Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form (review)

The term "metatheatre" now so casually bandied about, and sometimes with little acknowledgement of its origins, was first coined by Lionel Abel in 1963. In Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, he argued that increased self-consciousness on the part of the playwright and his creations along with the dissipation of "implacable values" inspired by a humanistic view in the early modern period made it impossible for Shakespeare and Calderón (and all subsequent Occidental authors) to write tragedies. But rather than bemoan plays like Hamlet and Life is a Dream as failed tragedies, Abel grouped them into the new-minted form of metatheatre. As more than simple manifestations of the play-within-a-play device, these plays are "theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized" (vi). Tragedy and Metatheatre aims "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" (1). To that end, twelve of the essays appearing in the original book have been reproduced here, rounded out by four more reprints from other sources and two new works. Neither of the two new contributions, "What is Tragedy?" and "The Novelization of Drama," directly addresses the issue of metatheatre, and so in terms of the intended reconnection or rethinking, this collection is akin to a time traveler arrived from the past. Through the reissue of this historical artifact, Abel's conception of metatheatre is restored to our collective attention with an invitation to assess its continuing impact.

It behooves me, therefore, to briefly consider Abel's legacy in light of current scholarship, reflecting back across the intervening four decades. Pavis's entry on metatheatre in his Dictionary of the Theatre rightly acknowledges Abel as the originator of the term, but dismisses the rest of his treatise as simply an extension of the theatrum mundi metaphor (210). Having extensively surveyed the literature of metatheatrical theory and criticism for my dissertation, I am inclined to agree with this assessment. For example, in the essay "Hamlet Q.E.D." Abel aptly shows that Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius use dramatic techniques with varying degrees of success to direct others in implicit plays-within. However, the conclusions drawn from this observation ultimately stall around the idea that Hamlet's world is a stage and therefore is not a tragedy. Abel's persistent focus on the generic contrast of tragedy with metatheatre as historically sequential and mutually exclusive limits the potential influence of the book in two ways. First, it circumscribes definition and analysis of this self-reflexive phenomenon within the proposed generic contrast to classical tragedy, thereby limiting consideration of other aspects. Second, this oppositional relationship will not hold water since it quickly becomes apparent, as Martin Puchner points out in the introduction, that the shift from tragedy to metatheatre that Abel describes happens much earlier than he imagined. In fact, "it is almost impossible for theatre not to become metatheatre. For how could any theatre not know, somehow, and show that it knows, somehow, what it means to be theatre" (13). And so even the earliest definitive tragedies inevitably express some metatheatrical elements. In the end, the rhetorical structure of pairing of metatheatre with tragedy, although perhaps useful in stimulating Abel's original meditations, does not hold a significant place in the genealogy of metatheatrical criticism.

The primary critical attraction of this collection lies in moments scattered amongst the main tragedy-versus-metatheatre argument. As Abel surveys two millennia of great dramatic works, a number of intriguing but fragmented ideas are generated, but remain tantalizingly undeveloped and unconnected. For example, in "Genet and Metatheatre" Abel describes "a new feeling of reality" when the audience is made aware of the costume as costume: "We tend to think of real blood on the stage as a fake; now the magic of metatheatre can make stage blood seem real; at least we can think of...