Our purpose at the outset of this study had been to determine just how transparent — or self-reflexive — was Shakespeare theatre. We sought to find this out through how often Shakespeare resorted to the theatre in the theatre, or what we now call metatheatre.
When Bertolt Brecht imagined Shakespeare’s theatre he saw it as being “full of A-effects”. And, certainly, Brecht was not far off the mark. But even he might have been surprised by the breadth and the depth of Shakespeare own brand of “A-effects”.
Of course we knew, as Brecht did, that the conditions of Elizabethan arena theatres were already conducive to a certain play of transparency. Since, for most of the Globe’s audience members, to look across its stage was to look at other spectators looking back at them. But though Shakespeare does make occasional references to these playing conditions (King John, Richard II, Measure), it is mostly ‘in passsing’.
Indeed, even Shakespeare’s use of the play-within-the-play may have had a purpose somewhat contrary to what we anticipated. Though Shakespeare’s plays-within-the-play certainly bring the process of theatrical representation (or elements thereof) to the fore, it does so — not by breaking what little dramatic illusion there might be — but by receding further into it. Indeed, hadn’t Shakespeare himself coached his audience into making use of its ”imaginarie forces” to “amend” the work of his “shadowes”, the players. In the end, this effect of receding into the play-world may, itself, be tantamount to a breaking of illusion: one that occurred from within (almost as if the illusion, itself, beckoned to be recognized as “air … thin air”).
Throughout our study, a form of structural transparency (almost akin to that of music) appears to have been the principal desired end of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical self-reflexivity. Yet is it difficult for us to ascertain if we have indeed achieved our own desired end (which was, in part, to inform current performance). For Shakespeare’s brand of self-reflexivity may be altogether too strongly tied to the particular rhetorical world from which he stems. Indeed, it is hard to say if his transparency could even ‘read’ in performance nowadays. Our final impression, then, is of having set up an experiment that may have gone a little too well.
Certainly, our graphic approach itself has yielded some lesser fruit. For instance, that 2Hiv (fig.1.18) exactly reproduces 1Hiv’ (fig.1.17) scheme of Falstaffe’s entrances is an incidental discovery that reveals how Shakespeare may have laid-out some of his plays. Or that Shakespeare’s artistic discourse falls exactly within those sections of Tymon of Athens (1.29) that are thought to be his (as opposed to Middleton’s) is another minor discovery. Both are entirely due to the data being graphically displayed. It has also been suggested that our graphing of particular sets of terms might be of assistance in establishing the chronology of plays. But of this, we ourselves, are not so sure. Our own chronological summaries (figs.4.1–3) being fairly standard. Our main contribution (if it maybe called that) to the study of Shakespeare remains in our providing formal outlines of his dramatic works based on the substantive textual data that the First Folio affords us. Though metatheatre remains a staple of our own practice as dramaturge and director, here must it mostly serve as an examplum of a possible application of our graphic tool. If we did inadvertently ad anything new to the field of Shakespeare studies it is perhaps in determining just how much Shakespeare did resort to metatheatre and (due to our graphic contextualization of its occurrences) of what structural import metatheatre and the play-metaphor may have been to his plays.
Our work on the graphic analysis of Shakespeare’s First Folio remains, of course, an ongoing project. Our thirty-six play-graphs have not quite achieved their final form (which should for instance include all of a play’s characters as opposed to the selection — albeit large — that we provide).
In our introduction we intimated that the formal paradigm of this catalogue raisonné or photo-reportage of Shakespeare’s metatheatre was an internet website. Such a website will indeed be the final resting place of this, otherwise, fairly unwieldy work. Yet did we feel it necessary for us to complete its ‘print’ version with something that a website could not do.
Hence does our final ‘figure’ (fig.4.3) conflate the graphic analyses of all three chapters so as to present the thirty-six Folio plays chronologically, in their (presumed) order of composition and performance. The result, which we believe to be the aptest conclusion to this essentially graphic endeavour, is a forty-foot graph representing almost ‘at a glance’ the history of Shakespeare’s metatheatre. As it happens, forty-foot was about the frontage of the Globe’s stage, the very ‘world’ onto which our work would ope a new window.