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INTRODUCTION
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0.1
INCEPTION
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"They [the Elizabethans] acted (and also rehearsed of course) by daylight in the open air, mostly without any attempt to indicate the place of the action and in the closest proximity to the audience, who sat on all sides, including on the stage, with a crowd standing or strolling around, and you’ll begin to get an idea how earthly, profane and lacking in magic it all was."
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Bertolt Brecht
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The Messingkauf Dialogues (Methuen, 1965, pp.58-9)
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This study began (innocently enough) as an attempt to verify Brecht’s intuitions with regards to Shakespeare’s theatre: “A theatre full of A-effects” (ibid, p.58) lacking almost entirely in magic, or naturalistic illusion. Of course, Brecht used the fairground performances he witnessed in his youth as a basis for his description of Shakespeare’s theatre. But Elizabethan playhouse owner Philip Henslowe’s Diary for the years 1594-1600 mostly vouches (safe perhaps for the audiences “on the stage”) for Brecht’s description. For when Henslowe’s gate receipts are taken in consideration of the Rose theatre’s excavation in 1989, it appears that audiences sometimes upwards of two thousand people were “standing or strolling around” in rather close quarters: tight three-tiered buildings whose diameters did not exceed thirty meters. Furthermore, the conditions of Elizabethan arena theatres were often such that, for most audience members, to look across the stage was to look at other spectators looking back at them.
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0.2 FALSE ENTRANCE
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"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."
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Louis Marin
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De la Représenation (1994, p.67)
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How did Shakespeare represent representation? How transparent (or, to use the art-historical term, opaque) did he want his theatre to appear to his audience, and to what end? Was such transparency a manifest aesthetic concern of his time or was it something more pragmatic that guided him, a means of keeping his audience “at bay” or “in the know”? Or did the representation of representation serve a dramatic end analogous to the artistic (cum painterly) end described by Louis Marin? Perhaps the answer is “all of the above”.
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0.3 WHAT IS TRANSPARENCY?
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AND HOW DOES IT APPLY TO SHAKESPEARE?
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"Is this nothing? /
Why then the World, and all that’s in’t, is nothing,/
The couering Skie is nothing, Bohemia nothing,/
My Wife is nothing, nor Nothing haue these Nothings,/
If this be nothing"
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The Winter’s Tale / 1.2.292-6 TLN 385-9
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In answer to Leontes’ question: his world and all that’s in it — the couering skie, his kingdom, his Wife, even himself — are all figments of dramatic imagination. So, as the audience very well knows, they are nothing. And yet, upon these pivotal words of Leontes (and their sudden acceleration) rests the entire thrust of The Winter’s Tale. In this single transparent moment, Shakespeare — even as he shatters illusion — has propelled the action of his play forward. An action that will ultimately be resolved on a stage-upon-a-stage.
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At the beginning of Othello, when Iago says “I am not what I am” (1.2.65 TLN 71) he means that he will dissemble. So, the actor in saying these words, says nothing but the truth. And though Iago says that he will lie, whenever he addresses the audience, Shakespeare has him telling the truth. Even Iago’s final line, “From this time forth, I neuer will speake word” (5.3.310 TLN 3608), is the truth. So, in Othello, at least, the dissembler is the most transparent, truthful character.
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The medieval latin word 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».
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What transparency seems to imply, 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».
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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 (and perhaps, on a secondary level, the relation of representation to the real world). If this ability to shift between representation and reality (in order to reveal the reality of representation) is the aesthetic province of the self-aware artist, it would also certainly be that of a self-aware actor.
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That Shakespeare, himself, was an actor can hardly be doubted. 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 . Later, we find Shakespeare 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 . And when, in 1602, the York Herald suspected that coats of arms were granted with laxity, he cited “Shakespeare the player” as an example .
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Thus it appears that the dramatist had gained a certain notoriety as one of the principal actors of his company. And if Shakespeare was not the best of players (as tradition, since Nicholas Rowe and Edward Capell dubiously has it ), we can safely assume that he did not lack stage experience. Indeed, 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. And yet this singular aspect of shakespearean dramaturgy — that his were the writings of a working actor — remained, until fairly recently, the least explored. To make matters worse, most 19th century scholars genuinely believed that the poet’s work as dramatist rather impeded than informed his writings: “Alas,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1840, “Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse; his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould” .
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This anti-theatrical bias may have been due, in part, to the ephemeral nature of dramatic performance. Short of the playtexts themselves, there was precious little information as to the actual stage practice and mindset of Elizabethan/Jacobean players and their audiences. It was not until historiographers such as E. K. Chambers and W. W. Greg gathered and interpreted nearly all of the available documentation, that Elizabethan drama could be correctly perceived as one of the principal artistic media of its age. And, indeed, as the most cursory survey of modern Elizabethan/Shakespearean scholarly literature will reveal, the serious study of dramatic texts as theatre scripts grows exponentially after the publication of Chambers’ monumental Elizabethan Stage (1923) and Greg’s compendium of Dramatic documents from the Elizabethan playhouses (1931).
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0.4 METATHEATRE’S ABC
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If theatricality is 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 secondary aesthetic shift in perception which allows for this theatrical construction (or process) to reveal itself as such.
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Though it still remained the poor cousin of literary analysis, the study of Shakespeare’s theatricality or stagecraft by the likes of Muriel C. Bradbrook (Elizabethan Stage Conditions, 1932), Alfred Harbage (Shakespeare’s Audience, 1941), Bernard Beckerman (Shakespeare at the Globe, 1962) and J. L. Styan (Shakespeare’s Stagecraft, 1967) did emerge as something of a viable interpretative tool which, in turn, gave rise to an appreciation of Shakespeare’s use of such metatheatrical devices as the play-within-the-play.
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Frederick S. Boas’ article The Play within the Play (1927) has the distinction of being, in all probability, the first of such studies. It would be followed, more than thirty years later, by R. J. Nelson’s rather wide-ranging monograph Play within a play; the dramatist's conception of his art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (1958), followed by Arthur Brown’s article The Play within a Play: An Elizabethan Dramatic Device (1960). But the most complete study, to date, of Shakespeare’s and the Elizabethans’ use of the play-within-the-play remains that of Anne (Righter) Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1964). Wherein Barton ably demonstrates that if the device essentially began as a throw-back to medieval theatrical practice (and, as such, was already built-into the culture of performance), the Elizabethan playwright’s rather wilful layering-in of the metaphor of Life as drama was likely analogous to his entire society’s budding awareness of its own conventions of class and role-playing, and thus its own analogous structural theatricality .
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“Some of the plays I am referring to” wrote Lionel Abel in Metatheatre: a new view of dramatic form (1963) “can, of course, be classified as instances of the play-within-the-play, but this term, also well known, suggests only a device, and not a definite form” (Metatheatre, p.60). Though Abel appears, here, to almost discard the play-within-the-play as a mere “device” or trick, he also recognizes it as being possibly representative of an entire “class” of modern drama.
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"Now, from a certain modern point of view, only that life which has acknowledged its inherent theatricality can be made interesting on the stage. From the same modern view, events, when interesting, will have the quality of having been thought, rather than of having simply occurred. But then 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. Plays of the kind I have in mind exist. I did not invent them. However, I shall presume to designate them. I call them metaplays, works of metatheatre."
(ibid. p.60-61)
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In this brief passage, Abel had not only coined the term metatheatre, he also “theorized” metatheatricality before almost anyone else (save perhaps Anne Barton) had realized that there was perhaps something more behind the quaint play-within-the-play. According to Abel, then, what distinguishes the metaplays of Shakespeare, Calderon, Molière, Shaw, Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett from the tragedies of Aeschylus, Seneca, Marlowe, Ibsen, Miller and O’neil is that the former “show the reality of the dramatic imagination, instanced by the playwright’s and also by that of his characters” (ibid. p.59, emphasis ours).
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Thus Anne Barton traced (almost avant la lettre) a compelling description of what amounts to be the metatheatrical mindset. While Lionel Abel formulated what such an aesthetic of self-awareness might practically entail. But it is James Calderwood who — though he took his cue from both Righter and Abel — ended up, at the time, writing the most influential work on the subject.
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In Shakespearean Metadrama (1971) Calderwood begins distinguishes Abel’s metatheatre from his own metadrama.
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"As the term is used by Abel and others metatheatre is a dramatic form that goes beyond drama (at least drama of a traditional sort), becoming a kind of anti-form in which the boundaries between the play as a work of self-contained art and life are dissolved. (p.4) "
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Though Calderwood would be “happy to 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” (ibid. p.5) — his general argument is rather that Shakespeare’s plays (and presumably anyone’s plays) “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” (id.), adding furthermore that dramatic art itself “is a dominant Shakespearean theme, perhaps his most abiding subject” (id.).
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Calderwood’s principal argument is that Shakespeare folded-in materials allowing for, both, a dramatic (or narrative) and a metadramatic (or poïetic) reading of his plays. That Titus Andronicus, for instance, represented a “rape of language” (ibid. p.29) or Love’s Labours Lost the poet “wenching” with language and finding in the comic mode a synthetic reconciliation between the lyric of the Academe and the satiric of the French Embassage (p.74); that Romeo & Juliet shows Shakespeare working his way “from pure poetry to a viable poetic purity” (p.102); while A Midsummer Night’s Dream “weds the audience to itself through the ceremony of dramatic art” (p.143). But, in the end, Calderwood’s analyses — though compelling — are more literary than they are theatrical. At best, his metadrama runs alongside a play’s presumed composition but sheds little light on how the play itself was or is to be performed.
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Even though this may certainly be something of a reductio ad absurdum, Abel, Barton & Calderwood do nonetheless represent metatheatre’s three main constitutive branches (or it’s A, B, C). For if Calderwood found successors in the likes of Manfred Schmeling (Métathéâtre et intertexte, 1982), Barton found her’s in the likes of Cherrell Guilfoyle — whose Shakespeare’s Play Within Play (1990) is a convincing study of scenic form and medieval imagery — while Judd D. Hubert’s Metatheater: The example of Shakespeare (1991) does apply something of Abel’s theory to specific cases. Namely, that of Hamlet:
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The tragedy [of Hamlet] recounts the hidden struggle between an imaginary dramatist, compelled to move his plot along, and a star performer, dissatisfied with his assignment, who reluctantly consents to participate in the action, but only on his own terms. (p.88)
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0.5 TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF
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SHAKESPEARE’S METATHEATRE
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What Lionel Abel essentially suggested was that playwrights such as Shakespeare wrote-in the self-awareness or transparency of their artistic representation in such a way as to be perceivable by their audience. Whereas Calderwood rather puts it on the subliminal level of the poetic undertaking itself. Hence, Calderwood’s metadrama rests almost entirely on the scholars own interpretative critical abilities. Whereas, Abel’s idea of metatheatre should be verifiable in the scripts themselves (even if a portion of Shakespeare’s original intentions are almost certainly paratextual and irretrievable).
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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). And yet since it is likely that the actor Shakespeare’s may have informed his playwrighting in the manner that Abel suggests, perhaps such dramaturgical piece-work need be done. For, indeed, the question how transparent was Shakespeare theatre? should at least partially be resolved by collating those verifiable occurrences of Shakespeare’s “dramatic imagination, [being] instanced” as Abel says “by the playwright’s and also by that of his characters”.
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Our thesis thus became a rather classical, quantitative demonstration. Its structure is defined by how the above metatheatrical survey was indeed constituted.
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CHAPTER 1 provides a (visual) catalogue of the two most obvious “instances” of a playwright’s ruling dramatic imagination (devices that essentially reproduce “in little” the very means of theatrical representation): PLAYS-WITHIN-THE-PLAY (such as Hamlet’s “Mousetrap” or Merry Wives’ “Herne, the Hunter”), and DISGUISED CHARACTERS (such as Rosalind/Ganymede in As You Like It or Measure for Measure’s Duke Vincentio/Friar Ludovick).
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Whereas CHAPTERS 2 & 3 provide play-by-play concordances of two sets of TEXTUAL OCCURRENCES. Chapter 2 catalogues direct references to the theatre itself (such as Twelfe Night’s Fabian “If this were plaid vpon a stage now, I could condemne it as an improbable fiction” / 3.4.127-8 TLN 1649-50); Chapter 3 catalogues references to other means of mimetic representation (as Hamlet’s Claudius “are you like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart?” 4.7.105-7 TLN 3106-7).
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0.6 CONTROL TEXT
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The degree of authority or fidelity of Shakespeare’s texts has been the source of much conjecture and debate. So that even though we proposed a clear quantitative approach to answering our subtitle’s question, there still remained for us to decide on what edition (or editions) of Shakespeare’s dramatic works we were to base our metatheatrical survey.
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Quite apart from the usual editorial, scribal or compositorial adulterations that may (or may not) have marred the original texts, a principal problem almost always remains determining upon what version, at what level of a play’s development, its original printshop copy was based . It has been more or less established that the majority of Shakespeare's published plays — those, at least, of the twelve good quartos and of the First Folio — were mostly typeset from his «foul papers» (or scribal transcripts thereof). But even though such rough (or first) drafts certainly insure a measure of fidelity regarding an author’s preproduction concepts, it remains almost certain that any late corrections or additions wouldn’t have appeared in them. Such corrections (if any) would most likely be found in the subsequent — and for the most part lost — fair copies and playbookes. In all likelihood, then, most of the original editions of Shakespeare plays represent early and not final versions. Indeed, in those few cases where we do possess more than one version of a play (Hamlet, Lear) there are substantial variations.
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The case of Hamlet, for instance, is particularly telling with regards our proposed study. One of the most oft-quoted theatrical (and topical) references in all of the canon is certainly that of Hamlet’s “little Yases” (2.2.339 TLN 1387) concerning the so-called “war of the theatres” that raged between London’s adult and children playing companies in the early 17th century. This reference does not appear in the 1604-5 text that was (mostly) set from Shakespeare’s foul papers (Q2). It rather appears in the “bad” quarto of 1603 (Q1) as well as in the 1623 Folio. Both texts are of theatrical origin. The former (Q1) was probably based on the memorial reconstruction of hired players, while the Folio’s copy was likely the promptbook itself (or a transcript). This might therefore suggest that, in the interim between conception and performance, theatrical references in a play’s text would have been more likely added than removed.
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Thus any edition of Shakespeare plays, be it ancient or modern, should be viewed (at least partially) as a more or less faithful reconstruction of an absent text that may or may not have been permanently set by either Shakespeare himself or the playing company to which he belonged. An ideal, stable text of Shakespeare — if it ever existed — is drowned in time. But if something of his (and his company’s) authorial or theatrical intentions are still discernable, it is in the original Quartos and the First Folio. And though some distinction need certainly be made between the good (authorized) and bad (un-authorized) original editions, even the bad quartos are susceptible of providing some information as to what an audience member actually saw (or heard) on stage. Thus any (re)construction or interpretation of Shakespeare’s text should be guided by Alan C. Dessen principle of inclusivity:
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to accept the extant quartos and Folio texts as relevant and useful evidence about stage practice and theatrical vocabulary, regardless of whether a given text is based upon (1) a manuscript that shows the preproduction concept of the author; (2) a manuscript (authorial or otherwise) lightly annotated for a performance; (3) a manuscript recopied and perhaps “improved” by a scribe; or (4) a manuscript compiled by one or more actors involved in a given production.
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What our proposed metatheatrical survey required was a control text that provides a modicum of editorial consistancy as well as a sufficient mass (or cross-section) of plays. Given the corpus of original contemporarneous texts, we only had two choices: either the eight “good” Pavier Quartos of 1619 or the First Folio of 1623. But n the end, only the Folio — being the first attempt at Shakespeare’s complete dramatic works and the sole repository of half his known plays — has the required consistancy, solidity, and gathers the most intersubjective agreement among scholars. We therefore selected Charlton Hinman’s Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare (2nd ed. 1996) as the principal control text of our survey.
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Furthermore, if Hinman’s through-line-numbering (TLN) provides as consistant a lineation system as can be, being continuous it also provides us with something akin to each play’s time-line (or, at least, its virtual X axis). As such, Hinman’s TLN scale has also enabled us to represent — graphically or visually — this essential condition of Shakespeare’s texts as scores: that of being events in time.
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