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The Evolution of Shakespearean Metadrama: Abel, Burckhardt, and Calderwood Richard Fly New interpretative methodologies arrive with increasing frequency in academic circles these days, feeding a fickle appetite for changing perspectives on our old texts. Consequently, the more established forms of Shakespearean criticism have been subject to some displacement by modes of discourse based on psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, structuralism, and deconstruction —to mention only the more popular. One such new approach is that taken by a growing body of scholars who concern themselves with what they perceive to be self-reflexive themes and techniques in Shakespeare's plays.!These critics find in Shakespeare's work a preoccupation not only with politics, religion, sexuality, ego-formation, gender, etc., but also with the materials and processes of art-making itself. They tend to view his masterpieces not simply as "windows" opening out upon a richly-textured panorama of general human experience, but as "mirrors" reflecting the artist's ongoing struggle to understand and master the expressive potential of his medium.2 Hence, the drama in the plays becomes dislodged from plot and character and situated instead in the playwright's self-conscious interaction with himself, his medium, and his audience. With this redirection of the creative process, mimesis gives way to self-analysis, and drama is subsumed in "metadrama." What the metadramatic critics propose is clearly a drastic revision of our traditional image of Shakespeare—one that supersedes Samuel Johnson's "poet of nature" who "holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life," as well as RICHARD FLY recently completed a term as Chairperson of the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo and is the author of Shakespeare 's Mediated World. 124 Richard Fly125 John Keats' exemplar of "Negative Capability."3 They do not invite us to contemplate that supremely competent dramatist James Joyce described as "like the God of the creation [who] remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails .'^ Instead, they offer us an intimate glimpse of a very human craftsman wrestling with an array of practical and theoretical problems associated with his special vocation. That such a radical reorientation of Shakespeare could gain the degree of respectability it has is due, I believe, to the pioneering work of Lionel Abel, Sigurd Burckhardt, and James L. Calderwood. The work of these three critics is marked by differing degrees of theoretical sophistication and remains controversial, but it has provoked us into rethinking (and possibly modifying) our understanding of Shakespeare's poetics. What follows is an attempt to put Shakespearean metadrama into critical perspective by tracing its evolution through the contributions of these three men. The metadramatic approach came into prominence in 1963 with the publication of Lionel Abel's widely-read book Metatheatre : A New View of Dramatic Form.5 Abel's boldly-stated thesis was that in the late Renaissance, especially in the dramatic works of Shakespeare and Calderón, a revolution occurred in human consciousness which made tragedy impossible and brought into being a new dramatic form he identified as "metaplay ," or "metatheatre." Shakespeare's plays are inescapably self-reflexive, Abel claims, because he has discovered that the illusion that sustains his play-worlds also sustains the world outside his plays—that not only Hamlet and Prospero but himself and all people are "dramatists" who are doomed by an emergent self-consciousness to the necessity of "staging" their existences in the "theatre" of life. Shakespeare becomes the first great artist fully to understand that a fundamental shift in human awareness has erased the boundaries that ordinarily separate plays (conceived as autonomous artifacts) from life itself. Abel's defense of his thesis is forthright and extreme. "I have defined metatheatre," he explains, "as resting on two basic postulates : (1) the world is a stage and (2) life is a dream."6 He argues that the playwright, after having acknowledged these two 126Comparative Drama premises, loses his ability to distinguish between reality and illusion and is left with nothing to represent but the unshunnable theatricalization of all human endeavor. Within the plays, moreover , a general insurrection takes place during which the...

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