6 Types of Metatheatricality

1. 6 Types of Metatheatricality 7th October 2013

2. 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)

3. Martin Puchneron Abel For anyone who has seen Shakespeare, or Calderón, Pirandello or Genet, the word metatheatre defines itself. Introduction to Tragedy and Metatheatre, p. 1.

4. Puchner (more helpfully this time), p. 1. • Hamlet’s advice to the players and the play-within-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.

5. 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.

6. Hamlet A Midsummer Night’s Dream Henry IV Titus Andronicus The Taming of the Shrew

7. The Taming of the Shrew (1593-4) Titus Andronicus (1593-4) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-6) Henry IV (1597-8) Hamlet (1600)

8. Richard Hornby,Drama, Metadrama and Perception (1986) • Play within a play • Role within a role • Ceremony within the play • Literary and real-life reference • Theatrical self-reference

9. Play within a play The Taming of the Shrew A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hamlet

10. 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 to-night. 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. [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?

11. “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)

12. 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.

13. 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

14. 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.

15. Self-reference (to the theatre) Prospero:Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air:And like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'dtow'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 stuffAs dreams are made on; and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep. All the world’s a stage Globe = globe Dreams and visions

16. 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 re-enacts 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.’

17. 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.

18. Why then? ‘The visual arts of the baroque are dominated by visual tricks: mirrors; painters painting themselves painting; tromped’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 self-knowledge which Jakobsen and Abel described have correlates in other disciplines and genres, even if they do not always rely on the prefix meta.’

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. Why? ‘The goal of metatheatre is…wonder at the capacity of this human imagination.’ Really?

22. 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.’

23. 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 self-fashioning? 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?