This visual catalogue charts Shakespeare’s use of the play-within-the-play and disguised characters in the thirty-six plays of the First Folio of 1623. The general layout of plays, as well as their arrangement into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, exactly reproduces that of the Folio (whereas the corresponding Roll# 1, Performative Structure & Metatheatrical Devices, presents the plays in their presumed chronological order of composition). Both devices — Play-within-the-play and disguise — are metatheatrical in that they dramatize the very means of theatrical representation: the first, by opening another fictional frame within the fictional framework of the drama itself; the second, by adding — so to speak — a costume onto a costume.
In his brief on-line article A Poetics of the Inset Play (2000), David A. Reinheimer defines the play-within-the-play as “an imitation of a theatrical imitation, establishing the context of performance … through alienation effecting the internalization of theatrical principle and/or practice.” Though Reinheimer himself then goes on to limit the reach of his definition by excluding masques and scenes extempore in favour of “perfect” inset plays (such as Hamlet’s “Murder of Gonzago”) or “imperfect” ones (such as Dreame’s “Pyramus and Thisbe”), we ourselves will rather opt for greater inclusivity.
Reinheimer’s definition does provide us with four relatively clear characteristics: “imitation of imitation”, “context of performance” (i.e. “frame”), “alienation”, and the “internalization of theatrical principles and/or practice”. Generally, when any two of these four characteristics did apply to a dramatic event susceptible of being a play-within-the-play, we included it in our visual catalogue. Thus Masques (such as Tempest’s Masque of Juno, 4.1), Maskers (as in Romeo and Juliet, 1.4–5), Scenes extempore (as in 1 Henry IV, 2.4 and As You Like It, 4.1), Visions (as in Macbeth, 4.1), Dreams (as in Cymbeline, 5.4), as well as certain Gullings (All’s Well, 4.1&3; Lear, 4.6) have all been included in the category of Play-within-the-play.
As for disguises, of course, we retained those obvious cases of characters who put on a disguise (such as Twelfe Nights Viola/Cesario) or travel incognito (King Henry in Henry V, 4.1). But we also considered to be disguised those character who — unbeknownst to themselves — have assumed another identity. We therefore consider the Winter’s Tale’s Perdita to be disguised, largely because the audience knows that she is not who she appears (or thinks) to be.
As we explained in the general introduction, our intent was to provide a graphic display that would show (together with a play’s scenic structure or formal outline) where and when these two metatheatrical devices occur in the course of Shakespeare’s Folio plays. Four influences have been instrumental in determining the manner in which we chose to do this.
The first is an artefact from the Elizabethan theatre itself. At the time, playing companies mostly functioned in repertory and often used (as an aide mémoire) plots (or plats). These were single-sheet summaries or outlines of a play’s cue to cue that were presumably posted in the tyring-houses during performances. Seven such plots are still extant, the most famous being the one for Richard Tarlton’s The Secound Parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinne . Plots described (quite accurately) a play’s scheme of entrances & exits and thus its basic performative structure. Though they remain textual descriptions, in terms of the information they provide, such plots — conceptually, at least — came very close to what we had in mind.
The second influence was the work of Regina Dombrowa, whose Strukturen in Shakespeares King Henry the Sixth (1985) provides a graphic analysis of the internal plot structure of the three Henry VI plays (fig.1).
For her analysis, Dombrowa colour-coded twelve distinct plots and subplots (ranging from French-yellow to Suffolk-red to Gloucester-green to York-blue). She then counted in her control text (Arden 2nd series) the number of verses concerning each plot and thereafter distributed her colour-scheme accordingly, along a time-line defined by the cycle’s seventy-nine scenes. The result is an compelling representation of the plays’ plot-structure. Unfortunately, the distribution of scenes in her graph wasn’t at all proportionate to their actual lengths (all scenes are shown as being exactly the same size). Even though Dombrowa notes what each and every one of these scenes is about, we have no sense of time, nor any idea as to which character is on or off stage. And yet, imperfect as it is, Dombrowa’s work did provide us nonetheless with a precedent for the graphic analysis of Shakespeare’s plays.
The third influence was the work of a friend, composer James Harley. Since music is (like theatre) an art of time, Harley’s Xenakis: His life and Music (2004) includes a number of graphs whose purpose it was to visually render pitches, sound classes and durations in musical compositions (fig.2).
Sound or pitch classes in Harley’s graph are represented in their order of appearance and are thus akin to characters (or voices) that enter and exit at precise moments in the course of a performance. Stage presences and their possible interplay are what these formal outlines essentially show.
The fourth influence came from Edward Tufte, whose seminal work The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) opens by succinctly and accurately describing what graphic displays should do.
• show the data
• induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than the methodology
• avoid distorting what the data have to say
• present many numbers in a small space
• make large data sets coherent
• encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data
• reveal the data at several levels of detail
• serve a reasonably clear purpose (p.13)
Each of the following play-graphs, then, is in essence a virtual “cue to cue” wherein the entrances and exits of the principal characters of each Folio play are displayed according to the Through-Line-Numbering (TLN) of Charlton Hinman’s Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare (2nd ed. 1996).
Principal characters (as well as some secondary and minor characters) are listed — in their order of appearance — on the graphs’ vertical Y axis. Their Entrances & Exits appear along the horizontal X axis of the play’s complete TLN (which therefore stands, analogously, for stage time). A cross (†) marks when a character is deceased.
The graphs indicate Act breaks, but not Scene breaks. For though an Act is often a relevant structural element, it is — more often than not — invisible onstage, whereas a Scene is as visually self-evident here as it is in performance (i.e. the stage itself is cleared). When the Folio gives the Act break, the act line itself is solid. When it provides none, then we either rely on contemporaneous Quartos or Octavos or on modern editions, but the Act line is then broken.
Plays-within-the-play (a category that also includes Masques, Scenes extempore, Dreams, Visions, and Gullings) appear as vertical inset frames. While Disguises appear as smaller horizontal frames around the individual characters concerned.
The graphs themselves represent numerical data gleaned from the First Folio. This data as well as notes and commentary on each of the plays’ act/scene subdivisions and underlying print-house copy can be found in Appendice A.