This article intends to show that dramaturgical analysis, i. e. overall perception of a text, conceived both as a body (material) and a thought, proceeds from the general effect of stage directions and stylistic indications that some works furnish explicitly or implicitly, in a functional and symbolic way. The “dramaticity” of the text is therefore examined through a knot of images (metaphors) which expand into networks and express the plot in a whole as well as the relationships between the characters, the set and other scenic elements. In this sense, the staging of a play as an embodiment of the work is already inscribed in the text. The irradiating strength of metaphor is obviously the object of an interpretative intervention based on symbolic shifts in meaning, which makes this kind of criticism creative and hazardous at the same time. While some playwrights such as Adamov or Cocteau give clues to the hidden meaning of their works, others such as Artaud (or Musset or Dubillard and others) barely give any landmarks. This article is an attempt to prove the validity of the method using Artaud’s Cenci as an example.