Spring 2001 Phyllis Gorfain

Every element of a script is a signal. There is not one word in the script that is not a signal: every word is a sign about how the play in performance will convey meaning or emotional affect.

Many of the elements that we recognize as scripted signals are the very same elements in verbal art that literary studies train people to notice, analyze, and interpret as readers. We will use this kind of literary training to analyze a script, but not as "readers," but as if we were actors, directors, or audiences. That is, we will not read the script to gain its meaning as readers but in order to infer how something might be played or understood in a real or imagined production.

Signals may help us decide about the meaning of a word, phrase, line, or sentence. Subtle guides may be inferred about the use of props, lighting, pacing, music, blocking, gesture. Literary elements such as metaphors or symbols or small signals such as a point of grammar or uses of meter can give clues about very large issues such as how to play a character, stage a scene, or to conceptualize relations between setting, time, costume, and the like. The script is interpreted in terms of signals; only the play in performance attains the full meaning of a completed art work. The script is a plan for a play and we take its elements as indications of the plan.

For example, we might analyze the script and find in it many recurrent themes. This thematic pattern may not instruct actors how to say any particular line or give the designer an idea about the set; but recognizing a pattern of abstract themes can help actors see the connections between their statements and the overall sense of the play. And those connections even could help them in choosing a set design, costumes, posture, etc. In King Lear, for example, the characters voice the theme of "Nothing" as many of them say the word "nothing" in particular speeches. A thematic analysis helps actors perceive that other characters are saying this word, perhaps even when they are not present; thus, they can realize that the word will be heard with great resonance when they say it. Moreover, recognizing a theme, particularly one that is voiced in particular words spoken by the characters, can lead to other decisions.

In a King Lear I saw performed recently by five actors, they explained to a Shakespeare class how their analysis of the recurrence of the word "nothing" led to their seeing this as a major theme in the play. This signaled for them opportunities to make "nothing" emerge clearly through such actions as how they made a gesture for "zero" and how they designed their set. They all remained on stage at all times, but "acted" within a chalk-drawn circle marked out on the center of the stage. The circle represented a kind of playing arena, a game area, a magic zone, and the 0 of "nothing." Moreover, the zero and the magic playing circle then made an equation, metaphorically and concretely, between the stage and nothingness. This is a major idea that Shakespeare pursues in other plays. He referred, in Henry V, to the Globe Theatre as a "wooden O," for his theatre formed a kind of octagonal circle around its stage. The Globe theatre was a globe in which were enacted little plays that served as microcosms for the larger macrocosm, or real globe in which the Globe was placed. The stage, as a "wooden O" representing the "rotundity of the world" was a "nothing," a kind of empty playing space. But in this space, in this world of nothingness, is a paradox. In such trivialities as play we create magic worlds; in the nothingness of just pretend we can create a world of teeming life and meaning. The paradoxes of producing something from nothing, meaning from plays, and convincing life within a magic playing circle can be enclosed in the imaginative chalk circle drawn by the actors of Lear. Notice that they found the original signal for this brilliant and simple set design first in the scripted recurrences of characters saying "nothing." But they also found in the script signals that characters made gestures for "nothing." And finally they made the stage itself into a theatrical sign, one that then fit with the theatrical signs of language, gesture, and idea. The redundancy of these theatrical signs -- a circle, gestures of circles, particular emphasis on the word "nothing" --enable the audience to appreciate some of the larger meanings of the play in performance. So: even themes can help the players make decisions, can help the director arrive at concepts, help the designer devise a set, or stimulate the audience to make connections between speeches and allow the play as a whole to have meanings beyond those in the script by itself.

Here is a list (as complete as I can think of now; maybe you can add to it) of scripted signals.

I. Character is created up out of information about the character we can infer from

A. The list of dramatis personae

B. What the character says and does

C. What others say about the character

D. How they respond to the character.

E. When analyzing these aspects of character we should try:

1. to ascertain social features:

a. age

b. social rank

c. social standing

d. education

e. gender

f. ethnicity

g. nation

2. to ascertain aspects of personality and other particular individualizing traits from such choices as the character's speech. Here we could notice patterns in

a.types of speech patterns

(1) recurrent images or metaphors

(2) use of monosyllables, polysyllables, Latinate vocabulary, euphemisms, informality

(3). Tendency toward long or short speeches and when.

b. Use of speech acts: commands, questions, complaints, promises, reports, exclamations, apologies, seductions, etc.

c. Uses of silence, whispers, loudness, shouts.

d. Registers used (song, verse, prose).

e. Uses of soliloquy, asides, monologue

f. half-lines

g. grammar: short simple sentences; complex syntax; broken syntax -- twisted or incomplete sentences.

h. Use of dialect

i. speech play

j. Does the person imitate other people's speech?

k. Other patterns?

3. typical patterns of choice: what are the person's typical ethics and ways of making choices. Is there a pattern in choice? Change in pattern?

change: when and how?

4.objectives: what does this character want overall, in any one scene, during any one interaction?

5.casting: how does casting affect the construction of character (if the character is played by a male or by a female, for example)?

 

II. Verse

A.Type of meter

1. blank verse

2. couplets

3. other verse not sung

4. sung verse

5. irregular meter or regular meter

6. any way that meter helps show what could be meant or emphasized.

7. half lines; partial lines; shared lines.

B. Rhyme

III. Prose

A. Its relationship to verse (whole scene in prose or only part of it?)

B. Does the character sometimes speak verse and sometimes prose, or only one?

C. What kind of prose: style? formal, sermonette, informal, joking, etc.

IV. Image patterns, metaphors, symbolic dimensions of images. Puns, wordplay.

e.g. notice disease imagery in Hamlet.

notice metaphors of weather to talk of moods.

notice the symbolism of cosmetics as a form of falsity.

V. Setting and changes in setting

What is signaled by going from a large court scene to an intimate "closet" scene as we do in Hamlet I.iii.when we leave the tense court of Claudius to the teasing domestic scene between Laertes and Ophelia? Or, going from the ghost-terrorized ramparts of midnight Elsinore to the chandeliered interior of Claudius' court in the first two scenes? Day/night, interior/exterior, public private, multiple levels/flat, descent/ascent, etc. Think about the symbolics of space, movement, places, and the histories of placements (e.g., characters doing things in the same place onstage as something else happened earlier that has an ironic parallel).

VI. Deployment of time and skipping time; when time is non-realistic, and when it is. How long after Polonius' death is it when Ophelia enters singing her songs and assigning flowers? What does the script's silence on time signal?

VII. Scene structure and juxtapositions

A. long scenes and their structures

B. short scenes

C. what kinds of scenes butt up against what kinds of scenes?

D. where might the interval(s) be placed?

E. where are scenes that are far apart in the play that form parallels or antitheses with each other?

VIII. Plot

A. where are "first causes", complications, resolutions, events that seem to have no causal place in the plot

B. open-endedness in plot endings

C. multiple plot; connections between plots in terms of causality; connections between plots in terms of parallelism?

IX. Stage images

A. verbal items that will or will not be seen on stage -- a crown, a throne, a recorder, a sword, a letter, a key --- and what relation do objects on stage have to verbal images, symbols, etc. For example notice how linguistic images (e.g. imagery of seeing in language) may be linked to a stage image of a blind man.

B. props

C. scenery

D. lighting

E. stage shape and architecture

X. Movement

A. Entrances and exits

1. characters entering at different doors or different sides of stage, or out through audience, etc.

2. who leaves and how; who enters and how

B. Postures: who is sitting, standing, kneeling, squatting if the script indicates that

happens.

C. Contact, Distance

1. who touches whom -- kisses, embraces, slaps, kicks, tripping another; violence; sexuality -- all of that human stuff

3. who holds whom, etc. -- the politics and symbolism of initiative, passivity, what kind of power

4. Who is above and who below (balconies, trap doors, etc.).

D. Other kinds of stage actions -- spitting on someone; drawing a sword on someone; etc. Breaking objects, carrying objects (Hamlet's book: is it upside down).

XI. Music and other offstage and onstage sounds.

A. instrumental music only.

B. Singing, a cappela

C. Singing and instrument

D. Dance and music

XII. Light

A. Artificial light: candles, torches,

B. visible or invisible light sources

C. darkness

D. changes of light

XIII. Costume

Religious garb; partly or all undressed; in black; other signals about dress in the script or implied by status, position.

XIV. The larger themes and ideas of the play -- these will influence how you take the various signals and treat them in performance.

XVI. Punctuation: commas, periods, question marks, lack of them

XVII. Syntax: convoluted, simple, puzzling

XVIII. Ideology: Assumptions, values, and world view expressed by various means in the script