Metatheatre and Early Modern Drama

John Marston
how could you do this to us? We are metafucked

Chris McCabe, "The Malcontent," Speculatrix (2014)

Almost sixty years after Lionel Abel coined the term in 1960, "meta-theatre" remains a stock concept for researchers, teachers, and practitioners of drama produced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and yet relatively little work has been done to theorize and historicize the forms and functions of early modern metatheatre since the 1980s. In order to re-assess the place of metatheatre in early modern drama studies, this special issue brings together six articles and a review essay. In the introduction that follows, we offer a critique of the field since its inception, argue for its relevance to recent scholarly developments, and explain how the special issue intervenes through work that engages with diverse but complementary theories and materials. The introduction finishes with summaries of the individual contributions, which collectively focus on performance (in various media), share concerns with audience, space, materiality and text, and build on important developments in scholarship since the work of Abel and his followers. Broadly speaking, these developments include performance and rehearsal theory (Purcell, Shaughnessy), gender studies and historical reconstruction (Escolme), rhetoric and the materiality of the stage (Davies), audience engagement and genre (Escolme, Leonard), and book history and the stage/page relationship (Newman). In some respects, the articles present different views on what metatheatre is, what it does, and how it should be analyzed. As editors, we do not want to impose a single definition of "metatheatre," nor to privilege specific frameworks for its analysis. Instead, by staging a collaborative debate, this issue shows that early modern metatheatre—in its broadest sense—is a topic which facilitates important conversations across areas of research, including theory and practice, theater history and book history, rhetorical studies and material culture, and modern performance and historical performance.

Defining "Metatheatre": Critical beginnings

There has been a longstanding acknowledgement of and critical engagement with Shakespeare's self-reflexivity: very early significant examples include Fenton, Mack and Nelson. However, Abel's seminal 1963 book, Metatheatre: A New Dramatic Form provided the first critical rhetoric for the analysis of self-conscious theater. Abel uses Hamlet as his prime example of a specific dramatic form, "metaplays": plays that tell "us at once that the happenings and characters within them are of the playwright's invention" and are "about life seen as already theatricalized" (59–60). His aim is to distinguish metatheatre as a distinct genre different from tragedy, arguing that whereas tragedy "gives by far the stronger sense of the reality of the "world," metatheatre "gives by far the stronger sense that the world is a projection of human consciousness" (113). Abel's project is ambitious as he seeks to establish metatheatre as a form which finds its full and unique articulation in the modern works of Genet, Beckett, and Brecht, but which is anticipated in the work of Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, and Pirandello. The scope of his contribution to the field is marked by a 2003 publication which republished his earlier work, combined with more recent essays, in order "to reconnect metatheatre to its originator and thus to use Abel's work as a point of departure for rethinking the term metatheatre as a powerful tool for understanding the history of theatre" (Puchner 1). Yet, while later critics have acknowledged Abel as inventor of the term "metatheatre," they have resisted, and even ignored, his somewhat rigid assertions that metatheatre is a unique dramatic form, traceable in a progressive historic evolution. Indeed, in his article for this issue Stephen Purcell argues against the tendency to anticipate Brecht in Shakespearean metatheatre.

For the most part, those writing on metatheatre have focused exclusively on the Shakespearean canon. Anne Righter's Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play does not use the term "metatheatre" (it was published a year before Abel's work), but has proved influential on later critics who do. Righter charts the medieval and classical history of features of Shakespeare's plays we might retrospectively call metatheatrical: metaphors of playing and acting, shadows and dreams...