This study is an attempt at a comprehensive and (as much as possible) exhaustive survey of metatheatre in the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623. In the words of Charlton Hinman, “the only edition of the collected works which can reasonably be accepted as a permanent standard” (Hinman 1996, p.xxiii).

Most scholars and practitioners would agree with Andrew Gurr that “metatheatricality ruled” over Shakespeare’s theatre (Gurr 2000, p.13). Indeed, plays-within-the-play, disguised characters, and sudden surprising utterances as that of Fabian’s in Twelfe Night, “If this were plaid upon the stage now, I could condemne it as an improbable fiction” (3.4.127/1649) are all fairly characteristic of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. And yet, in spite of this general agreement, it has not really been ascertained just how much Shakespeare resorted to these devices and therefore the degree to which his theatre was metatheatrical or self-reflexive.

Of course, there have been scholars who addressed the issue of metatheatre, most notably Lionel Abel in his seminal work Metatheatre: a new view of dramatic form (1963), Anne [Righter] Barton in her superb study of the play-metaphor Shakespeare and the Idea of the play (1962), and James Calderwood in Shakespearean Metadrama (1971). In the world of Shakespeare studies, these three authors (Abel, Barton, Calderwood) were indeed metatheatre’s A,B,C since they effectively defined the field. Others, of course, have followed in their wake (Egan 1972, Schmeling 1982, Hubert 1991, Guilfoyle 1990, Bates 1999) but, ever since Calderwood, metatheatre has mostly remained the province of literary critics and scholars. The study of metatheatre has rarely bridged the gap between theory and practice. And, apart from the likes of Andrew Gurr (2001), no one to our knowledge has sought to demonstrate just how Shakespeare’s metatheatre could not only enlighten the scholarly (literary) interpretation of his plays but also enliven their performances.

Our purpose, then, is to show to both theoreticians and practitioners just how important (in terms of performance and dramaturgy) metatheatre and the self-reflexivity or transparency that it suggests were to Shakespeare’s theatre. We want to show this is in a manner that is not only scholarly but immediately compelling so that the overwhelming evidence of Shakespeare’s metatheatre, itself, be brought to bear as essential proof of its importance. Mostly based on Abel’s theory of metatheatre and Barton’s work on the play-metaphor, our study would therefore provide a repertoire of all metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-plays and disguised characters) as well as of all textual references either to the theatre itself or to mimetic representation in general. What we essentially want to produce is a catalogue raisonné of Shakespeare’s metatheatre: a work whose simple perusal would already provide an idea of the depth and breadth of its subject.

When Lionel Abel first coined the term metatheatre, back in 1963, he meant for it to designate a form somewhat opposed to that of Tragedy. Abel believed that modern playwrights (or, at least, a species of modern playwrights) as well as their characters were too self-conscious to write or perform tragedy (which requires an earnest belief in the reality and inevitability of the situation). According to Abel, what distinguishes the metaplays of Shakespeare and Calderon, from the tragedies of Aeschylus and Seneca is that the former “show the reality of the dramatic imagination, instanced by the playwright’s and also by that of his characters” (id. p.59). If what Abel posits is true, and “the playwright has the obligation to acknowledge in the very structure of his play that it was his imagination which controlled the events from beginning to end” (id. p.60), then the highlighting of such events within the very structure of Shakespeare’s plays should reveal something of his own theatrical strategies. Of course, Abel himself presented little real evidence in favour of his theory and thus left mostly undone the dramaturgical piece-work that further stood to prove it (in true rationalistic form, he left this to empiricists).

Anne Barton’s approach to the play-metaphor was more methodical and precise than Abel’s overarching aesthetic category. She began her work by exploring how “the marriage of time present with time past upon which Mysteries are based” (Barton 1962, p.19) was the foundation of what she calls the “tyranny of the audience” (id. p.31). According to Barton, the idea of a self-contained drama would have been entirely foreign to a Medieval Tudor audience “simply not accustomed to being ignored” (id. p.37). Such an audience required the use of extra-dramatic addresses “designed for the express purpose of surprising [them] into attention when some necessary question of the play required [their] understanding” (id. p.47). Though Shakespeare himself would later write for an audience somewhat more accustomed to self-contained dramas, a similar “sense of contact still had to be maintained [as] a means of relating the play world with that reality upon which plays are built” (id. p.59). According to Barton, then, the play-metaphor — the image of the world as an all en-globing stage — was to the secular drama of Shakespeare what the theological relation of “Mankind in the audience” to the Mystery on the stage had been for the dramatist of the Middle Ages (id. p.63).

Thus did Barton trace a compelling description of what amounts to be the metatheatrical mindset. While Lionel Abel formulated what such an aesthetic of self-awareness might dramaturgically entail. But it was James Calderwood who — though he took his cue from both Barton and Abel — ended up writing the most influential work on the subject. In his Shakespearean Metadrama (1971) Calderwood would “let [his] notion of metadrama subsume that of metatheatre” — which he considered a species of metadrama devoted to exploring “the function of aesthetic distancing” or “the borders between fiction and reality” (id. p.5). Yet, at the outset of his work, does Calderwood mostly agrees with Abel. Shakespeare’s plays, he says, “are not only about the various moral, social, political, and other thematic issues with which critics have so long and quite properly been busy but also about Shakespeare’s plays” (ibid.), adding furthermore that dramatic art itself “is a dominant Shakespearean theme, perhaps his most abiding subject” (ibid.). Calderwood’s principal argument was that Shakespeare folded-in materials allowing for, both, a dramatic (or narrative) and a metadramatic (or poïetic) reading of his plays. Unfortunately, Calderwood’s own readings are all rather more literary and psychological than theatrical. Titus Andronicus represents, he says, a “rape of language” (id. p.29); while Romeo & Juliet shows Shakespeare working his way “from pure poetry to a viable poetic purity” (p.102); and A Midsummer Night’s Dream “weds the audience to itself through the ceremony of dramatic art” (id. p.143). At best, Calderwood’s metadrama runs alongside a play’s presumed composition but sheds little light on how it was to be performed.

Of course, Calderwood is a reflection of our own times. Nowadays, Shakespeare’s printed text is often seen as the necessary end of a principally literary endeavour, since we now consider the written word has having considerably more authority than the spoken word. Whereas it is fairly probable that Shakespeare himself thought just the opposite — that speech was the authority to which writing referred — and thus considered his dramatic scripts as somewhat more akin to musical scores, means towards an end, whose first publication was that of performance, not print (Worthen 1997). And so, even though we may well read and imagine Shakespeare’s plays in their fictional settings — Hamlet in Elsinore, Twelfe Night in Illyria, or A Winters Tale in Sicily & Bohemia by the sea — Shakespeare, when he set to composing these plays, must have first imagined them on his “vnworthy Scaffold” (Hv, prol./11): the Theatre’s, or the Globe’s, or the Blackfriars’ stage. Hence is our own study’s mindset somewhat more influenced by scholars sensitive to the plays’ original context of performance — such as Gurr (1992), A.C. Dessen (1977, 1984, 1995, 1999) and John C. Meagher (1997, 2003) — rather than by scholars of a more theoretical and literary ilk (Montrose 1996, Weimann 2000).

This study is based upon four fairly commonplace dramaturgical premises: The first is that Shakespeare was an actor who wrote (albeit one who wrote excellently well). The second premise is that his dramatic writings were meant for performance, not print. The third premise is that Shakespeare’s original readers — those to whom he destined his dramatic writings — were his fellow players who would have to perform them. The fourth premise is that Shakespeare, as a self-aware actor in an artistic era already prone to mannered displays of self-reflexivity (Greenwood 1988, Marin 1994, Stoichita 1997, Fowler 2003), knew the discourse, procedures and devices not only of his own but of other mimetic arts as well (such as, for instance, those of painting) and that, furthermore, he used them to inform his own work.

The type of graphic analysis we finally adopted for our study owes as much to classical dramaturgy as to contemporary musicology. Both these fields are concerned with the study and interpretation of works of performance. Hence do both occasionally resort to certain formalistic analytical tools of a schematic or graphic nature whereby the performance itself (albeit an ideal one) is foregrounded.

In terms of the graphic analysis of plays, the tools that dramaturgy has traditionally resorted to — such as Freytag’s pyramid of rising & falling action (Abrams 2005, p.236) — are generally derived from the classical four-part structure of protasis, epitasis, catastasis & catastrophe (Bladwin 1947). Though such forms of analysis do set the text apart in order to concentrate on the rise and fall of a play’s dramatic tension, they do not reveal its technical performance structure per se. Whereas, in musicology, it often is precisely with a score’s technical, performative structure that graphic analysis is concerned. Such formal outlines provide an “at a glance” overview of a musical work’s overall technical structure by displaying the entrances and exits of instruments or pitch classes as they appear throughout the course of a particular work’s duration.

Our choosing the First Folio for such an endeavour is almost self-evident. What our proposed metatheatrical survey required was a control text that provided a modicum of editorial consistancy as well as a sufficient mass (or cross-section) of plays. Given the corpus of original contemporaneous texts we only had two choices: either the eight “good” Pavier Quartos of 1619 or the First Folio of 1623. But in the end, only the Folio — being the sole repository of half of Shakespeare’s known plays — had the required consistency, solidity and gathered the most intersubjective agreement between scholars and practitioners. Not only is the Folio the very first collection of Shakespeare’s dramatic works, it is one in which (barring the dramatist himself) two of his fellow players, John Heminge and Henry Condell, evidently played an important part in producing. The Folio’s unique status and authority therefore made it the only edition of Shakespeare’s collected works whose graphic analysis might pretend to a modicum of like permanence and solidity (whereas the graphing of the 1864 Globe edition or of the Arden’s 1st series, for instance, obviously could not).

Our study’s very structure and design is defined by four sets of graphs. A first set — Chapter 1: Their Exits and their Entrances — provides a visual catalogue of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-play and disguised characters) and is largely inspired by the work and the typologies of Frederick Boas (1927) and Georges Forestier (1996, 1988). A second set — Chapter 2: A crie of players — inspired by the work of Barton on the play-metaphor (1962) displays most of Shakespeare’s textual (i.e. “spoken”) references to the theatre. A third set — Chapter 3: The painted word — also inspired by Barton as well as by the work of John Greenwood (1988), Murray Roston (1987), and Alistair Fowler (2003) on the subject of Shakespeare and the arts, shows the Folio plays’ textual references to mimetic representation, art, and painting. Hence are these second and third sets of graphs concerned with displaying the lexical fields of dramatic and artistic representation along the timeline of performance. As for the final set — Conclusion: The Beginning that is dead and buried — it gathers and presents all three previous sets as one. Each of the first three sets of graphs is preceded by a brief historical cum methodological introduction, and closes with a conclusive summary. Each individual graph is also accompanied by a short commentary (or dramaturgical “potshot”).

It has been objected that Louis Marin’s opacity [^“C’est ce que j’appelle l’opacité ou la reflexivité de l’oeuvre. Elle peut représenter quelque chose: être transparente, et en même temps, elle montre qu’elle représente. L’objet d’une science et d’une théorie de l’art est cette articulation très complexe entre transparence et opacité, entre la mise en oeuvre et les façons de montrer cette mise en oeuvre.” Louis Marin, De la Représenation (Gallimard/Seuil, 1994, p.67).^] would have been a more appropriate concept than transparency for describing this effect (in part, because opacity is already in general art-historical parlance). But Marin’s term, though it indeed describes a similar effect in the visual arts produced by comparable devices (painting-in-the-painting, veduta, and trompe l’oeil), rather refers to an abolishing or reduction of a painting’s perspectival narrative space to the single surface of its picture-plane (which is thereby rendered opaque). Of course, there was no such single plane for a viewer’s eye to abut on the Elizabethan stage. But whether we choose opacity or transparency, the processes they both describe emerge out of the same self-awareness and result in a similar aesthetical concern for self-reflexivity. The term transparent we simply thought more apt to describe this effect, not only because the word itself appears in Shakespeare’s writings (five times [^ 2Hvi, 3.1.353/1658; LLL, 4.3.29/1363; R&J, 1.2.92/340; MND, 2.2.104/759; TN, 4.2.36/2022^]) but also because opaque does not. And if “how self-reflexive was Shakespeare theatre” might have been a truer sub-title, “how opaque…” would clearly have given the wrong idea. For the transparency in question, here, also concerns our chosen approach, which — being accumulative — is rather more archaeological than strictly analytical. For, in the end, it is the very accumulation of fairly objective instances of self-reflexivity (either scenic or textual) that shows Shakespeare’s reliance on metatheatre to be so self-evident as to be “transparent”. As it stands the sub-title may perhaps be interpreted as an attempt at bringing some lighter stuff into the field of Shakespeare studies, hopefully, without our seeming to be too much of “Transparent Heretiques”(Rom 1.2.92/340).

[^#^]

[#]

So perhaps ours is yet another work of “mere archaeology” [^ E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage I, p.vii.^], though we have certainly tried to be thorough in order that better scholars and theorists may read more into it than we ever can. For we ourselves side perhaps altogether too much with theatre practitioners to whom this work is also addressed. If our formal outlines may serve as pre-production tools for the scoring of plays, then showing to my fellow actors and directors the degree to which Shakespeare, in performance, leaned towards a theatre about the theatre could certainly influence how we perform and interpret his plays today. Indeed, we should always remember that the “Clowd” shaped “like a Camell” (or “a Weazell” or “a Whale”) was in that self-same “excellent Canopy” — the sky — prince Hamlet, himself, shared with the Globe’s audience [^ Hamlet, 3.2/2247-52^].

Our study’s very structure and design is defined by four sets of graphs. A first set — Chapter 1: Their Exits and their Entrances — provides a visual catalogue of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-play and disguised characters) and is largely inspired by the work and the typologies of Frederick Boas (1927) and Georges Forestier (1996, 1988). And, indeed, Forestier himself did resort to certain graphic analyses in his study of metatheatre in French neoclassical drama. A second set — Chapter 2: A crie of players — inspired by the work of Barton on the play-metaphor (1962) displays Shakespeare’s textual (i.e. “spoken”) references to the theatre. A third set — Chapter 3: The painted word — also inspired by Barton as well as by the work of John Greenwood (1988), Murray Roston (1987), and Alistair Fowler (2003) on the subject of Shakespeare and the arts, show the Folio plays’ textual references to mimetic representation and to art. As for the final set — Conclusion: The Beginning that is dead and buried — it gathers and presents all three previous sets as one.

It has been objected that Louis Marin’s opacity [^“C’est ce que j’appelle l’opacité ou la reflexivité de l’oeuvre. Elle peut représenter quelque chose: être transparente, et en même temps, elle montre qu’elle représente. L’objet d’une science et d’une théorie de l’art est cette articulation très complexe entre transparence et opacité, entre la mise en oeuvre et les façons de montrer cette mise en oeuvre.” Louis Marin, De la Représenation (Gallimard/Seuil, 1994, p.67).^] would have been a more appropriate concept than transparency for describing this effect (in part, because opacity is already in general art-historical parlance). But Marin’s term, though it indeed describes a similar effect in the visual arts produced by comparable devices (painting-in-the-painting, veduta, and trompe l’oeil), rather refers to an abolishing or reduction of a painting’s perspectival narrative space to the single surface of its picture-plane (which is thereby rendered opaque). Of course, there was no such single plane for a viewer’s eye to abut on the Elizabethan stage. But whether we choose opacity or transparency, the processes they both describe emerge out of the same self-awareness and result in a similar aesthetical concern for self-reflexivity. The term transparent we simply thought more apt to describe this effect, not only because the word itself appears in Shakespeare’s writings (five times [^ 2Hvi, 3.1.353/1658; LLL, 4.3.29/1363; R&J, 1.2.92/340; MND, 2.2.104/759; TN, 4.2.36/2022^]) but also because opaque does not. And if “how self-reflexive was Shakespeare theatre” might have been a truer sub-title, “how opaque…” would clearly have given the wrong idea. For the transparency in question, here, also concerns our chosen approach, which — being accumulative — is rather more archaeological than strictly analytical. For, in the end, it is the very accumulation of fairly objective instances of self-reflexivity (either scenic or textual) that shows Shakespeare’s reliance on metatheatre to be so self-evident as to be “transparent”. As it stands the sub-title may perhaps be interpreted as an attempt at bringing some lighter stuff into the field of Shakespeare studies (hopefully, without our seeming to be too much like Romeo's “Transparent heretics”).

So perhaps ours is yet another work of “mere archaeology” [^ E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage I, p.vii.^], though we have certainly tried to be thorough in order that better scholars and theorists may read more into it than we ever can. For we ourselves side perhaps altogether too much with theatre practitioners to whom this work is also addressed. If our formal outlines may serve as pre-production tools for the scoring of plays, then showing to my fellow actors and directors the degree to which Shakespeare, in performance, leaned towards a theatre about the theatre could certainly influence how we perform and interpret his plays today. Indeed, we should always remember that the “Clowd” shaped “like a Camell” (or “a Weazell” or “a Whale”) was in that self-same “excellent Canopy” — the sky — prince Hamlet, himself, shared with the Globe’s audience [^ Hamlet, 3.2/2247-52].

->I know that diagrams are offensive to some readers, who feel that algebra is being substituted for explanatory language; but the density of Shakespeare’s sonnet-structure is often so dense that it can best be untangled through giving a separate diagram for each subordinate structure. (Vendler 1997, p.xvii)

This study, then, is an attempt at a comprehensive and (as much as possible) exhaustive survey of metatheatre in the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623. In the words of Charlton Hinman, “the only edition of the collected works which can reasonably be accepted as a permanent standard” (Hinman 1968, p.xxiii). Based on Abel’s theory of metatheatre and Barton’s work on the play-metaphor, this study would provide a repertoire of all metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-plays & disguised characters) as well as of all textual references either to the theatre itself or to mimetic representation in general.

Marvin Spevack’s Complete Sytematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (1968-80) is probably the seminal endeavour of computer-assisted Shakespeare studies. Apart from providing a veritable mother-load of ready quantified textual data based on G. Blakemore-Evans’ Riverside Shakespeare (1972), Spevack’s Systematic Concordance inspired a number stylometric and statistical studies (Matsuba 1989). But even though its complete digitalization of the Riverside text lent itself almost perfectly to something like our own undertaking, it was never used to generate Shakespeare’s plays’ formal outlines (nor any other kind of graphic evidence, for that matter). Indeed, from 1980 to the present, there appears to be not a single graphic analysis of a play (stylometric or otherwise) in either Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey or Shakespeare Jarhbuch. [^We found only one article that resorts to graphic analysis of any kind: “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited” by Alan B. Farmer & Zachary Lesser (Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1,2005) ^] Furthermore, none of the standard single-volume critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays appear to provide any sort of graphic outline of either a play’s plot or its technical structure. Indeed, the closest thing to the graphic outline of an elizabethan play's technical structure we've encountered remains the seven "scheme of parts" W.W. Greg provides in his Dramatic Documents From The Elizabethan Playhouses (1931). None of which are of a Shakespeare play. The sole example of a plot-based graphic analysis of a Shakespeare play appears to be Regina Dombrowa’s Strukturen in Shakespeares King Henry the Sixth (1985).

->How then are we to define the dramaturgy or sense of theatre that lies behind the plays we so much admire? Can we even assume that one set of techniques or one idea of a theatre can encompass the complex and diverse dramatic corpus of Elizabethan drama? — Alan C. Dessen / Elizabethan Drama & the Viewer’s Eye, p.28


->Tout art ou toute technique qui devient le mode d’expression d’une époque finit par se prendre pour son objet. — Georges Forestier/ Le Théâtre dans le Théâtre, p.37

Of course, there have been scholars who have addressed this issue, namely Anne [Righter] Barton in her superb study of the play-metaphor, Shakespeare and the Idea of the play (1962), and Lionel Abel in his seminal work Metatheatre: a new view of dramatic form (1963). But none has successfully bridged the gap between theory and practice. None demonstrated how Shakespeare’s metatheatre could enlighten the scholarly interpretation of his plays while also enlivening their performance.

->!!!!How then are we to define the dramaturgy or sense of theatre that lies behind the plays we so much admire? Can we even assume that one set of techniques or one idea of a theatre can encompass the complex and diverse dramatic corpus of Elizabethan drama? — Alan C. Dessen / Elizabethan Drama & the Viewer’s Eye, p.28


->!!!!Tout art ou toute technique qui devient le mode d’expression d’une époque finit par se prendre pour son objet. — Georges Forestier/ Le Théâtre dans le Théâtre, p.37

!!INTRODUCTION:


!!LOOKING ON HIS PICTURE
!!!(Towards a Graphic Analysis of Metatheatre in Shakespeare’s First Folio)


!!!!How then are we to define the dramaturgy or sense of theatre that lies behind the plays we so much admire? Can we even assume that one set of techniques or one idea of a theatre can encompass the complex and diverse dramatic corpus of Elizabethan drama? — Alan C. Dessen / Elizabethan Drama & the Viewer’s Eye, p.28


!!!!Tout art ou toute technique qui devient le mode d’expression d’une époque finit par se prendre pour son objet. — Georges Forestier/ Le Théâtre dans le Théâtre, p.37


\\

INTRODUCTION:


LOOKING ON HIS PICTURE
(Towards a Graphic Analysis
of Metatheatre in Shakespeare’s First Folio)


How then are we to define the dramaturgy or sense of theatre that lies behind the plays we so much admire? Can we even assume that one set of techniques or one idea of a theatre can encompass the complex and diverse dramatic corpus of Elizabethan drama?

— Alan C. Dessen
Elizabethan Drama & the Viewer’s Eye, p.28


Tout art ou toute technique qui devient le mode d’expression d’une époque finit par se prendre pour son objet.

— Georges Forestier
Le Théâtre dans le Théâtre, p.37



We all know that Shakespeare often resorted to the theatre in the theatre — or what we now call metatheatre — either through the play-within-the-play, disguised characters or sudden surprising utterances, such as Fabian’s in Twelfe Night, “If this were plaid upon the stage now, I could condemne it as an improbable fiction” (3.4.127/1649). But what has not really been ascertained is just how much he resorted to it and therefore how much his theatre was self-reflexive. This seems to us of some import to determine because Shakespeare’s metatheatre does not appear to be just a quaint device, but an aesthetic attitude that informs his entire work.

Of course, there have been scholars who have addressed this issue, namely Anne Baron in her superb study of the play-metaphor, Shakespeare and the Idea of the play (1962), and Lionel Abel in his seminal work Metatheatre: a new view of dramatic form (1963). But none has successfully bridged the gap between theory and practice. None demonstrated how Shakespeare’s metatheatre could enlighten the scholarly interpretation of his plays while also enlivening their performance.

Our purpose, then, is to show to both theoreticians and practitioners just how important (in terms of performance and dramaturgy) metatheatre and the self-reflexivity or transparency that it suggests were to Shakespeare’s theatre. We want to show this is in manner that is not only scholarly but immediately compelling so that the overwhelming evidence of Shakespeare’s metatheatre, itself, be brought to bear as essential proof of its importance. What we want to produce is a catalogue raisonné of Shakespeare’s metatheatre: a work whose simple perusal would already provide an idea of the depth and breadth of its subject.

The dual nature of this work — that it addresses itself to theory as well as to practice is due to our own shifting — as a sometime actor and director, as well as teacher and dramaturge — between both worlds. Certainly, we have been frustrated with some practitioners’ inability to appreciate what theory can contribute to performance (for what is theory but a more or less tightly framed theatre of the mind). But we have been far, far more frustrated with a great many scholars forgetting that — with regards to Shakespeare’s plays, at least — if an idea is/was not useful or transferable to performance (either past of present) then it is lost (for he himself would not have even considered it). Of course, we are not saying “easily transferable” to performance for Shakespeare did not avoid nor fear complexity.

This study, then, is an attempt at a comprehensive and (as much as possible) exhaustive survey of metatheatre in the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623. In the words of Charlton Hinman, “the only edition of the collected works which can reasonably be accepted as a permanent standard” (Hinman 1968, p.xxiii). Based on Abel’s theory of metatheatre (Abel 1963, 2003) and Barton’s work on the play-metaphor (Barton 1962), this study would provide a repertoire of all metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-plays & disguised characters) as well as of all textual references either to the theatre itself or to mimetic representation in general.

When Abel first coined the term metatheatre, back in 1963, he meant it as a form somewhat opposed to that of Tragedy because he felt that modern playwrights (or, at least, a species of modern playwrights) as well as their characters were too self-conscious to write or perform tragedies (which require an earnest belief in the reality and inevitability of the situation). According to him, what distinguishes the metaplays of Shakespeare and Calderon, from the tragedies of Aeschylus, and Seneca is that the former “show the reality of the dramatic imagination, instanced by the playwright’s and also by that of his characters” (Abel 1963, p.59). If what Abel posits is true, and “the playwright has the obligation to acknowledge in the very structure of his play that it was his imagination which controlled the events from beginning to end” (id. p.60), then the highlighting of such events within the very structure of Shakespeare’s plays should reveal something of his own theatrical strategies.

Based on a thorough historical survey of dramatic literature and practices, Anne Barton’s approach to the play-metaphor is more pragmatic and precise than Abel’s overarching aesthetic category. She began her work by exploring how “the marriage of time present with time past upon which Mysteries are based” (Barton 1962, p.19) was the foundation of what she calls the “tyranny of the audience” (id. p.31). According to Barton, the idea of a self-contained drama would have been entirely foreign to a Medieval Tudor audience “simply not accustomed to being ignored” (id. p.37). Such an audience required the use of extra-dramatic addresses “designed for the express purpose of surprising [them] into attention when some necessary question of the play required its understanding” (id. p.47). Though Shakespeare himself would later write for an audience somewhat more accustomed to self-contained dramas, a similar “sense of contact still had to be maintained [as] a means of relating the play world with that reality upon which plays are built” (id. p.59). According to Barton, then, the play-metaphor — the image of the world as an all en-globing stage — was to the secular drama of Shakespeare what the theological relation of “Mankind in the audience” to the Mystery on the stage had been for the dramatist of the Middle Ages (id. p.63).

Although, the study of Shakespeare’s metatheatre has since taken a decidedly literary turn (Calderwood 1971, Schmeling 1982, Hubert 1991), we ourselves wanted to take it back into the realm of theatrical performance and, what is more, of its original context of performance. This approach owes much to the works of such scholars as Alan C. Dessen (1995, 1984, 1977) and John C. Meagher (1997, 2003). For though we may well read and imagine the plays in their fictional settings — Hamlet in Elsinore, Twelfe Night in Illyria, or A Winters Tale in Sicily & Bohemia by the sea — Shakespeare when he set to composing these plays, must have first imagined them on his “vnworthy Scaffold” (Hv, prol./11): the Theatre’s, or the Globe’s, or the Blackfriars’ stage.

We tend to see his printed text as the necessary end of a principally literary endeavour, since we now consider the written word has having considerably more authority than the spoken word. Whereas Shakespeare probably thought the opposite — that speech was the authority to which writing referred — and thus considered his dramatic scripts as something akin to musical scores, means towards an end, whose first publication was that of performance, not print.

Thus are there four fairly commonplace dramaturgical premises upon which our study is based: The first is that Shakespeare was an actor who wrote (albeit one who wrote excellently well). The second premise is that his dramatic writings were meant for performance, not print. The third premise is that Shakespeare’s original readers — those to whom he destined his dramatic writings — were his fellow players who would have to perform them. The fourth premise is that Shakespeare, as a self-aware actor in an artistic era already prone to mannered displays of self-reflexivity (Greenwood 1988, Marin 1994, Stoichita 1997, Fowler 2003), knew the discourse, procedures and devices not only of his own but of other mimetic arts as well (such as, for instance, those of painting) and that, furthermore, he used them to inform his own work.

The first premise is founded on the available documentary evidence, according to which it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare was an actor (Schoenbaum 1971, 1975, 1977). Robert Greene’s polemical Groatsworth of Wit (1592) singles him out as such, and furthermore as a player who should learn to keep his place and not impinge on the playwright’s craft (id. 1975, p.115). Later, we find him listed between Will Kempe (the company’s clown) and Richard Burbage (principal sharer and lead actor) in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Queen “for plays performed before her majesty” in March 1595 (id. p.136). In another document dated May 1599, itemizing the properties of Sir Thomas Brend, lease-holder of the Globe’s site, the newly erected theatre is described as being “in occupacione Willielmi Shakespeare et aliorum” (id. 1977, p.209). In 1602, when the York Herald suspected that coats of arms were granted with laxity, he cited “Shakespeare the player” as an example (id. p.231). It therefore appears as if the dramatist had gained a certain notoriety as one of the principal players of his company. And if he was not the best of players — as tradition, since Nicholas Rowe and Edward Capell dubiously has it (id. p.148) — we can safely assume that he did not lack stage experience. What is more, of all the better known playwrights of his time — Greene, Marlowe, Jonson, Nashe, Kyd, Dekker, Fletcher, Beaumont, Massinger, Chapman, etc. — Shakespeare (with the possible exception of Nathan Field) was the only actor/sharer.

Our second premise — that Shakespeare favoured performance over print — is also something of a truism, since so much speculation inherent to Shakespearean scholarship — whether theatrical or editorial — is due to his not having shown any great concern for the preservation of his manuscripts nor the printing of his plays (Honigmann 1965, Wells 1984 & 1997). Indeed, of the twenty of his known plays to have been printed in his own lifetime, none show signs of authorial supervision.

Most everyone will also agree with our third premise that Shakespeare’s fellow actors were indeed the first readers of his dramatic writings. Since players are — perforce — those to whom all dramatic writing is originally addressed (Worthen 1997, Weimann 2000). Shakespeare’s players would have read their parts — or individual rolls — with the same concerns as their author: with an eye on the practical, technical demands of performance. Hence were these plays almost scores in the musical sense. For no matter how self-enclosed a play-world might have been, the fact of being onstage for Shakespeare and his fellow players must have been foremost in their minds

As for artistic knowledge, that the character of Bushy ably describes an anamorphosis in Richard II (2.2), or that Edgar on the cliffs of Dover draws a perfect receding perspective (King Lear, 4.6), or that perspective itself is deemed “best Painters art” in Sonnet 24, or that Tymon (1.1 & 5.1) apparently reprises elements of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Paragone debate (Blunt 1939), or that Hermione’s “oyly” statue in Winter’s Tale (5.3) is the work a Julio Romano (1499-1546), would all seem to indicate that Shakespeare had some fairly precise (and even arcane) knowledge of art (Greenwood 1988, Roston 1989, Fowler 2003). Furthermore, all of these occurrences are structurally significant: Bushy’s striking anamorphosis is certainly linked to Richard’s climactic shattering of the glasse (4.1); Edgar’s utterly convincing perspective — the first such description in English literature according to Roland Frye (Greenwood 1988, p.8) — is also utterly false. While Leonardo’s Paragone debate — though it was ostensibly about the comparative merit of the mimetic arts — was in actuality fought over patronage (Richter 1949, Mendelsohn, 1982). As for the mannerist painter Julio Romano, he was a master of trompe l’oeil.

What these four premises essentially did was to allow for our study of metatheatre to rest upon fairly pragmatic, practical grounds. Shakespeare, as an actor addressing other actors, knew that to allow for present performance to emerge out of the illusion of the playworld was (even as a titillating remnant of medieval extra-dramatic address) certainly fun to do. But as an artist and dramatist of the new secular theatre (as well as of Abel’s modern ilk), Shakespeare may have also wanted players and playgoers to engage each other from within the play-world (as Barton’s play-metaphor suggests). The point being, not to breach the illusion but to make it transparent: to open a window between worlds based on the actuality of performance itself.

That our catalogue raisonné of Shakespeare’s metatheatre resort to graphic analysis was due, in part, to our wanting to make clearer and more manifest — than in scholarly studies of a more literary than theatrical persuasion — that these plays in the eyes of Shakespeare and his fellow players were pre-production concepts or scores of performance pieces. What we needed, then, was a means whereby occurrences of metatheatre might be highlighted in the context of performance. Indeed, what we essentially required was to remove all contents else from the Folio plays except for where and when elements of metatheatre occurred in performance.

The type of graphic analysis we finally adopted for our study owes as much to classical dramaturgy as to contemporary musicology. Both dramaturgy and musicology are concerned with the study and interpretation of works of performance. Hence do both fields occasionally resort to certain analytical tools of a schematic or graphic nature whereby it is the performance itself (albeit an ideal one) that is foregrounded. In terms of the graphic analysis of plays, the tools that dramaturgy has traditionally resorted to — such as Freytag’s pyramid of rising & falling action (Freytag, 1863) — are generally derived from the classical four-part structure of protasis, epitasis, catastasis & catastrophe. Though such forms of analysis do set the text apart in order to concentrate on the rise and fall of a play’s dramatic tension, they do not reveal its technical performance structure per se. Whereas, in musicology, it often is precisely with a score’s technical, performative structure that graphic analysis is concerned. Such formal outlines provide an “at a glance” overview of a musical work’s overall technical structure by displaying the entrances and exits of instruments, sections, or pitch classes as they appear throughout the course of a particular work’s duration.


James Harley’s formal outline of Iannis Xenakis’ La Légende d’Eer, for example (fig.01), enables us to immediately perceive how nine groups of sounds interact with each other over the course of six movements of a precise total duration of 33:13. We also see that the groups’ initial entrances are staggered and that at no point in the piece do they all sound together at once. Though this analysis is certainly no substitute for a performance of La Légende d’Eer, it does give us a good idea as to how the piece itself actually works.

Of course, music does lend itself somewhat more readily to such formal analyses, simply because musical scores are already sub-divided into precise units of time. The conceptual leap from note-value, bar, or movement to time-line (or x-axis) is not so great. Whereas a play is burdened with a literary content that a score does not have to contend with and that may not be so easily subdivided into ready increments. The intellectual exercise required in making the passage from dramatic text to technical performance in time is not as obvious, so that those dramaturgical graphic outlines that come closest to the musicological ones are usually plot-based (fig.02).


For our own purposes, though, the conflation of music’s technical formal outline with drama’s plot-based outline (inasmuch as we substituted the Folio’s lineation for musical time and metatheatrical occurrences for plot-points) appeared to be exactly what our study needed. Indeed, the requirements that our survey of Shakespeare’s metatheatre be comprehensive and undertaken in the context of an ideal original performance stood to be met in a manner that was, both, intuitively compelling and technically accurate. But by choosing to go the way of graphic analysis our study was also choosing (albeit unwittingly) an approach for which there appeared to be very few other examples in the field of Shakespeare studies.

Marvin Spevack’s Complete Sytematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (1968-80) is probably the seminal endeavour of computer-assisted Shakespeare studies. Apart from providing a veritable mother-load of ready quantified textual data based on G. Blakemore-Evans’ Riverside Shakespeare (1972), Spevack’s Systematic Concordance inspired a number stylometric and statistical studies (Matsuba 1989). But even though its complete digitalization of the Riverside text lent itself almost perfectly to something like our own undertaking, it was never used to generate Shakespeare’s plays’ formal outlines (nor any other kind of graphic evidence, for that matter). Indeed, from 1980 to the present, there appears to be not a single graphic analysis of a play (stylometric or otherwise) in either Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey or Shakespeare Jarhbuch. And we found only one article that resorts to graphic analysis of any kind: “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited” by Alan B. Farmer & Zachary Lesser (Farmer 2005). Furthermore, none of the standard single-volume critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays appear to provide any sort of graphic outline of either a play’s plot or its technical structure. In fact, we only found a single example of plot-based graphic analysis of a Shakespeare play: Regina Dombrowa’s Strukturen in Shakespeares King Henry the Sixth (1985).

Faced with of such a dearth of like studies, then, it therefore appeared very likely that our graphic approach, being atypical, would take precedence over what it sought to demonstrate (namely, the quantity and purpose of Shakespeare’s metatheatre). For, indeed, by providing a graphic visual survey of metatheatre in the First Folio, we were — perforce — also providing a graphic analysis of the Folio itself. Thus an apparent lacunae in the field transformed our study of Shakespeare’s metatheatre into a demonstration or exemplum of graphic analysis itself.

But if there is no real precedent for our graphic analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, we have certainly been greatly inspired by Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997). For Vendler’s work is as comprehensive with regards the 1609 edition of the Sonnets (which she analyses, as it were, play by play) as we ourselves wanted to be regarding the Folio of 1623. Furthermore, Vendler does not shy away from resorting to graphic analysis and, indeed, provides as compelling a defence for it as any we’ve encountered.

I know that diagrams are offensive to some readers, who feel that algebra is being substituted for explanatory language; but the density of Shakespeare’s sonnet-structure is often so dense that it can best be untangled through giving a separate diagram for each subordinate structure. (Vendler 1997, p.xvii)


What follows essentially consists of a graphic analysis of William Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, whereby the technical formal outlines (or performative structures) of its thirty-six plays are revealed, so to speak, “at a glance”. These formal outlines are employed to contextualize and to quantify structural events and textual occurrences related to Shakespeare’s metatheatre.

Our choosing the First Folio for such an endeavour is almost self-evident. Not only is it the first of Shakespeare’s collected works, it is one in which (barring the dramatist himself) two of his fellow players, John Heminge and Henry Condell, evidently played an important part in producing. The Folio’s unique status and authority therefore makes it the only edition of Shakespeare’s collected works whose graphic analysis might pretend to a modicum of like permanence and solidity (whereas the graphing of the Arden’s 1st or 2nd series, for instance, obviously could not). That Hinman’s own “ideal” facsimile edition, The First Folio of Shakespeare (1968, 2nd ed. 1996), was itself chosen as our principal control-text (over other facsimile editions) was largely because of its through-line-numbering system (TLN). Given the complex textual and editorial history of Shakespeare’s plays, Hinman chose not to key his facsimile to any modern edition of Shakespeare’s works but rather to count, in normal reading order, every typographical line “straight through each play” (beginning with Actus primus, Scena prima and ending with the play’s final line). Thus Hinman’s TLN provides a solid series of continuous coordinates enabling us to precisely locate textual and structural events along an axis that is more or less analogous to that of time and performance.

Ideally, then, we would have liked to compose a work wherein text was almost entirely superfluous and the essential argument the opposite of the First Folio’s prefatory poem: “Reader, looke not on his [Booke] but on his [Picture]” (id. 1996, p.2). And indeed in order to fully appreciate the present document one must first allow that its graphic contents do not constitute support but rather its principal materials.

Our study’s very structure and design is defined by four sets of graphs. A first set — Chapter 1: Their Exits and their Entrances — provides a visual catalogue of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-play and disguised characters) and is largely inspired by the work and the typologies of Frederick Boas (1927) and Georges Forestier (1996, 1988). A second set — Chapter 2: A crie of players — inspired by the work of Barton on the play-metaphor (1962) displays Shakespeare’s textual (i.e. “spoken”) references to the theatre. A third set — Chapter 3: The painted word — also inspired by Barton as well as by the work of John Greenwood (1988), Murray Roston (1987), and Alistair Fowler (2003) on the subject of Shakespeare and the arts, show the Folio plays’ textual references to mimetic representation and to art. As for the final set — Conclusion: The Beginning that is dead and buried — it gathers and presents all three previous sets as one.

Thus the visual analytical journey that our work proposes goes from manifest events, to explicit textual occurrences, to implicit textual occurrences, to a final synthesis of metatheatre in the First Folio. Except for the final synthetic graph, all sets retain the Folio’s division of plays into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies as well as each category’s order of plays. As with Vendler’s work on the Sonnets, then, the internal logic of our own work is largely dependant on that of the Folio itself. Each of the first three sets of graphs is preceded by a brief historical cum methodological introduction, and closes with a conclusive summary. The final set departs from this in that, following our study’s general conclusion, it presents the plays in their presumed chronological order of composition and performance.

Thus our title, William’s Window, principally refers to the graphic endeavour itself (which does open something of a window on how Shakespeare may have envisioned — or, at least, sensed — the overall structure and the logistics of his plays in performance). Whereas our subtitle, how transparent was Shakespeare’s theatre, refers to our working metatheatrical occurrences back into our Folio’s formal outlines.

As for the term transparent, it refers to what we believe was the desired effect of we now call metatheatre upon Shakespeare’s original audience: that of a sudden shifting of perspective. The medieval latin word, itself, transparens originally meant «appearing through». Thus, transparent for the physical sciences, has come to mean «pellucid» or «allowing the passage of light». As a value concept, transparent stands for «manifest» or «clear». What transparency implies, then, is a shift in perception: when something «appears through», it also can be «seen through»; when something is «pellucid» and «allows the passage of light», it must also «allow the passage of sight»; in order for something to be «clear», it must «stand out»; and to have been made «manifest», it must have been «brought to the fore».

When we speak of transparency as a quality of dramatic or artistic representation, we usually refer to a shift in perception whereby what appears through or is made manifest is not so much that which is being represented (or given) but representation itself. For example, a play within a play (or a painting in a painting) is a case of representation representing something of itself. As such, its fiction — or illusion — is, both, augmented and destroyed. The spectator can go either way, further in or out of the play (or painting). What ultimately ends up being made manifest is the spectator’s relation to the representation, as well as the relation of the representation to the real world. For if we recognize theatricality as that aesthetic shift in perception which allows for a signifier (i.e. the theatre) to stand for the signified (i.e. the World) in a context recognized by all participants (i.e. players and play-goers alike) as fictional, then metatheatricality is that second aesthetic shift in perception which allows for this theatrical construction (or process) to reveal itself as such.

It has been objected that Louis Marin’s opacity would have been a more appropriate concept than transparency for describing this effect (in part, because opacity is already in general art-historical parlance). But Marin’s term, though it indeed describes a similar effect in the visual arts produced by comparable devices (painting-in-the-painting, veduta, and trompe l’oeil), rather refers to an abolishing or reduction of a painting’s perspectival narrative space to the single surface of its picture-plane (which is thereby rendered opaque). Of course, there was no such single plane for a viewer’s eye to abut on the Elizabethan stage. But whether we choose opacity or transparency, the processes they both describe emerge out of the same self-awareness and result in a similar aesthetical concern for self-reflexivity. The term transparent we simply thought more apt to describe this effect, not only because the word itself appears in Shakespeare’s writings (five times) but also because opaque does not. And if “how self-reflexive was Shakespeare theatre” might have been a truer sub-title, “how opaque…” would clearly have given the wrong idea. For the transparency in question, here, also concerns our chosen approach, which — being accumulative — is rather more archaeological than strictly analytical. For, in the end, it is the very accumulation of fairly objective instances of self-reflexivity (either scenic or textual) that shows Shakespeare’s reliance on metatheatre to be so self-evident as to be “transparent”. As it stands the sub-title may perhaps be interpreted as an attempt at bringing some lighter stuff into the field of Shakespeare studies (hopefully, without our seeming to be too much of “Transparent heretics”).

Of course, our heavy reliance on visually rendered evidence does tend to make our work a photo-reportage of sorts. But given the necessary interplay between Shakespeare’s theatrical scripts, the extracted data, and the resulting graphic analyses that the work represents, its true formal paradigm is far more that of an internet website. For a website — through hyperlinks and pop-up windows — does more readily allow for the back-and-forth perusal between numerical, textual and graphic levels which the proper interpretation of this study often requires. Whereas in the case of the present document, much of the textual data that constitutes Shakespeare’s theatrical metalanguage (in the sense, not of Jacobsen per se, but rather of Shakespeare’s theatre speaking about theatre) must perforce be presently included (as so many tables) in order for the reader to better appreciate the discrete nature of a material that would otherwise be displayed and interpreted mostly quantitatively.

So perhaps ours is yet another work of “mere archaeology”, though we have certainly tried to be thorough in order that better scholars and theorists may read more into it than we ever can. For we ourselves side perhaps altogether too much with theatre practitioners to whom this work is also addressed. If our formal outlines may serve as pre-production tools for the scoring of plays, then showing to my fellow actors and directors the degree to which Shakespeare, in performance, leaned towards a theatre about the theatre could certainly influence how we perform and interpret his plays today. Indeed, we should always remember that the “Clowd” shaped “like a Camell” (or “a Weazell” or “a Whale”) was in that self-same “excellent Canopy” — the sky — prince Hamlet, himself, shared with the Globe’s audience.