly cannot assert that a performance is good only when it scrupulously reproduces the written text and philologically conforms to the staging and acting or representative practices of the time when it was originally produced. Such a qualifying judgment cannot be pronounced but by a certain very limited sector of the audience: historians, humanists, the erudite, and perhaps not even by all of these. Theater is spectacle that aims, by its very nature, at a strong and lively collective participation, and that often assumes a ritual character. If the director does not reach for this immediate response, the drama is reduced to a cold archaeological event, to which the public responds with indifference. This being the case, the way is clearly opened to all kinds of freedom, if one thinks of the theatrical event in terms of the contrast between the historic reality of the text and the representative practices of the time of performance. And freedom, when the theater attracts a mass audience, as is common today, can easily become license. This is a phenomenon that frequently arises now among our most enterprising directors, who moreover seem to lend themselves to the savage appropriation of the entire cultural patrimony, and in a sector of activity that more than any other makes such appropriation legitimate. The “good” theatrical event, in fact, cannot be evaluated with parameters other than those of its contingent effects.

What can be said in defense of cultural patrimony? We can simply reply, as it were, morally and didactically. The erudite director faithful to the historicity both of texts and representative practices will indulge neither his/her own fantasy nor the expectations of a contemporary public, but, aware that audiences can also be modified, will try to refine their expectations. S/he will therefore see that not only does theater go toward the public, but that the public goes toward theater, and in a direction that leads no longer to innovation, but tradition. I repeat, however, that this kind of director will not necessarily put on a better production, but a type of production. In any case, we will see that s/he has also brought out—and with absolute legitimacy—certain aspects of the play’s textual potentiality, and this in conformity with contemporary existential and cultural preoccupations. It is a fact that not all historical theater is always re-representable. Certain works, raving successes in their own time, can no longer be tolerated. These perhaps will have to await a change in cultural conditions before they can again be accepted.

3.3. It is evident from what I have discussed that a semiotics of theater, or a semiotic criticism of theater cannot elect the written text as the exclusive object of scrutiny. In this sense, today’s scholars are almost all unanimous. We cannot even say that because there is theater there must be the word. Mime, for example, is theater without words. There is even theater without actors, as evidenced by certain moments of scenic duration in which only objects can be seen. The lively experimentation going on in contemporary theater shows that we will never be able to speak of absolute dominants. If the object of literary semiotics is the “literary text,” the object of theatrical semiotics is “the performance text.”

At this point, however, enormous difficulties arise, still unresolved by semioticians of the theater. The first lies in the fact that theater is ruled by the absolute predominance of the énonciation over the énoncé. It is true that while a play is being performed a spectator can mentally construct a text composed of memorial sediments and pertinences, finally to possess, when the curtain falls on the last act, a certain cotextual, contextual idea, that is, an énoncé, but it is also true that the theatrical fact is a dynamic development that, once ended, is irrecoverable and unverifiable. It is this, its particular—we could say para-existential—nature, that clearly distinguishes theater from literature, where the text is fixed and therefore recoverable and verifiable. If the laws of the literary text require that the énoncé be set, the laws of the theater are all inherent in the enunciative effect. This bears strongly upon the phenomenon of reception, the nature of which imposes on the theatrical text a certain type of communication that rests upon the semiosic act, and invokes a different study of reception from that pertaining to literature. There is also a temporal dimension in the literary text—studied by Cesare Segre (1974)—but it is followed by a freely recontemplative activity that performance cannot allow. This is why the theater demands an intense participation, levies a heavy tax upon the spectator’s emotional resources. The literary text makes a stronger appeal to contemplation than to participation, which is usually relegated to the stage of “ingenuous” reception.

The second difficulty is that for every single play there is a multiplicity of texts. Which performance out of all those presented should be chosen as the one to examine? No choice can escape the arbitrary.

The third great difficulty lies in the technical—not memorial—fixing of the stage text, which may be used as the corpus of the analysis. The “fixed” stage text can never be something that resembles the literary text, because it will have to be another text (where recourse to a multiplicity of metalanguages is necessary). And this other text can never offer a precise image of the stage text, if for no other reason than it is only a “translation.” The possibility of obtaining a recording of all the effects of scenic macrotextuality is unthinkable, even if one were to hypothesize a kind of “score”—on the model of musical texts—that registers the effects for each one of the material communication sources (proposed, in lieu of something better, by Kowzan, 1968, and Pagnini, 1970), because these effects, even if they originate from diverse channels, in any case almost always accumulate and intersect. Without speaking, of course, of the irrecoverability of past stage texts, for which the only source of information is some fortuitous documentation, usually partial and vague. Another substantial aspect of the theatrical event is irrecoverable: The fact is that the reception of the heterogeneous bundle of information offered in performance occurs not only in a particular historical situation, but also in an “emotional climate” that is not only made up of the subject’s reception but bears the traces of the collective reception. Each subject in the audience is a receiver “in contact” with other receivers, and is therefore implicated in a choral reception.

It follows that it is necessary (a) to abandon the idea that one can isolate one particular performance to stand for a play’s text, (b) to renounce the idea that one can “transcribe” (metalinguistically) every semiotic effect of a performance, though these may be both actual and evident, and (c) to recognize, even when all the semiosic effects may be successfully reconstructed metalinguistically, that these would not constitute the spectacle.

Nothing remains then other than to anticipate either (a) a theatrical semiotics that does not take the semiosic processes of one particular performance as the object of description but describes the type of semiosic processes that makes up the ideal theatrical performance, imagined in the completeness of its functions, that is, a semiotics of the “theatrical system,” comparable to the now-established semiotics of the “literary system” (see, for example, Todorov, 1967), or (b) a theatrical semiotics founded on a play’s historic reception according to the possible (but always partial) reconstructions on the basis of testimony.

The construction of theater’s semiotic system will have—as does the construction of literature’s semiotic system—two positive aspects: (a) it will be important as theory of the phenomenon—non-normative, let us emphasize, and (b) it will be important as a possibility for a fresh and enlightened return to single and concrete phenomena. Such knowledge sensitizes the receiver to the message, and permits critical approaches of particular competence and selectivity.

But there remains the embarrassing fact that one who has not been present at the performance to which a particular commentator refers will never be able to confront the critic’s response with the text that has provoked it, something that the scholar of literature can always do.

3.4. It is here, then, in the ongoing polemics against the written text—which as usual risk letting the whole discourse slide to the opposite slope, with absurd conjectures about those who could ever have confused the written with the performed text—that study of the text can be vindicated, even if only in its partial importance. The text—whether it exists as written pre-text or is a recorded performance—will always constitute, for good or ill, a precious and important element of the theatrical macrotext, upon which it is possible to conduct a series of hermeneutic operations and verifications. This, one well knows, in the light of knowledge of the “theatrical system” of which I spoke above, need not be of an exclusively “literary” order but oriented toward evaluations of the very “quality” of the specific theatrical language, that can be recognized in the predisposition of the word to be recited and acted. See, for example, J. L. Styan’s studies of Shakespeare’s texts (1971).

Further, it is by perusing the text—whether it be the one respectful of the master-text or not, recorded on tapes and then retranscribed, or the one that exists only on tape because it was never written down, or one produced by a “live” recording of an event—that its linguistic (and paralinguistic) complexity is captured. A complexity that sometimes in the immediacy of the performance does not lend itself to a total reception. It is doubtful that we would have known Hamlet, as we do today, if we had received only its stage realization. It is totally probable that the ever-more frequent publication of Elizabethan and Jacobean texts came about because of the felt need to conduct minute and capillary examinations. The written text also allows, and this is obvious, an easy modelization of the action of its effective “narrative” distribution, a precise reconstruction of its segments, a tabulation of the characters’ physical relationships, and so forth. Further, comparison of performance with text is not a negligible operation, because it allows an evaluation of the expressivity of the eventual “disjunctions” and “innovations” used in the stage realizations.

Finally, I see no harm in speaking—as I have done elsewhere (Pagnini 1970a), thereby exciting some discussion (for example, Ruffini, 1974, 43)—of the written text as of “deep structure,” understood in a wide sense. Do not director, actors and technicians first of all read and assimilate the written text (when it exists), and assimilating it, do they not perhaps put down the projectual foundations of what then will be the operative macrotext of the representation? While I would not like to affirm that every text of the stage macrotext is inscribed in the written text, I would also be reluctant to say that the written text has not suggested something of the contextuality and, possibly of the nature of macrotextuality itself. In the “montage” of all the texts that compose the performance-text there will be reciprocal relationships that constitute reciprocal determinations, and the verbal text (transformations of the written text) will thus have had its own effect (a phenomenon very clearly spelled out by Keir Elam, 1977).²

3.5. Perhaps something yet remains to be added, given that we are deep within the various questions of the theatrical performance. With regard to the activity performed by the receiver, it will be enough to recall the activity discussed in Chapter II, where I spoke of literary reception, and to add to it the activity specific to the spectator at the theater.

a) In the first place, the spectator accepts the “conventions” that permit him/her to frame the spectacle as “theater.” Such conventions consist, in substance, in the acceptance of the “metaphoricity” (or “symbolicity”) of all that is seen on the stage. In other words, s/he not only accepts minor conventions like that of the monologue or of the aside, but also accepts the idea that all that one sees and hears at the theater is itself and other than itself; it is framed in a great paradigmatic of sense. It can serve to remind us of a not too paradoxical remark made by Aldous Huxley that pertained to literature, but naturally includes the theater, and that is that life never makes sense and literature always does.

b) Second, s/he makes an intense effort to make sense of the information received from the performance’s many simultaneous channels, an effort aggravated by the fact that the information is inexorably tied to its dramatic duration.

c) Third, s/he establishes an ambiguous rapport with the state and particularly with character, a rapport of involvement, or of identification, through which the barriers of “pretending” fall; a relationship of detachment and contemplation, through which the “pretense” is “pretense” and is judged as “art.” Character is empathetically lived—with all that this implies of profound and unconscious implications—but at the same time it is seen and heard and is praised or blamed on the basis of its level of ability.

d) Fourth, s/he contemplates and judges the interpretative and directive data on the basis of dynamic models that the performance raises little by little as it unfolds.

e) Fifth, s/he interprets the performance not only on the basis of epistemological, ideological, and other “systems” in his/her possession (on this point we refer to our observations on literary interpretation) but also on the basis of the “systems” of staging practices acquired through experience of other theatrical events.

f) Sixth, s/he compares the realizations of the performance with others of the same play that s/he has seen. And, if s/he knows the written text, evaluates the skill with which directors, actors, and technicians have interpreted and put into effect.

g) Seventh, s/he integrates, in fantasy, the stage frame using some essential suggestions of the representation (in some cases reduced to very few symbolic elements).

h) Finally—as I said above—the personal response to the performance is inevitably intermingled with the shared reception (by other persons in the audience).