We all know that Shakespeare resorted to what we now call metatheatre — either through the play-within-the-play, disguised characters or sudden surprising utterances like “If this were plaid upon the stage now, I could condemne it as an improbable fiction” (Twelfe Night, 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 study began as an attempt at a comprehensive and (as much as possible) exhaustive survey of metatheatre in the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 as being, 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). Basing ourselves on Lionel Abel’s theory of metatheatre (Abel, 1963, 2003) and Anne [Righter] Barton’s work on the play-metaphor (Barton, 1964), we sought to provide a repertoire of all metatheatrical devices (plays-within-the-plays & disguised characters) as well as all textual references either to the theatre itself or to mimetic representation in general.
When Lionel 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 sense of the real). 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” (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, 1964, p.19) was the foundation of what she calls the “tyranny of the audience” (id. p.31). 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 a 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, its original context of performance. An approach that 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 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”: 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 displays of self-reflexivity (Marin, 1994; Stoichita, 1997), 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 (Schoenbaum, 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” (Schoenbaum, 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) —, 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). Shakespeare’s players would have read their parts — or individual rolls — with the same concerns as Shakespeare: 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 felt quite real.
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, would all seem to indicate that Shakespeare had some fairly precise (and even arcane) knowledge of art (Greenwood, 1987; Roston, 1989). Furthermore, all of these occurrences are structurally significant: Bushy’s striking anamorphosis is certainly linked to Richard’s climactic shattering of the glass (4.1); Edgar’s utterly convincing perspective (the first such description in English according to Greenwood) 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-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.
Thus had our survey also to restore something of the plays’ original sense of theatre. That these plays were — in the eyes of Shakespeare and his fellow players — pre-production concepts or scores of performance pieces had to somehow be made more manifest than in scholarly studies of a more literary than theatrical persuasion. What we needed, then, was a means whereby occurrences of metatheatre might be highlighted in their 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.
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 performance in time is not so 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 inumerable 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. Furthermore, none of the standard single-volume critical editions of Shakespeare’s plays (for instance, none of the twenty-three Julius Caesar on the shelves of McGill? University) 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).
In the face of such a dearth, it therefore appeared very likely that our graphic approach itself would take precedence over its intended purpose. Since by providing a graphic visual survey a metatheatre in the First Folio, we were also providing a graphic analysis of the Folio itself. Thus an apparent lacunae in the field transformed our study into something of a demonstration or exemplum as to how graphic analysis works.
Hence 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 self-evident. Not only is it the first of Shakespeare’s collected works, it is one in which (barring the dramatist himself) two 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 Shakepeare (1968), 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.
In order to fully appreciate the present document one must allow that its graphic contents do not constitute support but rather its principal materials. Indeed, our study’s very design is defined by its four sets of graphs. A first set (Chapter 1: Their Exits and their Entrances) provides a visual catalogue of Shakespeare’s use of such metatheatrical devices as the play-within-the-play and disguised characters, largely inspired by the work and the typologies of Georges Forestier (1996, 1988). A second set (Chapter 2: A crie of players) concerns Shakespeare’s textual (i.e. “spoken”) references to the theatre. A third set, (Chapter 3: The painted word) concerns textual references to mimetic representation and art. Both second and third sets of graphs are themselves based on textual surveys inspired by the work of Anne Barton on the play-metaphor (Barton, 1964). As for the final set (Conclusion: the beginning that is dead and buried), it gathers and presents all three previous sets as one. Thus is the visual analytical journey that we propose one that goes from manifest events, to intrinsic textual occurrences, to extrinsic 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. Each of the first three sets is preceded by a brief 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 the 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 does imply, 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-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 or 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. 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”.