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(r)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.

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!!!!Some of the plays I am referring to … 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. … Yet the plays I am pointing to do have a common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized. — Lionel Abel, Metatheatre, p.60

!!!!Sa fortune subite n’est explicable que parce qu’il s’agit d’une technique qui correspondait aux tendances artistiques de l’époque, à la volonté d’innovation des dramaturges et aux demandes d’un public avide ne nouveautés; mais surtout, ce phénomène d’inclusion d’une oeuvre théâtrale dans une autre est dû au développement prodigieux qu’à connu le théâtre à cette époque: 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

!CHAPTER I

<<<<<<<

!!A Graphic Survey of Metatheatrical devices in Shakespeare’s First Folio
=======
!“THEIR EXITS AND THEIR ENTRANCES”

>>>>>>>

!“THEIR EXITS AND THEIR ENTRANCES”

!!!Some of the plays I am referring to … 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. … Yet the plays I am pointing to do have a common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized. — Lionel Abel, Metatheatre, p.60

!!!Sa fortune subite n’est explicable que parce qu’il s’agit d’une technique qui correspondait aux tendances artistiques de l’époque, à la volonté d’innovation des dramaturges et aux demandes d’un public avide ne nouveautés; mais surtout, ce phénomène d’inclusion d’une oeuvre théâtrale dans une autre est dû au développement prodigieux qu’à connu le théâtre à cette époque: 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

!!!“THEIR EXITS AND THEIR ENTRANCES”
!!A Graphic Survey of Metatheatrical devices

!Some of the plays I am referring to … 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. … Yet the plays I am pointing to do have a common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized.

!Sa fortune subite n’est explicable que parce qu’il s’agit d’une technique qui correspondait aux tendances artistiques de l’époque, à la volonté d’innovation des dramaturges et aux demandes d’un public avide ne nouveautés; mais surtout, ce phénomène d’inclusion d’une oeuvre théâtrale dans une autre est dû au développement prodigieux qu’à connu le théâtre à cette époque: tout art ou toute technique qui devient le mode d’expression d’une époque finit par se prendre pour son objet.

CHAPTER I

“THEIR EXITS AND THEIR ENTRANCES”
A Graphic Survey of Metatheatrical devices
in Shakespeare’s First Folio

Some of the plays I am referring to … 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. … Yet the plays I am pointing to do have a common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized.

— Lionel Abel,
Metatheatre, p.60

Sa fortune subite n’est explicable que parce qu’il s’agit d’une technique qui correspondait aux tendances artistiques de l’époque, à la volonté d’innovation des dramaturges et aux demandes d’un public avide ne nouveautés; mais surtout, ce phénomène d’inclusion d’une oeuvre théâtrale dans une autre est dû au développement prodigieux qu’à connu le théâtre à cette époque: 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


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 resorts 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).


Even though disguise may range widely from masquerade to dissemblance, to impersonation; and serve to dissimulate either name, sex, condition, or quality (Forestier, 1988), for the purpose of our survey, we have mostly retained its two essential types: the conscious disguise and the un-conscious disguise. Both types are, of course, tied to identity: either a character hides his/her true identity (such as Viola in Twelfe Night) or his/her true identity is hidden from them (such as Perdita in Winter’s Tale). 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). But this is a variation of un-conscious disguise, whereby a character’s true identity cannot be recognized because — unbeknownst to the character himself — he is disguised as another. Hence do disguises usually remain either conscious or un-conscious. In both cases a character’s identity is hidden and, what is more, the audience knows it. Though simple, this approach to disguise remains fairly practical and finds itself mostly vindicated by Georges Forestier’s Esthétique de l’identité dans le théâtre français (1550-1680): le déguisement et ses avatars (1988) which provides us with a scholarly precedent for distinguishing between theses two main types of disguises.

Establishing such a clear typology for the play-within-the-play is not so simple. But ever since Abel coined the term metatheatre the play-within-the-play has certainly 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, of course, predates the inception of metatheatre.

R. J. Nelson’s rather wide-ranging monograph Play within a play; the dramatist's conception of his art: Shakespeare to Anouilh was published in 1958. Nelson’ work is of interest for two reasons. The First is that, in distinguishing between primary (or outer) play and secondary (or inner) play-within-the-play, it provides a schematic definition of the device itself (Nelson, 1958, p.x). The second is that Nelson includes a list of Shakespeare’s plays-within-the-play (id. p.12) and though this list consists of only seven plays, he sub-divides further it into three periods. The first period (of “affirmation” according to Nelson) contains The Taming of the Shrew (1590-1), Loves Labours Lost (1594-5), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-8) and As you Like It (1599-1600). The second period (of “soul-searching”) contains Hamlet (1600-1), and the third (of “reaffirmation”) The Tempest (1611). 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’ (Tempest 4.1) as a play-within-the-play, but not Macbeth’s ‘Show of eight Kings’ (Macbeth 4.1).

Frederick S. Boas’ article, The Play within the Play (1927), has the distinction of being, not only the first study of the device, but one of the best. Boas saw the play-within-the-play as a ”distinctive feature of Elizabethan dramatic history … a product partly of intellectual forces, partly of material conditions” (Boas, 1927, p.134). In Tudor England, these material conditions 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 to transfer “from real life to the traffic of the stage” (ibid.). While in Elizabethan England, the structural arrangement of the permanent theatres “with inner and outer stage and gallery, lent themselves to the play-within-the-play” (ibid.). Boas then provides 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). 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). Whereas the masked dance of the Shepherd-King in Henry VIII (1.4) is “the beginning of an infatuation … pregnant with dramatic significance” (id. p.144). What is 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).

Not bad for mere prologue, for 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. While Boas himself, 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). But coming from a contemporary of E.K. Chambers, W.W. Gregg, and Dover Wilson perhaps we should not be so surprised. Furthermore, 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 (1595-6) and Much Adoe (1598), since both these plays show as dramatically significant a use of Maskers as Henry VIII. But perhaps Nelson short list should itself be taken as a typology of sorts, and not as a closed definitive set of Shakespeare’s plays-within-the play. Perhaps each of the plays he mentions can lead to another.

Most everyone would agree with Nelson and recognize Merry Wives’ ‘Herne the Hunter’ (5.5) 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 so apparent, many of Shakespeare’s gullings are indeed theatrical. In All’s Well, that Ends Well (1604-5), for instance, the Gulling of Parolles (4.1&3), 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 having regimental players, Parolles is gulled in front of an 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 (2.5), wherein a “part” has been laid for Malvolio to play before the audience of Toby, Aguecheek, and Fabian. And if Nelson considers the ‘Maske of Hymen’ in As You Like It (5.4) as a play-within-the-play, then why not Posthumus’ dream of Jupiter in Cymbeline (5.4).

For 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. We must include not only those manifest instances of inset-plays (such as plays-within-the-play and scenes extempore), but also Maske(r)s, Gullings and Dreams or Visions, since all of these open secondary frames in the principal action of a play whereby inset-performances themselves may occur.

Though Boas was apparently 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 (albeit not on the subject of Elizabethan theatre) is certainly that of Georges Forestier Le Théâtre dans le théâtre sur la scène Française du XVIIe siècle (1996). 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. Also, with regards to our own study, Forestier is the only scholar we’ve encountered who provides his work with a full range of graphic support: from brief sketches showing levels of representation (fig. 1.01), to fairly elaborate schematic renderings of metatheatrical strategies (fig. 1.02).

The typology of insetting modes of Le Théâtre dans le théâtre’ is 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 (Forestier, 1996, 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”, 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’, 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.

If Boas allowed for our developing a typology based on species of the play-within-the-play, then Forestier provides one that is based on its modes and structures. Both typologies are necessary if we wish to reveal the play-within-the-play in the context of Shakespeare's theatrical cosmotecture.

It will perhaps seem paradoxical that, while we have sought to widen the definition of the play-within-the-play — so as to include inset-plays, maskes, scenes-extempore, gullings and visions — we have stayed with a rather conservative one of disguise. But disguise has a much longer history than the play-within-the-play, which is a device that essentially belongs — like the painting-in-the-painting — to early modernity and its incipient fondness for paradox and ambiguity (Greenwood, 1988). Hence is the play-within-the-play more complex and structurally ambivalent than disguise, which is more stolidly theatrical. Indeed, even such fundamental Aristotelian dramaturgical concepts as recognition and reversal are related to it, since the revelation of identity (or the fall of the disguise) is at the very crux of such classical catastrophes as that of Hamlet’s ancestor Orestes.

As we explained in the general introduction, our intent is to provide a graphic display that shows where and when these two devices occur in the course of Shakespeare’s Folio plays. In a sense, what our graphic analysis hoped to reproduce (albeit in a somewhat more objective fashion) resembles a synoptic instrument that the Elizabethan players themselves employed.

At the time, playing companies functioned in repertory (Foakes, 1961; Gurr, 1992) and often used as an aide mémoire plots (or platts). These were single-sheet summaries or outlines of a play’s cue to cue that were presumably posted on the tyring-house wall 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 (Greg, 1931; Braunmuller, 1990) . 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. For what the thirty-six play-graphs that follow essentially represent are the plays’ technical plots according on their true original copies. Each graph is a true visual rendering of a "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 size and importance in proportion to the whole play. The character of Tempest’s Shipmaster, 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 2200-2319. Generally, on our play-graphs, a character enters and exits exactly as he does in the Folio: 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 Wells and Taylor’s Textual Companion (1997) as well as the Norton Shakespeare (1997).

All of a play’s characters are listed on the play-graph’s vertical-axis, from top to bottom and in their order of appearance. Their entrances and exits (their presence on stage or on the Folio page) are displayed along the horizontal-axis of the play’s full TLN course (which therefore stands, analogously, for stage time). A cross (†) marks when a character is deceased.

The play-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 is cleared). When the Folio gives the act break, its line is solid. When it provides none, we’ve relied (as above) on either contemporaneous or on modern editions to establish its location, but the act line is then broken.

A play-within-within-the-play appears as a vertical inset-frame, colour-coded according to type. We distinguish five types of play-within-the-play:
Inset-play (yellow)
Scene-extempore (blue)
Maske or Maskers (red)
Gulling (green)
Dream or Vision (orange)

A disguise appears as a smaller horizontal frame surrounding the individual characters concerned, also colour-coded according to its type:
Conscious (yellow)
Un-conscious (blue)

By highlighting these devices within the context of the plays’ technical performative structure, we are essentially looking at them from the vantage of metatheatre. The two devices 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 the devices remains our principal task. But to also highlight what the structural analysis itself reveals, must certainly be discussed. Hence for each of the thirty-six play-graphs that follow will we provide a brief commentary on the graphic analysis itself. While in the case of plays with metatheatrical devices we will provide a further commentary on the articulation between the play and its manifest metatheatrical elements. In conclusion, we will give a technical summary of our findings as well as discuss what these findings say about of the plays apparent self-reflexivity.