This study adopts the metatheatrical perspective as outlined above to explore the theatrical self-reflexivity and metatheatricality in five English Renaissance plays: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and Hamlet, and The Revenger’s Tragedy, with references to related plays if necessary. The metatheatrical critical perspective will highlight the theatrical self-reflexivity common on the Early Modern stage. To supply a more systematic
examination of the metatheatrical elements in these plays, this study organizes the following chapters in accordance with different metatheatrical topics:
role-playing, playwright-character, inset play and audience perception after a brief summary of the Renaissance view toward dramatic art and a brief account of the metatheatrical criticism. These topics are the most fundamental issues in the discussion about metatheatricality. In each chapter a survey and
discussion of metatheatrical theory and practice related to the assigned topic will be provided first to set up the critical framework for the reading of dramatic works, followed by in-depth analyses of two plays that may provide a contrast to the same issue, while drawing on other plays in the hope of bringing
out a much fuller description of the issues at hand.
The second chapter explores the subtle and cunning disguises embodied in the practice of role-playing especially in Hamlet and Vindice. Deception, dissimulation, hypocrisy, and disguise are some important manifestations and representations of the complex mechanism of role-playing. By exposing the cunning manipulation behind a character in disguise, dramatists make manifest the underlying calculation and playacting, laying bare the fiction of the
theatrical illusion and, by extension, the theatricality of life. Through a character’s metatheatrical sensitivity, a playwright could bring forth the dialectics of drama and life, illusion and reality, seeming and being, acting and doing illustrated in the mechanism of role-playing.
The third chapter traces a type of playwright-character, a character
“employing a playwright’s consciousness of drama to impose a certain posture or attitude on another” (Abel 46). Like a playwright inventing plots and arranging dramatic action, a full-fledged playwright-character tends to manipulate his fellow characters with carefully wrought illusion.
Mephostophilis and Iago are such playwright-characters. Faustus and Othello, on the other hand, are a different type of playwright-characters. They indulge in self-dramatization, constantly casting roles and dramatic action for
themselves. They want to be the authors of their own destiny. Moreover, in these different playwright-characters, a theatrical parallel between the gradual formation of their plots and that of a dramatic piece is established.
Chapter Four examines the significance of inset plays, including a play-within-a-play. A play-within-a-play can lend a fuller insight into the
interplay of illusion and reality, presenting two, sometimes even more, different planes of dramatic illusion. It mirrors the larger play in some detail, from the casting of roles, rehearsing, playacting on the same stage, to matching a play to an audience. For example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet bring up the subject of theater and theatrical performance in their dramatic action, the internal theatrical practices reflecting the self-conscious and self-reflexive impulses common in this period. By bringing in a group of (touring) players, both plays draw our attention to the whole business of theater.
Hamlet, in particular, plays up the nature of dramatic performance, including the impersonation of the player and the falsification of feelings.
The Prince questions the genuineness of the First Player’s playacting pretense, a gesture underscoring his own theatrical impersonation and pretense. The play-within-the-play functions not only as a weapon to rip open the illusory appearances in the Danish court, but also as a reminder to the play proper’s own pretense.
Chapter Five dissects the dramatic mechanism of audience engagement and detachment in some metaplays. A Johnsonian attitude of detachment indicates the spectator’s “constant awareness ‘that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players’” (Shapiro 146). In contrast a Coleridgean response of engagement represents the spectator that responds in “a state of rapt absorption in the work of art, as in a dream” (146).
Asides and soliloquies are two common devices that playwrights use to engage their audience. On the other hand, metatheatrical devices, including the use of dramatic imagery, disguise, role-playing, plot repetition and imitation,
and inset plays, draw our attention to the play’s plotting, and expose the play’s artificiality and its status as an artifact. In general, dramatists use
metatheatrical devices to encourage “detachment”— to maintain a balance of perception. Thus, these devices are generally considered to be distancing for the benefit of increasing reflection on the meaning of what we see (Mack 1962:
281). But, interestingly, it appears that the more an audience is reminded of the fiction, the more it falls for the invention. The more a dramatist
emphasizes the illusion, the more an audience believes it.
This study concludes with an exploration of the mirror metaphor and its self-reflexivity. The purpose of dramatic art, according to Hamlet, is to hold a mirror up to nature, reflecting life and reality. Renaissance metadrama
illustrates its function as a mirror, which reflects the dramatic medium and its limit and capability of capturing reality. With an external mediation, it is easier for a person to behold himself. Metadrama supplies that means of external mediation, through whose help we can see the image of the
appearances of reality, which in turn is an approach to self-knowledge. The self-reflexivity of metatheater denotes the theater’s self-conscious reflection on itself as a medium where illusion, reality, imagination and truth meet and
interact.
This study hopes to illustrate that a metatheatrical reading of Renaissance drama not only helps a reader to better grasp the dramatic medium, but also lends depth and substantiality to the insight and understanding of the dramatic meaning. The quintessence of theater bordering reality and illusion becomes a niche for playwrights to explore the dynamics of the onstage and offstage
worlds. It is hoped that the findings of this study can shed light on the metadramatic implications in these plays with a constant attention to the playwrights’ dramaturgy.