Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama by June Schlueter (review)

Book Reviews 213 JUNE SCHLUETER. Metafictiollal Characters in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press 1979. Pp. xii + 143. The idea of "metatheatre" broke on the unsuspecting world of dramatic criticism when Lionel Abel published his "new view of dramatic form" in 1963. By concentrating on the psychological complexity of the Prince, he suggested, the critics had overlooked the form of Hamlet the play. In particular, had we noticed that while some of the characters (Gertrude, Ophelia, Laertes) are "actors," others (Hamlet, Claudius, Polonius, the Ghost) are "dramatists"? Hamlet was "the first stage figure with an acute awareness ofwhat it means to be staged," the first to express the thought that "none of us, no matter what our situation, really knows the form of the plot he is in." And Lionel Abel added, "Some three hundred years later six characters would visit a playwright, who had not invented them, and according to his own testimony, ask him to be their author." Now characters who are aware of their own theatricality, who "knew themselves to be dramatic before the playwright took note of them" (Metatheatre, pp. 57- 60), are the very stuff of metatheatre. In far more plays than Hamlet, Shakespeare has provided a primary source for metatheatrical speculation. Almost all his comedies introduce a sense of play-within-a-play, especially As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, All's Well, and above all The Tempest. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" is a key to our proper understanding of how, in such drama, illusion is shown to be inseparable from reality, indeed, illusion nearly always is the reality. At the center of life, so the argument goes, we find fantasy, and thus it is that all the world's a stage. It so happened that when Abel was writing the essays which went to make up his Metatheatre, Anne Righter was simultaneously working on her more verbally based study ofthe play metaphor, Shakespeare and the Idea ofthe Play (1962). Soon after, Ruby Cohn took up the theme for modem drama in Currents in Contemporary Drama (1969). For James L. Calderwood in Shakespearean Metadrama (1971), "each poem contains its own poetics" (p. 7) and the art of drama itself is a Shakespearean theme. Robert Egan followed through with Drama within Drama: Shakespeare's Sense ofHis Art in "King Lear," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest" (1975), and in the same year my Drama, Stage and Audience tried to say that the stage continued to be an inherently self-conscious, non-illusory medium long after Hamlet, when it appeared that realism had begun to set in. Finally, apotheosis: the years 1977 and 1978 saw the introduction by John W. Blanpied ofthe first two seminars on "Shakespearean Metadrama" at the M.L.A. conventions in Chicago and New York. The metacritical industry thrives. Possibly little of this would have come to pass had not persistent tendencies in the contemporary theatre after Pirandello and Brecht drawn attention to their sources. One thinks of Tom Stoppard's lighthearted games with slippery 214 Book Reviews role-playing characters like Ros and Guil in Rosellcrantz and Guildellstern Are Dead, and Moon and Birdboot in The Real/nspector Hound, all victims of unpredictable "whodunits," and even of the ugly mirror-characters in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, who find in one another the reflection of their own distorted images. One thinks of Peter Handke's The Ride across Lake Constance, with its comfortless non-representational stage in which language is used to banish any vestiges of the dramatic logic which had previously held the stage together, a play of non sequiturs and irrational non-connections which refuse to be anything other than they self-consciously and unhappily are. The most recent play of Harold Pinter, who has always been nothing if not metatheatrically inclined, is Betrayal, which removes the supports of realism from a sex-triangle by playing its scenes in reverse order, beginning coldly with the deathly end of the affair and ironically moving to the upbeat of the first passionate encounter. It must now seem that the major figures of the modem theatre...