I.
This chapter provides a visual catalogue of the two devices that essentially reproduce “in little” the very means of theatrical representation: disguise and the play-within-the-play. Our graphic analysis consists in contextualizing these two devices by displaying as accurately as possible exactly where and when in the Folio’s thirty-six plays Shakespeare does resort to them. Hopefully, this manner of survey may also help us gage and appreciate how important these devices were to his dramaturgy (at the very least, in terms of their quantity).
Our survey’s typology of disguise and play-within-the-play is mostly inspired by the work of three scholars: R.J. Nelson (1958), Frederick Boas (1927) and Georges Forestier (1988, 1996).
Though the use of disguised characters in drama ranges widely — from masquerade, to dissemblance, to impersonation — and may serve to dissimulate face, name, sex, condition, manner or quality (Beckerman 1962) — for the purpose of our survey, we have retained what Georges Forestier in his Esthétique de l’identité dans le théâtre français (1988) considers its two principal types: the conscious disguise and the un-conscious disguise. Both types are, of course, tied to a character’s identity: either a character hides his/her true identity — such as Viola in Twelfe Night (fig. 1.13) — or his/her true identity is hidden from them — such as Perdita in Winter’s Tale (fig. 1.14). From Roman comedy we also have mis-identification or the qui pro quo, when a character is mis-taken for another — as in The Comedy of Errors (fig. 1.5)). But this, essentially, is a variation of the un-conscious disguise.
Establishing such a clear typology for the play-within-the-play was not as simple. Disguise is the oldest of dramatic devices. Indeed, even such fundamental Aristotelian concepts as recognition and reversal are related to it, since the revelation of identity (the fall of the mask or disguise) is at the very crux of such classical catastrophes (such as that of Hamlet’s ancestor Orestes). Whereas the play-within-the-play, essentially belongs — like the painting-in-the-painting — to early modernity and its incipient fondness for paradox and ambiguity (Stoichita 1997, Greenwood 1988).
But ever since Abel coined the term metatheatre (Abel 1963) the play-within-the-play has been its emblematic device, in part, because it shows that the play-world wherein it appears has itself already been theatricalized. But the study of the device, itself, predates the inception of metatheatre. R. J. Nelson’s rather wide-ranging monograph Play within a play: the dramatist’s conception of his art was published in 1958. It was of special interest to us for two reasons. The First is that, by distinguishing a primary (or outer) play from a secondary (or inner) play-within-the-play, Nelson provides a first schematic definition of the device itself (op. cit., p.x). The second reason is that Nelson includes a list of Shakespeare’s plays-within-the-play (id. p.12).
Though Nelson’s list consists of only seven plays, he further sub-divides it into three periods. A first period of “affirmation” contains The Taming of the Shrew (fig.1.11), Loves Labours Lost (fig.1.7), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (fig.1.8), The Merry Wives of Windsor (fig.1.3) and As you Like It (fig.1.10). A second period of “soul-searching” is represented by Hamlet (fig.1.32); and a third period of “reaffirmation”, by The Tempest (fig.1.1). Unfortunately, Nelson does not go on to examine in any great detail any of the plays-within-the-play that he lists. Nor does he explain why he includes Tempest’s magical ‘Maske of Juno’ (4.1) as a play-within-the-play, but not Macbeth’s just as magical ‘Show of eight Kings’ (fig.1.31).
Frederick S. Boas’ article, The Play within the Play (1927) considers the device a ”distinctive feature of Elizabethan dramatic history … a product partly of intellectual forces, partly of material conditions” (op. cit., p.134). In Tudor England, these material conditions, according to Boas, were largely due “the rise of travelling professional companies which made it a familiar occurrence for a ’cry of players’ to arrive at a great house” (id. p.135); an easy enough incident, says Boas, to transfer “from real life to the traffic of the stage” (ibid.). While in Elizabethan England, it was the very structure of the permanent theatres “with [their] inner and outer stage and gallery, [that] lent themselves to the play-within-the-play” (ibid.).
Boas then goes on to provide three swift studies: the first, of the inset-mumming of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (1497); the second, of the inset-morality of the ill-fated Sir Thomas More (1592–3); the third, of the Masking at Wolsey’s house in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (1612–13). Medwall’s use of the device, Boas explains, “is not merely an extra decoration [but] illustrates the prodigality of the patrician suitor [as] an act of ceremonial compliment” (id. p.137). Boas thereby lends this occurrence of the device an implicit dramaturgical (as well as a decorative) purpose. While his careful exegesis of Sir Thomas More’s inset-morality, The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, demonstrates that the Elizabethan dramatist who wrote the scene (probably Anthony Munday) showed such a close “textual knowledge of early Tudor drama” as to conflate a number of texts in order “perpetrate an elaborate hoax” (id. p.142). The scholar thereby strongly suggests not to underestimate either the deep knowledge nor the degree of playfulness of Elizabethan playwrights. And when Boas writes that the masked dance of the Shepherd-King, in Henry VIII (fig.1.24), is “the beginning of an infatuation … pregnant with dramatic significance” (id. p.144), he underlines the structural importance of the device. But what is also impressive with Boas’ quick survey of these three occurrences is that it also exploits the underlying historical connection between Morton (in whose house Medwall’s comedy was first performed), More (who was in Cardinal Morton’ service at the time), and Wosley (More’s successor as Lord Chancellor).
Boas then looks at the inset-pageant of Loves Labours Lost, the play-within-the-play in A Midsommer Nights Dreame, the two versions of Shrew, and the device becoming an “instrument of tragic Nemesis” (id. p.153) with Thomas Kyd’s A Spanish Tragedy (c.1585–7) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Predictably, his article concludes with the fading of Prospero’s pageant as indicative of the play-within-the-play’s own final dissolution: “It takes indeed some sporadic later forms as the puppet-play in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) but its work was virtually done” (id.155). According to Boas, then, the purpose of the play-within-the-play had essentially been to aesthetically address the eternal problems of shadow and substance, “of reality and appearance with which the metaphysician and the scientist are still in a subtler and more penetrating fashion wrestling to-day“ (id. p.156).
Boas’ idiosyncratic, scholarly and uncannily synoptic article claimed to bring “neither new facts nor theories” (id. p.134). But it nonetheless provides a fairly wide assortment of types (or species) of inset-play: inset-mumming, inset-morality, Maske, inset-pageant, play-within-the-play, and puppet-play. Boas, himself, also displays a gamut of analytical approaches and readings (historical, textual, structural, comparative) that always remain sensitive to theatrical performance. No one, to our knowledge, has so ably sounded the full range of types and effects that the play-within-the-play affords in so brief a spell (a mere twenty-three pages).
Boas’ designation of Henry VIII’s Maske as a play-within-the-play certainly extends Nelson’s list. Now it should also include Romeo and Juliet (fig.1.28) and Much Adoe (fig.1.6), since both these plays show as dramatically significant a use of Maskers as Henry VIII. Hence is Nelson’s short list itself more of a typology than a closed definitive set of Shakespeare’s plays-within-the play. Perhaps each of the plays he mentions can lead to another.
Most everyone, for instance, agrees with Nelson and recognizes Merry Wives’ ‘Herne the Hunter’ (5.1) as a play-within-the-play, even though one of its actors, Falstaffe, does not. For ‘Herne the Hunter’ is as much a Gulling as a play-within-the-play. Though their frames are not always as apparent, many of Shakespeare’s gullings are very theatrical indeed. In All’s Well that Ends Well (fig.1.12), for instance, the Gulling of Parolles — wherein the braggart’s own regiment (playing the part of “Muskvo’s”) first takes him prisoner (4.1) and then interrogates him (4.3) — is even more of a play-within-a-play than ‘Herne the Hunter’. After all, in addition to the regimental players, Parolles is gulled in front of a stage audience made up of the two French Lords G & E and Bertram. The same may also be said for the Gulling of Malvolio in Twelfe Night (fig.1.13), wherein a “part” has been laid for Malvolio to play before the stage audience of Toby, Aguecheek, and Fabian. And if Nelson considers the divine ‘Maske of Hymen’ in As You Like It as a play-within-the-play, then why not the just as divine appearance of Jupiter in Cymbeline (fig.1.36), which is a far more framed event than the aforementioned Maske.
If the play-within-the-play is, as David A. Reinheimer writes, “an imitation of a theatrical imitation, establishing the context of performance” (Reinheimer 2000) and its goal, as Abel suggests, is the theatricalization of the play-world itself, then our own survey’s range must certainly be extended. It should include not only those manifest instances of inset-plays (such as plays-within-the-play and scenes extempore), but also Maske®s, Gullings and Dreams or Visions, since all of these do open secondary frames in the principal action of a play whereby inset-performances may occur.
Though Boas was likely the first to study the play-within-the-play, followed (more than thirty years later) by Nelson, its most complete and impressive study to date is not at all on the subject of Elizabethan theatre but rather on that of French Classical theatre. In Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène Française du XVIIe siècle (1996), Georges Forestier proves rather compellingly that the work of the play-within-the-play was not entirely done by 1611. Indeed, there appear to have been far more French plays to use the device between 1628 and 1700 than English ones between 1585 and the closing of theatres in 1642. But the principal contribution that Forestier brings to the general study of the play-within-the-play lies in his establishing a typology based on structural modes of insetting.
Forestier’s modes are an elaboration of Nelson’s simple binary distinction between primary (or outer) play and secondary (or inner) play-within-the-play. Forestier distinguishes five modes of inset-play (op. cit., pp.89–123): perfect, imperfect, monolithic, multiple, and decomposed (or disrupted). The first four are presented (like Nelson’s inner-outer) as pairs of opposites. A perfect inset-play is an inner play framed within an outer play (like Tempest’s ‘Maske of Juno’), while an imperfect inset-play is open-ended (like Taming of the Shrew). A monolithic inset-play is shown all at once without break in continuity — “L’action n’est jamais interrompue par un retour au spectacle principal” (id. p.91), whereas a multiple inset-play is broken-up into a number of episodes spread-out through the primary play. Dreame’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbie’ (fig.1.8), for instance, might very well be deemed a multiple inset-play since we are shown its casting (1.2), rehearsal (3.1), preferment (4.2) and performance (5.1) as so many episodes from conception to realization. As for Forestier’s final mode, the decomposed inset-play, it principally designates those plays-within-the-play whose performances are disrupted by their spectators. Most of Shakespeare’s plays-within-the-play, then, are decomposed, because their audiences — from Berowne, to Hyppolita & Theseus, to Hamlet — take special pleasure in disrupting them.
Boas allowed for our developing a typology based on species of the play-within-the-play (inset-plays, maskes, scenes-extempore, gullings and visions). Forestier provides one that enables us to recognize its modes and structure. It is by uniting both these typologies that our survey may then show the full range of Shakespeare’s play-within-the-play.
II.
As we explained in the general introduction, our intent is to provide a graphic display that shows where and when disguises and plays-within-the-play occur in Shakespeare’s Folio plays. In a sense, what our graphic analysis reproduces somewhat resembles a synoptic instrument that the Elizabethan players themselves employed.
At the time, playing companies functioned in repertory (Chambers 1931, Foakes 1961, Gurr 1992) and often used as an aide mémoire plots (or platts). These single-sheet summaries (or outlines) of a play’s cue to cue were presumably posted on the tyring-house wall during rehearsals or 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 (Greg 1931, Braunmuller 1990). Plots described (quite accurately) a play’s scheme of entrances & exits and thus its basic technical, 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. For what our play-graphs essentially represent are the plays’ technical plots, as it were, “according on their true original copies”. Each graph being a visual rendering of a plot’s “cue to cue”, exactly displaying the entrances and exits of characters according to Hinman’s TLN coordinates of the Folio play wherein they appear .
Contrary to the traditional act-scene-verse numbers, Hinman’s TLN system gives us a more precise intuitive sense of a part’s importance in proportion to the whole play. The character of Tempest’s Shipmaster (fig.1.1), for instance, appears in two scenes, 1.1.1–4 and 5.1.215.s.d.−319.s.d., whereas, along the play’s continuous TLN course of 2342 lines, he is onstage for TLN 2–9 and 2200–319.
Generally, on our play-graphs, a character enters and exits exactly as he does in the Folio play. Tempest’s Shipmaster appears with “En-ter a Ship-master” (TLN 1–2) and disappears with the indication Exit (TLN 9). In the event where such indications are lacking or faulty (as in the Folio’s 2Hvi), we resorted to other contemporaneous editions to establish where their location would have been in the Folio’s text (in the case of 2Hvi to Q1 of 1594). When no such edition exists (Two Gents) or where a play’s stage directions are notoriously difficult to interpret (Merry Wives), only then did we resort to modern editions for clarification. In such cases, we generally favoured the Riverside Shakespeare (1997) for its being already keyed to Hinman’s TLN. But we also consulted Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s Textual Companion (1997) as well as Stephen Greenblatt’ Norton Shakespeare (1997).
By highlighting metatheatrical devices within the context of the plays’ technical performative structure, we are essentially looking at the plays from the vantage of metatheatre. The two devices (play-within-the-play and disguise) provide a large measure of the significant relief and contour of our graphic analysis. But, of course, not all of the Folio’s plays contain such devices (indeed, most of the Histories do not), so that the purpose of our graphs must be two-fold. To highlight the amount and the structural importance of these devices remains our principal task. But to also highlight what the structural analysis itself reveals, must certainly be part of our discussion.
Indeed our “harping” on structure as well as metatheatre is somewhat par for the course given our using a graphic tool (the formal outline) whose purpose it essentially is to reveal — at a glance — the interaction of characters in the context of an entire play. In some cases, this structural interplay is so manifest as to appear intent on playing-off audience expectations, by setting-up clear rhythms that are subsequently broken. Such is evidently the case of Loves Labours (fig.1.7) and Dreame (fig.1.8). But more subtle rhythms or structural interplays or sometimes discernable and become more apparent from one play to the next. That a portion of Shakespeare’s audience was attuned to such strategies does indeed add another level of (meta)theatrical communication or expression to the mix. One that is more abstract, perhaps, and akin to music. Hence will our commentary and interpretation (perforce, succinct) of each of the Folio’s thirty-six play-graphs, often appear to be as much about structure as about metatheatre. Though metatheatre always remain the principal (structural) vantage point of this survey.
The thirty-six play-graphs that follow are presented in the order and according to the three categories of the Folio itself. In order to guide the viewer’s eye, each of the three play categories is preceded by a brief introductory text that presents some of the formal and metatheatrical characteristics of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.