The above graph seems to suggest that the Folio editors themselves had an eye on Shakespeare’s (meta)theatrical discourse. It also shows how the placement of Shakespeare’s Romances appears uncannily significant. The four Folio plays that represent Shakespeare’s most transparent last manner — Tempest, Winters Tale, Henry VIII and Cymbeline — open and close the Comedies, close the Histories, as well as the Tragedies (and, thereby, the entire volume). The Comedies section itself appears to fold in onto the two ‘theatre-plays’ that it contains (LLL and Dreame). So that something of the remarkable textual coherence and the inherent strategies of Shakespeare’s theatrical discourse appears to be somewhat reflected in how the First Folio itself was composed. Of course, therein lies madness.
Though we had fully expected that Shakespeare’s ‘talk of theatre’ would be fairly solid and consistent. We had not expected that it would reveal itself to be so clearly premeditated and strategic as it has proven to be. If Two Gents is indeed Shakespeare’s first play, then, this ‘talk of theatre’ begins with a sly bang: for though it hides behind music (“play but one part”) and a diegetical retelling (“play the woman’s part”) the theme of theatrical representation was to sound and resonate more and more strongly throughout the entire canon. In almost every Folio play, the distribution of theatrical terms is uncannily significant, the terms themselves often serving as structural markers.
But what is perhaps most remarkable is that, though the play-worlds do manifest a theatrical self-awareness, their fiction is never breached by it — their ‘theatre’ having seemingly been entirely internalized. Hence does Shakespeare theatrical discourse — even as it reminds the playgoers of the inherent artificiality of the play —mostly creates ‘correspondences’ between the real-world and the play-world. Indeed, that theatrical terms often mark out a play’s structure would seem to indicate, that Shakespeare was not at all adverse to his theatre being ‘read’ by its audience as ‘theatre’, seeing the representation itself for what it is.