ABSTRACT
The works of Shakespeare have represented over the past fifteen to twenty years one of the major fields of critical enquiry for structuralist and semiotic readings of literature and drama.1 Literary semiotics, and more specifically the semiotics of drama, offer a very wide and complex network of interrelated theories and methods; here I can present only some of the basic principles relevant to the main purpose of this essay, namely the sketching out of a particular mode of analysis of Shakespearean drama. After reviewing these theoretical parameters, I will endeavour to exemplify my own version of semiotic criticism, in a necessarily brief hermeneutic reading of two plays, Julius Caesar and Othello.
