Modernizing Metatheatre in the RSC's A Mad World My Masters

Midway through Sean Foley's 2013 RSC production of Thomas Middleton's A Mad World My Masters, Penitent Brothel (John Hopkins) utters what is admittedly, a pretty awful pun. Masquerading as a doctor, Penitent tends to Truly Kidman (Sarah Ridgeway), a courtesan who feigns illness to dupe the wealthy old knight, Sir Bounteous Peersucker (Ian Redford). Penitent prescribes a preposterously elaborate and expensive cure, worrying Peersucker, who implores Penitent to show "patience." Penitent replies, "I cannot be patient and physician too" (46). Turning to the audience, he quips, "Thomas Middleton, 1605." Of this moment, Emma Smith observed "That Middleton should be explicitly credited with one of the lamer jokes in an hilarious production is symptomatic of a surprising lack of confidence in the play's original language" (2013). José A. Pérez Díez acknowledged that the audience found this moment "hysterically funny" but his response was also sceptical: "it seems unlikely that the RSC would have done this with some of Shakespeare's occasionally unfunny or obsolete jokes" (2013, 148). Peter Kirwan likewise attested to the "huge applause" this aside received, but his reaction was more favourable. For Kirwan, "The explicit pointing out of the play's multiple authorship, the apology for a bad joke that also acted as a celebration of the author, and the production's own entertaining self-consciousness all came into play in one aside" (2013). All three reviewers were broadly positive about the production, but this particular moment was marked out as contentious. Was this self-conscious interpolation a playfully affectionate testimony to the continued vitality of Middleton's play, or was it an example of anxiety, attesting to the production's distrust of Middleton's language?

In their preface to their edition of the playtext, Foley and his co-editor, Phil Porter, say that part of the appeal of the play is that "it knows that it's being funny, and invites us to have fun knowing that it knows" (11). Although they do not use the word, the quality they ascribe to Middleton's play accords with many critical conceptions of metatheatre. Writing more broadly about laughter in Shakespearean drama, Indira Ghose states that:

metatheatrical signals […] increasethe pleasure of the spectator by drawing attention to the artfulness of the staged fiction. They gratify both the audience's pleasure of absorption into the fictive world and the pleasure of detached awareness of the...