We often describe Shakespeare’s metatheatrical journey as beginning with Shrew, Loves Labours and Dreame, summitting with As You Like It, Hamlet & Twelfe Night, and concluding with Tempest. But even this generous selection of its peaks and summits (amounting to 8 plays-within-plays and 18 disguises) may prove to be altogether too reductive. According to our survey, Shakespeare’s First Folio contains 23 play-within-play-like events and 52 disguises:
•The Tempest: 1 disg. / Masque
•The Two Gentlemen of Verona: 1 disg.
•The Merry Wives of Windsor: 2 disg. / Play (gulling)
•Measure For Measure: 1 disg.
•The Comedie of Errors: Nil
•Much Adoe About Nothing: Maskers
•Loves Labours Lost: 8 disg. / Masque & Play
•A Midsommer Nights Dreame: Play
•The Merchant of Venice: 3 disg.
•As You Like it: 2 disg. / Scene extempore
•The Taming of the Shrew: 6 disg. / Play
•All’s Well, That Ends Well: 1 disg. / 2 Gullings
•Twelfe Night, or What You Will: 1 disg
•The Winter’s Tale: 5 disg. / Dance, Gulling
TOTAL: 31 disg./ 12 plays
•King John: Nil
•Richard the Second: Nil
•1 Henry the Fourth: 2 disg. / Scene extempore
•2 Henry the Fourth: 2 disg.
•Henry the Fift: 1 disg.
•1 Henry the Sixt: Nil
•2 Henry the Sixt: Nil
•3 Henry the Sixt: 1 disg.
•Richard the Third: Scene extempore
•All Is True: 1 disg / Maskers & Vision
TOTAL: 7 disg./ 4 plays
•Troilus and Cressida: Nil
•Coriolanus: Nil
•Titus Andronicus: 3 disg.
•Romeo and Juliet: 3 disg./ Maskers
•Tymon of Athens: Masque
•Julius Caesar: Nil
•Macbeth: Apparitions
•Hamlet: 2 Plays
•King Lear: 2 disg. / Gulling
•Othello: Nil
•Anthonie, and Cleopatra: Nil
•Cymbeline: 6 disg. / Vision
TOTAL: 14 disg / 7 plays
As was perhaps to be expected, the bulk of occurrences belong to the Comedies (with 31 disguises & 12 plays-in-play), followed by the Tragedies (14 disguises & 7 plays-in-play), then the Histories (7 disguises & 4 plays-in-play). The combined metatheatrical events in the Histories (11) are half the number of those in the Tragedies (21), which are in turn half of those in the comedies (43). But when the plays are presented in their presumed chronological order of composition, the discrepancies between early middle and late periods are not so apparent.
•Two Gents of Verona: 1 disg.
•Taming of the Shrew: 6 disg. / Play
•2 Henry the Sixt: Nil
•3 Henry the Sixt: 1 disg.
•1 Henry the Sixt: Nil
•Titus Andronicus: 3 disg.
•Richard the Third: Scene extempore
•Comedie of Errors: Nil
•Loves Labours Lost: 8 disg. / Masque & Play
•King John: Nil
•Richard the Second: Nil
•Romeo and Juliet: 3 disg. / Maskers
•Midsommer Nights Dreame: Play
SUBTOTAL 5 Nil / 22 disg. / 6 Plays
•Merchant of Venice: 3 disg.
•1 Henry the Fourth: 2 disg. / Scene extempore
•Merry Wives: 2 disg. / Play (gulling)
•2 Henry the Fourth: 2 disg.
•Much Adoe: Maskers
•Henry the Fift: 1 disg.
•Julius Caesar: Nil
•As You Like it: 2 disg. / Scene extempore
•Hamlet: 2 Plays
•Twelfe Night: 1 disg.
•Troilus : Nil
SUBTOTAL: 2 Nil / 13 disg. / 6 Plays
•All’s Well: 1 disg. / 2 Gullings
•Othello: Nil
•Measure For Measure: 1 disg.
•Tymon of Athens: Masque
•King Lear: 2 disg. / Gulling
•Macbeth: Apparitions
•Anthonie & Cleo: Nil
•Coriolanus: Nil
•Cymbeline: 6 disg. / Vision
•Winter’s Tale: 5 disg. / Dance & Gulling
•The Tempest: 1 disg. / Masque
SUBTOTAL: 3 Nil / 16 disg. / 10 Plays
Though the middle period’s numbers appear to be low, this may in part be due to a qualitative shift. For if there are more disguises in Shrew (6) and in Loves Labours (8) than in As You Like It (2), it is with the character of Rosalind (and, later, Lear’s Edgar) that Shakespeare pushes the envelope and explores the nature of disguise. After all, with Rosalind, the boy actor was called upon to play a girl (Rosalind) playing a boy (Ganymede) playing a girl (Rosalind).
But the single most striking element that our visual catalogue reveals is perhaps the structural importance of metatheatrical events in Shakespeare’s plays. As T.W. Baldwin demonstrated in his monumental Shakespere’s Five-Act Structure (1947), the dramatist’s grammar-school education would have likely made him well-acquainted — not only with Horace’s Ars Poetica — but also with Donatus’ commentary on Terence. Shakespeare would therefore have been well aware of the four classical structural elements of protasis (prologue), epitasis (episodes), catastasis (climax) and catastrophe (reversal).
Three of the Folio’s metatheatrical events — all three involving Maskers — masterfully conclude their play’s protasis by introducing a playful element that enables characters that wouldn’t otherwise meet or speak to do so (Romeo and Juliet, Much Adoe, All Is True). Five others effectively mark the passage from epitasis to catastasis (Tempest’s Masque of Juno, Macbeth’s Apparitions, Cymbeline’s Dream, Henry VIII’s Vision, Lear’s Leap). While three are catastasic in earnest (Loves Labours’ Masque, Alls Well’s Gulling, As You Like It’s Scene extempore), four are catastrophic (Merry Wives’ Herne, the Hunter, Loves Labours’ Pageant, Dreame’s Pyramus, Winters Tale’s Statue). And even those events that appear to be episodic (such as 1 Henry IV’s Scene extempore, Hamlet’s Rugged Pyrrhus, or Buckingham public wwoing of Richard III) announce dramatic shifts the action of the play.
As for the structural importance of disguised characters, well, ever since antiquity does their revelation properly define catastrophes (or those reversals wherein — according to Aristotle — ignorance is suddenly turned into knowledge), for such are the cases of Errors, Twelfe Night, Measure, Alls Well, Cymbeline and Winters Tale. But Shakespeare also uses disguises to indicate other structural shifts as well: Feste’Sir Topaz in Twelfe Night is probably catastasic, as is Polixenes angry revelation in Winters Tale.
Perhaps two problematic cases of Shakespeare’s metatheatre represent of some of his experiments. Hamlet’s play-within-the-play, for instance, appears to be a catastasic event. For, indeed, once the Ghost’s accusations are verified in performance by The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet’s revenge could have occurred on the spot. Of course a catastrophic event does itself occur soon afterwards with the murder of Polonius (and that it is indeed catastrophic is emphasized by the Ghost’s re-appearance). But, as everyone knows, the play’s true catastrophe is delayed for another thousand lines. This is perhaps due to the fact that a second revenge tragedy (indeed, as Hamlet himself indicates, the “portraiture” of the first) must, in the interim, take place: that of Laertes.
The second case is in King Lear, and concerns the “gulling” of Gloster at Dover’s cliff: Gloster’s leap. There has been some question as to our including this event in our list of metatheatrical devices or plays-within-play. After all, there is no “line in the sand”, so to speak, no framing device or window. But we ourselves believe that, in this case, Shakespeare may perhaps have been engaging in a form of Guerilla theatre, avant la lettre.
Simply put, the question is the following: were the disguised Edgar to have indeed brought his father to Dover’s cliff and Gloster to have leapt off it, how differently would this have been acted by either Edgar or Gloster? Or, rather, in the context of the Globe playhouse how differently could it have been acted? The answer is: not very. Edgar’s struggling up an incline that goes un-noted by the world-weary Gloster is not such an imaginary stretch (the Globe’s stage being presumably flat). The convincing perspectival description of the yawning abyss would have been exactly the same, as also Gloster’s fall itself (for he does not know that he is being gulled). And so the point of this scene may not have been to gull Gloster alone, but the audience as well. For, indeed, how could the scene have been effective otherwise.