Shakespeare and Metatheatre

1. Shakespeare and Metatheatre

2. Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre New buildings: The Theatre (1576); The Curtain (by 1577) Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, 1583: • ‘…but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites, or worse. And these be the fruits of plays and interludes, for the most part. And whereas, you say, there are good examples to be learned in them: truly so there are…’

3. Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre • ‘…if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod and mow; if you will learn to play the Vice, to swear, tear and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become a bawd, unclean, and to devirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, flay, kill, pick, steal, rob and rove, if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures, to practise idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery; if you will learn to deride, scoff, mock and flout, to flatter and smooth; if you will learn to play the whoremaster, the glutton, drunkard, or incestuous person; if you will learn to become proud, haughty and arrogant; and finally, if you will learn to contemn God and all His laws, to care neither for Heaven nor Hell, and to commit all kind of sin and mischief, you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays.’

4. Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, c.1579 (published 1595): • ‘To the arguments of abuse, I will after answer, only thus much now is to be said, that the Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous & scornful sort that may be: so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one. […] So that the right use of Comedy, will I think, by nobody be blamed; and much less of the high and excellent Tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and sheweth forth the ulcers that are covered with Tissue, that maketh Kings fear to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours, that with stirring the affects of Admiration and Commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.’

5. Elizabethan anxiety about the theatre Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, 1612 (some of this is paraphrasing Sidney): • ‘Plays are writ with this aim, and carried with this method, to teach the subjects obedience to their King, to shew the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections […] If we present a Tragedy, we include the fatal and abortive ends of such as commit notorious murders, which is aggravated and acted with all the Art that may be, to terrify men from the like abhorred practises. [...] If a Comedy, it is pleasantly contrived with merry accidents […] to shew others their slovenly and unhandsome behaviour, that they may reform that simplicity in themselves […] or to refresh such weary spirits as are tired with labour, or study, to moderate the cares and heaviness of the mind, that they may return to their trades and faculties with more zeal and earnestness, after some small soft and pleasant retirement.’

6. The effects of drama upon its audience • Heywood’s view of the effects of drama tallies with Hamlet’s: HAMLET. I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a playHave by the very cunning of the sceneBeen struck so to the soul that presentlyThey have proclaimed their malefactions… (2.2.591-4) • Certainly Claudius’s abrupt exit from The Murder of Gonzago suggests that the play has ‘caught his conscience’.

7. The effects of drama upon its audience • Indeed, Heywood recalls a similar effect at a real performance in Norfolk: • ‘As this was acted, a townswoman (till then of good estimation and report) finding her conscience (at this presentment) extremely troubled, suddenly screeched and cried out, “Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatening and menacing me!” At which shrill and unexpected outcry, the people about her, moved to a strange amazement, inquired the reason of her clamour, when presently, un-urged, she told them that seven years ago, she, to be possessed of such a Gentleman (meaning him) had poisoned her husband…’

8. The effects of drama upon its audience • Hamlet has clear ideas about theatre’s potential: • ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’ (3.2.17-24) • David Bevingtonon this: ‘The play Hamlet, among its other amazing accomplishments, is an astute critical defence of theatre at its highest potential. … Hamlet as a play is serious about reform of the English stage.’ (2009: 142)

9. The effects of drama in Dream • Why are these utterances comical?: BOTTOM. Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and, for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver: this will put them out of fear. (3.1.16-20) SNUG. You, ladies, you whose gentle hearts do fearThe smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,May now perchance both quake and tremble hereWhen lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.Then know that I one Snug the joiner amA lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam.(5.1.217-22) • Anne Righter on the playlet in Dream: ‘The interlude becomes, in effect, an essay on the art of destroying a play’ (1967: 97). • Irony of conversation about staging moonlight (3.1.43-56).

10. Anxiety about theatre in Dream • Puck’s epilogue: a genuine anxiety about offence? • Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BC): ‘he [the poet] wakens and encourages and strengthens the lower elements in the mind to the detriment of reason, which is like giving power and control to the worst elements in a state and ruining the better elements’. • Theseus on the simultaneous romance and danger of fantasy: • The lunatic, the lover, and the poetAre of imagination all compact.One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-17)

11. Fantasy and shadows • John Lyly, Court Prologue to Campaspe, 1583: • ‘Whatsoever we present we wish it may be thought the dancing of Agrippa his shadows, who in the moment they were seen were of any shape one could conceive.’ • ‘Shadows’ in Dream: • Oberon as ‘king of shadows’ (3.2.348) • Fiction as shadows: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’ (5.1.210-11) • Players as shadows: ‘If we shadows have offended…’ (Epilogue 1)

12. Theatre as conjuring • Puck is a self-described ‘actor’ (3.1.74) and shape-shifter (2.1.44-57 and 3.1.103-6). • Titania accuses Oberon of similar deception (2.1.64-8). • Love potion tricks the senses: does the enchantment and disenchantment of Titania and Lysander mimic the theatrical effect of the play? • What about Demetrius? (‘I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.’ 4.1.190-1)

13. Onstage spectators • Shakespeare’s onstage spectators are far from idealised – they are disruptive in Hamlet, Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost. • Hamlet makes it clear that he considers his own taste in theatre more refined than that of the masses: • ‘…for the play, I remember, pleased not the million. ’Twascaviare to the general. But it was – as I received it, and others whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine – an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning.’ (2.2.438-43) • Polonius is a philistine: ‘This is too long’ (2.2.501)

14. Metatheatre • The term ‘metatheatre’ was coined by Lionel Abel in his book of the same name (1963). By his own admission, Abel’s use of the term was ‘loose and sometimes erratic’ (2003: v). • One definition is the play-within-the-play, or more broadly, the play that stages some kind of sustained exploration of the nature of dramatic art: • ‘Shakespeare experimented throughout his whole career with the play-within-a-play, sometimes introducing play-within-a-play sequences in his tragedies, almost always introducing such sequences in his comedies’ (2003: 140).

15. Metatheatre • But though Abel recognizes that some of the plays he is discussing can ‘be classified as instances of the play-within-a-play’, many of them do not employ the device. • ‘Yet the plays I am pointing at do have a common character,’ he continues: • ‘All of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized. By this I mean that the persons appearing on the stage in these plays are there not simply because they were caught by the playwright in dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, but because they themselves knew they were dramatic long before the playwright took note of them.’ (2003: 134-5)

16. Meatheatre • There are two important aspects to this description, the closest Abel comes in the book to offering a definition of his term: • First is the notion of life as ‘already theatricalized’: Abel opens the book with an analysis of Hamlet not because of The Murder of Gonzago, but because he reads the play as a text populated with characters who behave either like dramatists (Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius and the Ghost) or like actors (Gertrude, Ophelia, and Laertes). • Second is that Abel’s metatheatrical stage figures ‘are aware of their own theatricality’ (2003: 135). What might this mean? Indeed, by this measure, are Shakespeare’s plays alwaysmetatheatrical?

17. The life-as-theatre metaphor JAQUES. All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players. (As You Like It, 2.7.139-40) HAMLET. Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’.’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black,Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,Nor the dejected havior of the visage,Together with all forms, moods, shapes of griefThat can denote me truly. These indeed ‘seem’,For they are actions that a man might play:But I have that within which passeth show – These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)

18. The life-as-theatre metaphor • Life itself is a ‘performance’ for numerous Shakespearean characters: VIOLA. I am not that I play. (Twelfth Night, 1.5.177) IAGO. I am not what I am. (Othello, 1.1.65) EDMUND. …and on’s cue out he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy; mine is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like them of Bedlam. (King Lear, 1.2.129-31) CORIOLANUS. Why did you wish me milder? would you have meFalse to my nature? Rather say I playThe man I am. (3.2.13-15) CORIOLANUS. Like a dull actor now,I have forgot my part, and I am out,Even to a full disgrace. (5.3.40-2)

19. Some things a person can ‘play’ in Shakespeare: • the villain (Iago on himself in Othello, 2.3.337) • the devil (the Bastard on himself in King John, 2.1.137; Gloucester on himself in Richard III, 1.3.343) • the tyrant (Cressida on Troilus, 3.2.114) • the cook (Titus on himself in Titus Andronicus, 5.2.205; Belarius and his sons in Cymbeline, 3.6.31 and 4.2.209) • the orator (Edward on himself and Gloucester on himself in 3 Henry VI, 1.2.2 and 3.2.204; Buckingham on himself in Richard III, 3.5.95) • the humble host (Macbeth on himself in Macbeth, 3.4.5) • the pious innocent (Dionyza on Cleon in Pericles, 4.3.18)

20. Some things a person can ‘play’ in Shakespeare (continued): • the penitent (Antony on himself in Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.115) • the fool (Hal on himself in 2 Henry IV, 2.2.133; Gratiano on himself in The Merchant of Venice, 1.1.82; Hamlet on Polonius in Hamlet, 3.1.143-4; Viola on Feste in Twelfth Night, 3.1.57) • the woman (Macduff on himself in Macbeth, 4.3.270; Wolsey on himself in Henry VIII, 3.2.504) • the housewife (Capulet on himself in Romeo and Juliet, 4.2.44) • the knave (Rosalind on herself in As You Like It, 3.2.285) • the swaggerer (Rosalind on herself in As You Like It, 4.3.14) • the swan (Emilia on herself, dying, in Othello, 5.2.288)

21. Power as performance • Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 1582: • ‘We are commanded by God to abide in the same calling wherein we were called, which is our ordinary vocation in a commonweal. … So in a commonweal, if private men be suffered to forsake their calling because they desire to walk gentleman-like in satin and velvet, with a buckler at their heels, proportion is so broken, unity dissolved, harmony confounded, that the whole body must be dismembered and the prince or the head cannot choose but sicken…’ • Is Gosson exposing the theatricality of everyday life here?

22. Power as performance • Stephen Greenblatt: • ‘Theatricality, in the sense of both disguise and histrionic self-representation, arose from conditions common to almost all Renaissance courts: a group of men and women alienated from the customary roles and revolving uneasily around a centre of power, a constant struggle for recognition and attention, and a virtually fetishistic emphasis upon manner. The manuals of court behaviour which became popular in the sixteenth century are essentially handbooks for actors, practical guides for a society whose members were nearly always on stage.’ (2005: 162) • Sir Thomas More on Richard III’s rise to power, History of King Richard III, c. 1515: • ‘And so they said that these matters be kings’ games, as it were, stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds, in which poor men be but the lookers-on.’

23. Statecraft as stagecraft in Hamlet HAMLET. …one may smile and smile and be a villain. At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark. (1.5.109-10) HAMLET. …my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, an hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little. (2.2.364-7) HAMLET. They had begun the play… (on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s deaths, 5.2.32)

24. Statecraft as stagecraft in Hamlet CLAUDIUS. …this vile deedWe must, with all our majesty and skillBoth countenance and excuse. (4.1.29-31) CLAUDIUS. How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!Yet must not we put the strong law on him.He’s loved of the distracted multitude,Who like not in their judgment but their eyes. (4.3.2-5)

25. ‘Shakespeare breaks the fourth wall…’ • No, he doesn’t! • Sidney again: • ‘Now for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth… What childe is there, that comming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old doore, doth beleeve that it is Thebes?’ • Or as the author of the second folio’s commendatory poem On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems (1632) put it: • ‘… abused, and gladTo be abused, affected with that truthWhich we perceive is false; …This, and much more which cannot be expressedBut by himself, his tongue and his own breast,Was Shakespeare’s freehold.’ (ll. 23-42)

26. ‘Shakespeare breaks the fourth wall…’ • In the words of Julia Briggs: • ‘…the performance requires the audience to believe and disbelieve simultaneously, yielding themselves up to it self-forgetfully, while letting the play work upon them, involve them, possibly even change them. It requires an immediate and unthinking response, yet pausing to consider the nature of the theatrical illusion makes its paradoxes of appearance and reality difficult to define.’ (1997: 253-4)

27. Metatheatricalself-awareness • Shakespeare frequently draws the audience’s attention to the material realities of the playhouse and its actors, often at moments of heightened emotion: GHOST. (cries under the stage) Swear. HAMLET. Ha, ha, boy, say’stthou so? art thou there, truepenny?Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage.Consent to swear. (1.5.152-5) HAMLET. …this brave o’erhanging[firmament], this majestical roof fretted with golden fire … appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (2.2.302-5) HAMLET. Remember thee?Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seatIn this distracted globe. (1.5.95-7)

28. Metatheatricalself-awareness HAMLET. My lord, you played once i’th’ university, you say. POLONIUS. That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. HAMLET. And what did you enact? POLONIUS. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me. HAMLET. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there. (3.2.94-101) • Hamlet was played by Richard Burbage, who has played Brutus in Julius Caesar; Polonius/Caesar was ‘probably John Heminges’ (Gurr1996: 106). • Gurr on this in-joke: ‘It reflects in the writers the expectation that their audiences would be well aware of their environs, and that the fictions were to be seen as open mimicry whose pretence at deceit was obvious.’ (1996: 106)

29. Metatheatricalself-awareness • In a similar manner, argues Righter, ‘Puck’s remark to Oberon [see below] forestalls possible objections to the artificiality of the scene which follows’ (1967: 136): PUCK. Shall we their fond pageant see?Lord, what fools these mortals be! (3.2.114-15) QUINCE. …here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house… (3.1.2-4) FABIAN. If this were played upon a stage, now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. (Twelfth Night, 3.4.125-6)

30. References • Abel, Lionel (2003) Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form, New York: Holmes & Meier. • Bevington, David M. (2009) This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Briggs, Julia (1997) This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580-1625, Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Greenblatt, Stephen (2005) Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Gurr, Andrew (1996) Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Righter, Anne (1967) Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.