6 Types of Metatheatricality
7th October 2013
1
Lionel Abel, Metatheatre (1963)
Some of the plays I refer to in this book can be classified
as instances of the play-within-a-play, but this term
suggests only a device, and not a definite form. I
designate a whole range of plays as metatheatre, some
of which do not employ the play-within-a-play, even as
a device. The plays I point to as metatheatre have one
common character: all of them are theatre pieces
about life seen as already theatricalized. By this a mean
that because they were caught by the playwright in
dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, and
because these characters already knew they were
dramatic. They are aware of their own theatricality.
Preface to the reprinted version, Tragedy and Metatheatre
(2003)
2
Martin Puchner on Abel
For anyone who has seen Shakespeare, or
Calderón, Pirandello or Genet, the word
metatheatre defines itself.
Introduction to Tragedy and Metatheatre, p. 1.
3
Puchner (more helpfully this time), p. 1.
• Hamlet’s advice to the players and the playwithin-the-play signal undeniably that we are
watching a play about theatre.
• The blurring of play and reality, and the confusing
passage from one to the other…
• We watch one layer of theatricality and illusion
give way to the next as if they were so many
Russian dolls stacked into one another.
• Characters [who] like nothing more than dressing
themselves in various costumes and assuming
different roles as if the world offstage were even
more theatrical than what we see onstage.
4
Abel, from ‘Genet and Metatheatre’, p. 153.
the metaplay…is the necessary form for dramatizing
characters who, having full self-consciousness,
cannot but participate in their own
dramatization. Hence the famous lines of Jaques,
Shakespeare’s philosopher of metatheatre, “All
the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players.” The same notion is expressed by
Calderón, who titled one of his works The Great
Stage of the World. For both the Spanish and the
English poets there could not but be an essential
illusoriness in reality.
5
Hamlet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Henry IV
Titus Andronicus
The Taming of the Shrew
6
The Taming of the Shrew (1593-4)
Titus Andronicus (1593-4)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-6)
Henry IV (1597-8)
Hamlet (1600)
7
Richard Hornby,
Drama, Metadrama and Perception (1986)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Play within a play
Role within a role
Ceremony within the play
Literary and real-life reference
Theatrical self-reference
8
Play within a play
The Taming of the Shrew
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hamlet
9
[EPILOGUE]
Then enter two bearing of Sly in his own apparel
again, and leave him where they found him,
and then go out. Then enter the Tapster.
Tapster. Now that the darksome night is
overpassed,
And dawning day appears in crystal sky,
Now must I haste abroad. But soft, who's this?
What, Sly? oh wondrous, hath he lain here all
night?
I'll wake him; I think he's starved by this,
But that his belly was so stuffed with ale.
What, ho, Sly? Awake for shame!
Sly. Gi's some more wine! What's all the players
gone?
Am not I a lord?
Tapster. A lord, with a murrain! Come, art thou
drunken still?
Sly. Who's this? Tapster? Oh, lord, sirrah, I have had
The bravest dream to-night, that ever thou
Heardest in all thy life!
Tapster. Ay, marry, but you had best get you home,
For your wife will course you for dreaming here tonight.
Sly. Will she? I know now how to tame a shrew!
I dreamt upon it all this night till now,
And thou hast waked me out of the best dream
That ever I had in my life.
But I'll to my wife presently
And tame her too, and if she anger me.
Tapster. Nay, tarry, Sly, for I’ll go home with thee,
And hear the rest that thou hast dreamt to-night.
Exeunt Omnes.
10
“If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life.
No! I am no such thing; I am a man as other men are”.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i.42-44
‘Then know that I as Snug the joiner am
A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam’
(V.i.223-4)
11
Role within a Role
Titus: Tamora as Revenge; Titus: ‘I’ll play the cook’
(5.2.203)
Hamlet: his ‘antic’ disposition
Shrew: Kate is a ‘shrew’; does Petruchio taking her
for many things ‘a daughter/Called Katharina, fair
and virtuous’ force/encourage her into the role of
a good wife?
Henry IV: famous Boar’s Head scene where Falstaff
and Hal pretend to be the King: ‘Do thou stand
for my father’ (2.5.342). This has elements of
parody/burlesque too: ‘This chair shall be my
state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my
crown.’ (344-5). Also the Gad’s Hill dressing up.
12
Ceremony within the Play
Processions (anything regal): Hamlet; MSDN;
Henry IV 1 and 2; Titus.
Weddings: As You Like It; Twelfth Night etc
Balls/Masquerades: Romeo and Juliet; Much
Ado; Merchant of Venice
Other ‘created’ ceremony: the casket scene in
Merchant springs to mind
13
Literary and Real-life reference
Allusions to past plays/literature which ground the
play within the world of reality: Titus’ obsession
with Ovid (Lavinia chases Young Lucius around
the stage trying to get her hands on his copy of
Metamorphoses); Lucrece and the reminders of
Thyestes.
Folk-lore/festive play: Twelfth Night operates
within a kind of frame of the boy-bishop
Revenge: unremitting cyclical nature of revenge
gets one into a kind of loop both metatextually
(revenge plays of the period always hark back to
previous revenge plays) but also with the strong
sense that revenge itself breeds revenge.
14
Self-reference (to the theatre)
All the world’s a
stage
Globe = globe
Dreams and
visions
Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our
actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous
palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
15
An addition to Hornby?
What happens when you add an animal to the mix? Either
real or costume?
For there to be metadrama, there must be ‘two sharply
differentiated layers of performance’, with those within
the play acknowledging not only the existence of the
inset, but also acknowledging it as performance. The very
best example of this I can find is Launce’s play in Two
Gents which involves Crab (the dog) not taking part in the
tearful leave-taking from Launce’s house. Launce reenacts this scene on stage with Crab persisting in
behaving as ‘a stone, a very pebble stone, and has no
more pity in him than a dog.’
16
Stake, Stage and Scaffold
Andreas Höfele (OUP, 2011).
Macbeth; Henry VI plays to Richard III;
Coriolanus; Hamlet and Titus; Lear and The
Tempest.
A version of the ‘all the world’s a stage’ trope
but one which uses the metadramatic impulse
to encourage analogical thinking.
17
Why then?
‘The visual arts of the baroque are dominated by
visual tricks: mirrors; painters painting
themselves painting; trompe d’oeil, the art of
creating illusions, and consciously fake marble
dominate the decorative arts and architecture.’
(Puchner, p. 4.)
‘The fact that metacritique, metalanguage, and
metatheatre came to prominence in the late
fifties and early sixties is no coincidence. The
particular self-awareness, self-reflexivity, and selfknowledge which Jakobsen and Abel described
have correlates in other disciplines and genres,
even if they do not always rely on the prefix
meta.’
18
The early modern and the modern
Self-reflexive.
Abel says that Antigone is never self-aware, Hamlet
never not, which is why he cannot be a tragic
hero.
Renaissance self-fashioning – Greenblatt – seeing
yourself as others do – distance.
Marvin Carlson: The world is treated not as external
and alien but as a ‘projection of human
consciousness’. Order is not, as in tragedy,
imposed from without but continually improvised
by men’. There is thus no ultimate world image,
but a continual unfolding of human dreams and
imaginings. The goal of metatheatre is not
transcendence; it is wonder at the capacity of this
human imagination.
19
Thomas M. Greene. The Light in Troy:
Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry
(1982)
Early modern relationship with imitation –
making classical tropes new/your own
encourages a meta-discourse like Young
Lucius’ Ovid or The Winter’s Tale’s relationship
with John Florio and Evanthius.
20
Why?
‘The goal of metatheatre is…wonder at the
capacity of this human imagination.’
Really?
21
How to use metatheatre: some caveats
for Section A.
Do not write ‘this is metatheatrical’ without
further comment. So what?
‘Shakespeare uses these metatheatrical devices
in this scene (explain them and how they
work) to do this. And his does this because in
the wider context of the play he wants an
audience to notice this and remember that
because the dramatic trajectory is heading
here.’
22
1 and 2 Henry IV
Filled with metatheatrical devices: role within a role
(x 2 at least); ceremony within the play; literary
and real-life reference (it is a history play for
heaven’s sake); people dressing up as each other
on the battlefield; sleight of hand with crowns.
Is the play basically an exploration of Hal’s selffashioning? Of his trying on of as many hats and
crowns as he can before he has to knuckle under
to the one performance he cannot allow to slip?
King Henry tells him off for being too like Richard
II – too unregal -- at 1HIV, 3.2.
And does the acting of the mock King scene in 2.5
mean that Hal’s rejection of Falstaff is inevitable?
23