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  • All 'Metatheatre' is Not Created Equal:The Knight of the Burning Pestle, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Navigation of the Spectrum of Dramatic Representation
  • Nathaniel C. Leonard
CITIZEN

… and now you call your play The London Merchant. Down with your title, boy, down with your title!

Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle Induction, 8–9
QUINCE

Marry, our play is The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.2.9–11

Both Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595) use the comic presentation of a play as a central element in their overall dramatic plots, but to meaningfully different ends. Beaumont's play stages an intruding audience that frames and shapes the play's narrative and places one of its own members in a starring role, while Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" serve as a low comic subplot through the preparation of their own play that they in turn present to the protagonists of the central romantic plot and which acts as a coda for the play as a whole. But what are the formal functions that these seemingly similar, but also clearly distinct, dramatic techniques fulfill? And, perhaps more importantly, how are we, as readers or viewers of early modern English drama, meant to understand and discuss those techniques? The standard answer to such questions in the current critical conversation has been to begin by labeling such techniques as "metatheatrical." The problem with this easy label is that, [End Page 49] since the term's coining by Lionel Abel in 1960, it has become a catch-all for reflexive dramaturgy with regard to both genre and technique. The term has become so ubiquitous that it can be applied to almost any play, early modern or otherwise. Many critical discussions use metatheatre to connect a series of reflexive dramatic strategies—like soliloquy, chorus, dumbshow, the-play-within-the-play, prologue, and epilogue—and assume that because these tropes all involve the play's apparent awareness of its own theatrical nature they all have similar dramaturgical functions. But, as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Knight of the Burning Pestle demonstrate, metatheatrical tropes have the ability to generate a variety of efficacies and representational logics based on how those reflexive strategies are utilized. Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle's theatricalization of the actual audience through the introduction of the Citizen, the Citizen's Wife, and Rafe collapses the easy distinction between audience and performance. Knight uses this metatheatrical intervention early in the plot to generate competing fictional worlds, which are effectively inset within the performance of the audience and represent competing generic logics. Midsummer, on the other hand, uses the parallels between scenes to evoke the metatheatrical, which consistently asks the viewer to re-imagine their relationship to the staged action and to live performance more generally. The "tragical mirth" (Shakespeare 5.1.57) of the play-within asks the viewer to reevaluate their categorization of Midsummer as simply a comedy, instead suggesting that a play's position in a genre or between genres has as much to do with its execution in performance as its plot.

In order to discuss these issues in Knight and Midsummer, this essay will elaborate on some of the specific dramaturgical ramifications of the metatheatrical by exploring the term's slippery nature and offering a working definition of the term. In addition, this article will propose an alternative strategy for describing the devices under the aegis of metatheatre by positing an approach to naming and distinguishing between the layers of dramatic representation generated by metatheatre and other similar techniques. In order to describe this spectrum of dramatic layering, I use Robert Weimann's concepts of locus and platea as a starting point for distinguishing between these representational strata. Weimann's terminology, based on the representational structure of medieval theater, offers a solid foundation for new terminology that will allow for a more specific and nuanced discussion of metatheatrical structure and dramatic texts more generally. In order to begin this process, I will introduce two new terms...

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